Problems and solutions in infinite ethics

Abstract

The universe may very well be in nite, and hence contain an in nite amount of happiness and sadness. This causes several problems for altruists; for example: we can plausibly only a ect a nite subset of the universe, and an in nite quantity of happiness is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of a nite amount of happiness. This would imply that all forms of altruism are equally ine ective. Like everything in life, the canonical reference in philosophy about this problem was written by Nick Bostrom. However, I found that an area of economics known as “sustainable development” has actually made much further progress on this subject than the philosophy world. In this post I go over some of what I consider to be the most interesting results.