Imagine that humanity is offered the following deal:
- All living humans will enjoy 100 more years of healthy and happy life, finished by a peaceful death in sleep. Immediately after signing the deal, humans will forget the deal and will not worry about this "deadline".
- If you sign the deal, no human will even experience any suffering. As life will be extended to 100 years from now regardless of the starting age, no human will even witness the death of another human. Even old people would enjoy a healthy and happy life, becoming physically young again and regaining their mental capacity - without losing their experience.
- Each life will be full of accomplishments, not only by material welfare, but also with most spiritual accomplishments that a human can reasonably expect. Children will still be born, parents will still be happy about them - even more so, because all would go smooth with no worries and no accidents.
- People would live happily and without any worry until the "deadline", that will be a peaceful end of the whole humanity.
Would you take the above deal?
The deal sounds like the dream of utilitarianism: it "maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals". There is not even a need to balance the conflicting welfare desires under limited resources - that practical utilitarian must address.
Still, I expect that most people would not accept such deal. At least for me, “the end of humanity” is a too high price to pay, even for a life full of happiness. Even if such happiness would be more than any human will be able to enjoy in the next 100 years, I am sure many would refuse such deal.
Debriefing
What I wanted to show with this thought experiment is that most of us are not only valuing our personal welfare and the welfare of others. In the back of our value system we also care about the fate and the long-term flourish of humanity.
There could be exceptions - people that would prefer a life of happiness regardless of what happens after them. This is the life of a drug addicted if a fully safe drug would be developed. Some will not even care about the others; we call such people psychopath.
Still, I would bet that most people would not like the "Devil's deal", however appealing in theory. If you are like me, and tend to refuse the deal, there are some less obvious consequences. If we really care about what happens with the humanity in the far future, we should re-tune our policies and even our morality to optimize for the long-term human flourishing.
Deal not taken
When not taking the deal, we accept that we must not only aim for the today's welfare of people. We need to create a robust society that give a better chance for Humanity to endure and thrive for centuries. There is no simple solution for this goal. However, genetic diversity and a chance for everyone to achieve its potential seems like a safe bet for the short and medium future.
For the long future, we will almost surely need to colonize other planets to better protect the Humanity from catastrophic event like a big meteor from space and even a deadly disease.
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