> “As recently as 1903, Pope Pius X was still able to tabulate the number of days’ remission from purgatory that each rank in the hierarchy was entitled to grant: cardinals two hundred days, archbishops a hundred days, bishops a mere fifty days. By his time, however, indulgences were no longer sold directly for money. Even in the Middle Ages, money was not the only currency in which you could buy parole from purgatory. You could pay in prayers too, either your own before death or the prayers of others on your behalf, after your death. And money could buy prayers. If you were rich, you could lay down provision for your soul in perpetuity. My own Oxford College, New College, was founded in 1379 (it was new then) by one of that century’s great philanthropists, William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. A medieval bishop could become the Bill Gates of the age, controlling the equivalent of the information highway (to God), and amassing huge riches. His diocese was exceptionally large, and Wykeham used his wealth and influence to found two great educational establishments, one in Winchester and one in Oxford. Education was important to Wykeham, but, in the words of the official New College history, published in 1979 to mark the sixth centenary, the fundamental purpose of the college was ‘as a great chantry to make intercession for the repose of his soul. He provided for the service of the chapel by ten chaplains, three clerks and sixteen choristers, and he ordered that they alone were to be retained if the college’s income failed.’ Wykeham left New College in the hands of the Fellowship, a self-electing body which has been continuously in existence like a single organism for more than six hundred years. Presumably he trusted us to continue to pray for his soul through the centuries.
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> Today the college has only one chaplain* and no clerks, and the steady century-by-century torrent of prayers for Wykeham in purgatory has dwindled to a trickle of two prayers per year. The choristers alone go from strength to strength and their music is, indeed, magical. Even I feel a twinge of guilt, as a member of that Fellowship, for a trust betrayed. In the understanding of his own time, Wykeham was doing the equivalent of a rich man today making a large down payment to a cryogenics company which guarantees to freeze your body and keep it insulated from earthquakes, civil disorder, nuclear war and other hazards, until some future time when medical science has learned how to unfreeze it and cure whatever disease it was dying of. Are we later Fellows of New College reneging on a contract with our Founder? If so, we are in good company. Hundreds of medieval benefactors died trusting that their heirs, well paid to do so, would pray for them in purgatory. I can’t help wondering what proportion of Europe’s medieval treasures of art and architecture started out as down payments on eternity, in trusts now betrayed.”

The cryonics comparison is disquieting; it’s one thing when we’re ripping off those stupid gullible theists…

What you can do is decide what resources future people will have by deciding how much you will consume today versus saving or investing. Whatever you don’t consume before you die will become someone else’s.

Robin supposes that there are win-win deals to be made between the generations, if only the future could be committed to agreeing to the present’s desires. “I won’t chop down the forest and use it to make fires to keep me warm; instead, I’ll leave the trees for your own use after I die… but only if you promise to cut a few of them down and use them to build totem poles with my face on them.” But this isn’t a win-win deal; it’s not a deal at all. The future doesn’t get to reject the offer or negotiate on the price. The present does whatever they want, and the future gets what they get.

That means we can’t take advantage of markets and price discovery mechanisms to determine what the efficient trades are. The best we can do is to make those trades in which the resources donated to the future are very large and the costs imposed on the future are very small, so as to ensure that the trade is actually beneficial to the future. The limit case here, of course, is intergenerational altruism, where resources are donated to the future for free. This happens all the time. But suppose we’d like to increase this on the margin? Can the future “offer” something to the present in order to find more win-win “deals”?

Would paying people in the future to carry out the wishes of the present increase the amount of donation from the present to the future? Will you get more donations to a fund that says “Save our grandchildren and have your name carved on a monument” than one that just says “Save our grandchildren”? And if so, do we need stronger inter-generational commitment mechanisms to enable those win-win trades?

I’m inclined to think that the amount of gains to be made here is small, at best, and might even be negative. First off, I think the value to the present of “leave a bunch of money to my descendents” is much, much greater than the value to the present of “have my descendents remember my name” (or worship my god, or be vegetarian, or structure their society according to the dictates of my favorite socio-political theory). In other words, I doubt there’s a lot of win-win trades being left on the table due to lack of enforcement mechanisms, at least relative to the size of the altruistic trades which require no such mechanisms. Second, I think the existing enforcement mechanisms we already have in place do well to enforce those trades where the cost to the future is small (e.g. erecting a monument, writing someone’s name in a book someplace) while ignoring those that would be very costly (e.g. holding on to outdated and obviously erroneous beliefs). Since the present is very, very likely to have erroneous estimates of the cost to the future of their demands, this selective abrogation of the “terms” of the “contract” by the future actually serves to improve efficiency, not reduce it.

I suspect.

Which folks are those? Such a policy makes little sense to me. Why not just give the resources to your direct descendants – as most biological systems who contribute resources to future generations do?

It may not be *obvious* that the dead will persistently make the wrong trade-off between flexibility and putting their preferences into trusts, but plenty of non-obvious things are true (eg refrigerators manage to cool things). If the experience of a number of lawyers and judges over a massive variety of trial cases is that old trusts keep causing problems by being inflexibile when asset use needs to change, then a rule against perpetuaties is not unthinking repugnance. It might still be wrong, but my Bayesian priors are with the British common law system on this point. The prosperity of the UK and its offshoots (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ) doesn’t match with a hypothesis that the English system was being run by fools.

Jess, we could (for some values of could) currently be living in a handful of ‘fake’ worlds (simulation, Cartesian evil demon, solipsistic hallucination). As long as we cannot tell the difference, we cannot have different utilities in the two situations. I say this as a physicalist, if they are absolutely indistinguishable (to us) they are identical (to us). I can (do) value living in a real universe and would not willingly enter a simulated universe (in general). This is a statement about my current preferences over future states, not preferences I will have in the future after I am gone.
Or a different interpretation of Jess’s comment (I don’t know which is correct); if someone forces my brain patterns into some state (say the state it is in now), at that time I will be experiencing the same utility that I am now. Again, I say this as a physicalist; there is no spirit floating above my mind checking my utility function. I currently do not value that state as highly as the free state, but that is a statement about my current state, not the future state.
That was kind of rambling, sorry, I guess my point is that I can currently have preferences over the probabilities for the future, but cannot experience utility at that future time if I am dead.

The trusts assets are quietly leached away by the trustees. Does this remind anyone of the Anthony Trollope novella “The Warden”?

And Richard Dawkins pointed out in The God Delusion that his college at Cambridge was originally founded mainly to pray for the soul of its founder, Bishop Wycome of Winchester in 1379. Originally it had ten chaplains who produced a constant stream of prayers for him. Now there is one chaplain. And two prayers a year.

Here’s the question: whether they never existed, or whether they’re just all dead, what difference should that make in RH’s decision? His actions cannot provide them with direct satisfaction, and they’ll never know what he did, but he would be fulfilling their one great aspiration. Even if giving up all his property distracts him from his effort to continuously breed so as to satisfy the wants of the non-existent, it should still be a net win.