Longtermism
Is improving the far future one of the key moral priorities of our time? If it is, how should this influence our actions?
This profile is tailored towards students studying economics, philosophy and psychology, however we expect there to be valuable open research questions that could be pursued by students in other disciplines.
Why is this a pressing problem?
In The Precipice, the philosopher Toby Ord describes longtermism as a philosophy that ‘takes seriously the fact that our own generation is but one page in a much longer story, and that our most important role may be how we shape—or fail to shape—that story.’
It’s very common to feel some level of concern and responsibility for future lives – many people are concerned about the effects of climate change because of the hardships their children and grandchildren may face, for example. Longtermists take this common idea further: might making future lives better be the most important thing we can do today?
This might be the case because, providing humanity doesn’t go extinct, the potential number of future lives could be vast, far exceeding the number of people who have existed so far. For example, Our World in Data estimates that if humanity survives as long as the typical mammalian species (1 million years), the population stabilises at 11 billion, and the average human lifespan rises to 88 years, there would be 100 trillion people alive over the next 800,000 years. Depending on the trajectory of humanity’s future, the number of future humans could be many orders of magnitude higher. Of course, we could also meet an early extinction, meaning it could be much lower.
Improving the future need not involve bringing about a very long future – longtermism isn’t just about mitigating the risk of extinction. If we can predictably and positively influence the future through the actions we take today, the size of the future might present an opportunity to make a vast number of individuals better off. If we consider these future lives to be just as morally significant as lives today, it could be that trying to improve them is the most important thing for us to focus on.
This possibility raises many fundamental questions that further research is needed to answer. For example, how reliably can we improve the future? How do efforts to improve lives in the short-term seem likely to affect the long-term future? Is trying to reduce the risk of human extinction the best thing we can do for the future? Should we focus on trying to bring the best possible future about, or should our efforts go towards trying to avoid the worst possible outcomes?
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Research papers
Beckstead, Nick, & Teruji Thomas (2021) A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities and Enormous Values
Beckstead, Nick (2013) On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future (PhD thesis)
Broome, John (2005) Should We Value Population?, Journal of Political Philosophy
Curran, Emma J. (2022) Longtermism, Aggregation, and Catastrophic Risk
Greaves, Hilary (2016) Cluelessness, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
Greaves, Hilary (2017) Population Axiology, Philosophy Compass
Greaves, Hilary & William MacAskill (2021) The Case for Strong Longtermism
Mogensen, Andreas L. (2019) Staking Our Future: Deontic Longtermism and the Non-Identity Problem
Thorstad, David (2022) Existential Risk Pessimism and the Time of Perils
Organisations
Books
MacAskill, William (2022) What We Owe the Future, Basic Books
Ord, Toby (2020) The Precipice, Bloomsbury
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The website longtermism.com has many useful resources and suggestions for further reading if you want to explore this direction further.
Future Matters is a newsletter covering a variety of topics related to longtermism.
Contributors: This profile was last updated 21/12/2022. Thanks to Hayden Wilkinson, Tomi Francis, Renan Araujo, Maria Stogianni and John Firth for helpful feedback on this profile. All mistakes remain our own. Learn more about how we create our profiles.
