The article gives the example of us deciding how much we should pay as a society to reduce the number of road deaths. Do we count only the lives of the people who would otherwise die in the accidents? Or do we also count the lives of the children that they might have?
Valuing descendants gets you to weird conclusions pretty quickly: preventing the death of someone in a culture where people typically have large numbers of children would seem much more important than saving the life of someone past childbearing age as you consider the exponential increase in descendents over time.
Similarly, there are likely a lot of ways that you could increase the number of children born other than by preventing the deaths of their would-be parents. Policies that made housing, childcare, and education cheaper could have a very large impact -- I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost.
Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people who won't get to exist in addition to all of the current people who would die.
I think Toby Ord's "The Precipice" has a pretty good treatment of these issues, and is very thorough.
Valuing descendants gets you to weird conclusions pretty quickly: preventing the death of someone in a culture where people typically have large numbers of children would seem much more important than saving the life of someone past childbearing age as you consider the exponential increase in descendents over time.
Similarly, there are likely a lot of ways that you could increase the number of children born other than by preventing the deaths of their would-be parents. Policies that made housing, childcare, and education cheaper could have a very large impact -- I know a lot of people who have decided to have fewer kids than they otherwise would have because of the cost.
Even more dramatically, consider policies that have an effect on whether humanity continues to exist. If we wipe ourselves out with nukes, bioengineering, etc, that's a lot of potential future people who won't get to exist in addition to all of the current people who would die.
I think Toby Ord's "The Precipice" has a pretty good treatment of these issues, and is very thorough.