Preference utilitarians should care about the preferences of past people

• Preference utilitarians care about satisfying the preferences of other agents.
• There are agents in the past that have died, and agents in the future that have not yet been born.
• It seems weird (although consistent) to say that “being alive” is the condition that makes an agents preferences the kind of preferences a preference utilitarian would want to satisfy.
• A common conclusion people draw is that this means preference utilitarians should care about the preferences of people who aren’t born yet
  • This is philosophically complicated because you might be able to take actions that influence the preferences of future people, so you might have to pick amongst fixed-points (or there might be no fixed points).
• Similarly, I think preference utilitarians should care about satisfying the preferences about people in the past
  • This is less philosophically complicated in that you probably can’t really change those preferences, but more complicated in that those preferences also created you, so you are in an interesting bargaining position.

Some other notes:

• Recording the preferences of people is morally valuable.
• You shouldn’t be able to “win” by achieving any set of alive agents all of whose preferences are satisfied.
• It is morally valuable to reflect on the preferences of past people you would have been friends with and see if there are simple ways to satisfy those preferences.
  • You are kinda currently in a moral acausal trade situationn.