"There are still trillions of future individuals, whose interests and dignity matter."

How can the interests and dignity of unidentified fictional persons matter?

I view this aspect of longtermism much the way I view forced-birthers (so-called "pro-life") who pretend to care about "unborn babies". The fake concern in both cases is in service of an ideology. Many of the forced birthers are sociopaths who show no concern for actual human beings. In the case of the cargo cult concern of longtermism, it strikes me as something I might expect of people on the spectrum ... but I don't know any of these people personally, so I have no concrete reason to think this is true, but I find a concern for trillions of abstract people who are merely imagined to some day exist to be so bizarre that I'm grasping for an explanation.

"When someone is born is a morally irrelevant fact"

Whether "someone" actually exists is a morally relevant fact. This use of "someone" is a highly misleading equivocation or amphiboly--in one case it references a specific organism; in the other case it doesn't reference anything it at all. Perhaps it would help to try to formulate longtermism in Loglan.

Jim Balter

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