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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

> And he's not even talking about preserving the planet for the future generations, he's merely concerned with them being born in the first place.

It's odd to give that much moral weight to the potential future existence of unborn people centuries from now; how does that not favor simply having as many babies as possible?

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Not to mention the fact that any person alive today is potentially the root of a vast ancestral tree of countless millions of those future unborn, each of which is potentially the root of other vast ancestral trees, and so on... Ill effects suffered by these people may well be passed on through these generations (sins of the father, so to speak). Or worse, if they do not make it to procreation entire continents of future lives will be snuffed out. The moral weight of this absurd postulation, if anything, swings toward the past rather than the future.

That moral weight to the future hypothetical people is something that I have just now put a name to (thanks!) and the more I think about it, the more places I see it, and the creepier it gets.

But on a purely biological note, natural selection favors just that: those who make more babies than anyone else, who then go on to make more babies than any of their contemporaries, etc etc etc.

Natural selection is a shitty basis for ethics.

History has proved that any ethic is ineffective by itself and needs to be supported with brute, unethical to others, force

pretty much. that's why I find this valuation system that so grossly over-emphasizes future people at the expense of current ones so creeeeeepy.

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