Longtermism
Released on 22nd June 2025
Max Dalton
Citations
Longtermism
Longtermism is the view that we should be doing much more to protect future generations.
This is motivated by three ideas:
- Future people matter
- The future could be vast
- Our actions could predictably influence how well the future goes.
Together, these suggest that we have a significant responsibility to make the future go well.
This perspective is a major motivator of Forethought’s research. And it is strengthened because we think that the rapid development of AI and associated technologies might raise hard-to-reverse decisions that could have massive consequences for the long-term future.
Potential Research Projects
Under what moral theories is concern for the very long-term future warranted?
Given concern for the very long-term future, is the prioritisation claim of longtermism correct? Should altruists in general be moved primarily by explicit considerations of long-run impact, or are all such efforts intractable?
Does longtermism lead to the conclusion that existential risk reduction should be the highest priority? Does it further lead to the stronger conclusion that reducing extinction risk should be the highest priority? Or might we do better to focus on macroeconomic ‘trajectory changes’ (that is, smaller but very persistent/long-lasting improvements to total value achieved at every time), or other ways of increasing the expected value of the far future conditional on the survival of the human race?
Should we be more concerned about avoiding the worst possible outcomes for the future, or about ensuring the very best outcomes occur?
Do anthropic ‘doomsday arguments’ offer a compelling reason to believe that the future will be short?
Forethought’s Research on Longtermism
- Will MacAskill and Hilary Greaves, The Case for Strong Longtermism (soon to be published in the book Essays on Longtermism)
- Will MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future (review by The Guardian here)
- Toby Ord, On the Value of Advancing Progress
- Will MacAskill and Fin Moorhouse, Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion
Existing Academic Literature
- Nick Beckstead, On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future(PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2013).
- Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
- Thomas Hurka, Asymmetries in Value, Noûs 44 (2002): 199-223.
- David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Sufferings of the World, in Essays and Aphorisms. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1970.
- Brandon Carter and William H. McCrea, The Anthropic Principle and Its Implications for Biological Evolution, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 310 (1983): 347-363.
- Nick Bostrom, Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2002.
Existing Informal Discussion
- Wikipedia, Longtermism
- The New York Times, The Case For Longtermism
- Amanda Askell, Common objections to Pascal’s Wager
- Paul Christiano, Why might the future be good?
- Carl Shulman, Are pain and pleasure equally energy-efficient?
- Brian Tomasik, Risks of Astronomical Future Suffering
- David Althaus and Lukas Gloor, Reducing Risks of Astronomical Suffering: a Neglected Priority
- Fin Moorhouse, Introduction to Longtermism
- Oxford Talks, Two Types of Longtermism
- 1000 Word Philosophy, Longtermism: How Much Should We Care About the Far Future?
Released on 22nd June 2025