I think the argument is missing the fact that you don't use temporal discounting to look at the past. Temporal discounting is about uncertainty--you're making a choice and you're uncertain about the future. The further in the future, the more uncertain it is. But if you look backwards, there is no uncertainty (or at least a lot less). To give an example, if you were Hitler's nanny, deciding to smother him would have no apparent value (probably negative value, at least according to his family). It would be very difficult to predict what his effect over the next 60 years would be. If you were a time traveler, and knew about what Hitler was going to do, then the decision to smother him might have far more value than deciding the death of one random person today. There would still be uncertainty, because you don't know what would have happened if you started history forward from that same point. So, you're right: there is no obvious reason to believe killing one person in the year zero is worse than killing one person today, because at their respective times, the decisions were equivalent. But you can still use temporal discounting to look at the future, because the chances of your choices today having the favorable outcome you anticipate are diminished the further in the future they are. Another way to look at it: temporal discounting would not have any value, if you knew the future (because again, there would be no uncertainty).
Hyperbolic discounting (rather than exponential) can avoid this implication. The few contemporary philosophers sympathetic to discounting would support hyperbolic over exponential discounting.
That is only clearly ludicrous relative to your standards.
To someone that discounts in the specified way, there's nothing ludicrous about it. It's just how things are.
What you're saying here strikes me as about as pointless as someone saying that it intrinsically makes no sense to say pineapple on pizza is bad, because if you put pineapple on pizza, it would taste like pizza with pineapple on it, then adding "Which is clearly gross." As though your attitudes about pizza toppings matter at all to someone who likes pineapple on pizza.
Same here. If I discount, I don't care how ludicrous you find it. I'm just going to do it.
Temporal discount rates are, like anything else, potentially reflective of contingent psychological facts about the utility function of an agent. Such facts cannot be true or false any more than it makes sense to say that being a human is "true" or that having 42 chromosomes is "false." Realists about these sorts of things strike me as making category errors or using terms and concepts in very strange ways.
Sure, if one agrees with that, then this wouldn't convince them. That is true of all reductios in ethics. However, I don't think most people who support discounting agree with the notion that killing millions of people today is just as bad as killing one person around the year zero.
Sure, for *normative* reasons most wouldn't agree...myself included. I don't discount at all.
But do most people think someone who discounts is objectively mistaken? There's little evidence to suggest this is true. And I argue that the answer is that most people have no determinate position one way or the other - and that the only to find out would involve engaging in philosophical dialectic with that person.
I am not taking a stance on whether it is "objectively unreasonable," here. Given that you and I agree that realism lacks significant normative implications, the project I undertake here is just to argue that discounting has ridiculous normative implications. I agree that people don't have a determinate view on meta-ethics, though they may have intuitions that entail particular views in meta-ethics.
When I said that, I was distinguishing the view that we should discount for practical reasons because of factual uncertainty that increases the further into the future one goes and the view that things matter less the further in time they are.
I think the argument is missing the fact that you don't use temporal discounting to look at the past. Temporal discounting is about uncertainty--you're making a choice and you're uncertain about the future. The further in the future, the more uncertain it is. But if you look backwards, there is no uncertainty (or at least a lot less). To give an example, if you were Hitler's nanny, deciding to smother him would have no apparent value (probably negative value, at least according to his family). It would be very difficult to predict what his effect over the next 60 years would be. If you were a time traveler, and knew about what Hitler was going to do, then the decision to smother him might have far more value than deciding the death of one random person today. There would still be uncertainty, because you don't know what would have happened if you started history forward from that same point. So, you're right: there is no obvious reason to believe killing one person in the year zero is worse than killing one person today, because at their respective times, the decisions were equivalent. But you can still use temporal discounting to look at the future, because the chances of your choices today having the favorable outcome you anticipate are diminished the further in the future they are. Another way to look at it: temporal discounting would not have any value, if you knew the future (because again, there would be no uncertainty).
Discounting is explicitly not about uncertainty in the sense I'm talking about there.
Hyperbolic discounting (rather than exponential) can avoid this implication. The few contemporary philosophers sympathetic to discounting would support hyperbolic over exponential discounting.
We are aware that temporal discounting involves temporal DISCOUNTING. But thanks for the reminder...
That is only clearly ludicrous relative to your standards.
To someone that discounts in the specified way, there's nothing ludicrous about it. It's just how things are.
What you're saying here strikes me as about as pointless as someone saying that it intrinsically makes no sense to say pineapple on pizza is bad, because if you put pineapple on pizza, it would taste like pizza with pineapple on it, then adding "Which is clearly gross." As though your attitudes about pizza toppings matter at all to someone who likes pineapple on pizza.
Same here. If I discount, I don't care how ludicrous you find it. I'm just going to do it.
Temporal discount rates are, like anything else, potentially reflective of contingent psychological facts about the utility function of an agent. Such facts cannot be true or false any more than it makes sense to say that being a human is "true" or that having 42 chromosomes is "false." Realists about these sorts of things strike me as making category errors or using terms and concepts in very strange ways.
Sure, if one agrees with that, then this wouldn't convince them. That is true of all reductios in ethics. However, I don't think most people who support discounting agree with the notion that killing millions of people today is just as bad as killing one person around the year zero.
Sure, for *normative* reasons most wouldn't agree...myself included. I don't discount at all.
But do most people think someone who discounts is objectively mistaken? There's little evidence to suggest this is true. And I argue that the answer is that most people have no determinate position one way or the other - and that the only to find out would involve engaging in philosophical dialectic with that person.
I am not taking a stance on whether it is "objectively unreasonable," here. Given that you and I agree that realism lacks significant normative implications, the project I undertake here is just to argue that discounting has ridiculous normative implications. I agree that people don't have a determinate view on meta-ethics, though they may have intuitions that entail particular views in meta-ethics.
Well, you did say "intrinsically."
When I said that, I was distinguishing the view that we should discount for practical reasons because of factual uncertainty that increases the further into the future one goes and the view that things matter less the further in time they are.