
#321 - Reckoning with Parfit
Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content
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The Importance of Distance in Moral Progress
We've learned to care more about distant people because we understand that geographical distance doesn't have any ethical content. If someone were starving to death on your doorstep, it matters. The fact that you put that doorstep a thousand miles from your actual doorstep, it should still matter. And strangely, even our future selves and the lives of future people who do exist get hyperbolicly discounted - which is bizarre. We spend very little time thinking about what the world will be like when they're in their fifties.
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