1. All I mean here is that the harm is redistributed. Aggregate harm is not reduced, but the responsibility for it is shuffled around.

2. If you were able to increase the expected lifespan of the 1 year old, then you could retroactively say that his death was more harmful than you realized at first, since he would now have lived longer. I don't think it would be appropriate to say that the extension itself was harmful, since in real life such an extension would be likely to benefit the living in such a way as to outweigh any additional harm, and if the 1 year old had not died at all, then there would be no question about the new development.

One such example could be public healthcare programs that extend the life of the poor. Maybe people who died recently had the harm of their death increased by this, but the benefit to all others across time should vastly outweigh this. So we have two options, and they aren't mutually exclusive: we regret the death of our friend even more since they would have lived longer, and/or we celebrate the new healthcare program since it will benefit so many others.

When you say overstated, do you mean that there is no harm at all to the one who dies? I want to know if we can have self-regarding reasons to avoid our own death if we are not harmed by our own death.

I don't agree that a dead person is hypothetical, though their future is. That is why we need to speculate about what that future would have been absent their premature death.

I visualize humans here as being placed on a time and utility chart, with the likely future of a dead person being plotted out in dotted lines, but their actual dead future being a flat line, and the difference being their deprivation.

For a hypothetical person, there either is no chart, since they never were, or you only plot out their possible future. But if you do that, you have to divide the aggregate utility units you predict (say 100) by the probability of their existence (one in billions and billions) which divides out to nearly nothing. Hypothetical humans either cannot have futures attributed to them, or they are so speculative as to be meaningless. A fetus is a real human (contrary to other comments to this article) and it's future absent its abortion not as speculative, similar to an infant or any other human.

This problem of hypothetical humans is something that comes across my find frequently, even before I spoke with you. And it is one of the stronger arguments against my position. I am disappointed when people respond to me with biological absurdities, and am glad you took the time to continue commenting.

I spend some time in the article speaking about the historical continuity between infanticide and abortion, and am concerned that your line of argument leads to infanticide being harmless, provided the infant isn't loved by anyone, it is killed painlessly, and doesn't have any unique trait such as immunity to a rare disease or something. Humans are unique among mammals in that we outgrew the need for infanticide by way of political and scientific technology, and I think this is progress that can be extended to abortion by the same, especially by improving the welfare state.

One more thing I want to add: I think we can speak of harming future generations if we assume that there will be some, but that harm only becomes possible once those future people are conceived. I don't think this is the same as hypothetical humans being harmed, but maybe it is close. I have cited global warming prevention and ending slavery as examples of this.

I am in the middle of an investigative project which are delaying my responses, but I should be able to respond every few days.