This two-tiered value — present and future — seems vulnerable to a counterexample of this kind: Imagine a comatose patient whom doctors assure is not presently valuing anything but whom doctors assure will emerge out of the coma in one day to go on and enjoy his or her life.

Would it be any less wrong to kill this patient than it would to kill anybody else? I don’t think any of us would think so.

And that’s because, intuitively, it’s the future of value, not the present valuing, that is doing all the wrongmaking work.