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Longtermism: A Philosophy to Last a Lifetime or Two — Oxford Political Review
webA student-facing Oxford Political Review article providing an accessible overview of longtermism, useful as introductory reading for those new to the philosophical underpinnings of existential risk and AI safety advocacy.
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Importance: 32/100opinion pieceeducational
Summary
An accessible introduction and critical examination of longtermism as a philosophical framework, exploring its core claims that future people matter morally and that shaping the long-term future is among the most important tasks humanity faces. The article discusses implications for policy and ethics, including connections to existential risk reduction and effective altruism.
Key Points
- •Longtermism holds that future generations have equal moral weight to present people, potentially justifying large sacrifices now for long-run gains.
- •The philosophy is closely linked to effective altruism and the work of philosophers like William MacAskill and Toby Ord.
- •Existential risk reduction—including from AI and other catastrophic threats—is a central practical implication of longtermist thinking.
- •Critics raise concerns about the speculative nature of longtermist reasoning and potential for neglecting present harms in favor of uncertain future benefits.
- •The article situates longtermism within broader political and ethical debates, making it accessible to a general academic audience.
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Longtermism: A Philosophy To Last A Lifetime (Or Two…) | OxJournal
Longtermism: A Philosophy To Last A Lifetime (Or Two…)
Posted by Hannah de Dombal | Dec 14, 2023 | OxBright Essay Competition , Psychology | 0
Despite scientific research claiming that it’s better to be realistically pessimistic than unrealistically optimistic (Hecht, 2013), the philosophical idea of ‘longtermism’, coined by Oxford philosophers William MacAskill & Toby Ord, can help foster realistic optimism for the future. In 2023, there is no way to escape discourse about the future; the amount of ominous prophecies in the news is enough to devastate anyone. From discussions of a mere 20 years to act before the climate crisis crushes the planet (Turrentine, 2018), to an ongoing war of 584 days being fought on the other side of Europe, it’s no wonder that 39% of US adults believe ‘we are living in end times’ (Diamant, 2022).
This apocalyptic way of thinking will get us nowhere: it’s time for a change. Longtermism, according to Moorhouse (2021) ‘is the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time’. This philosophical idea isn’t a completely manufactured or rigid one either – it’s more of a collection of different understandings, agreeing upon the fundamental principle of looking after humanity’s future. MacAskill (2022) states, ‘if you could prevent a genocide in a thousand years, the fact that “those people don’t exist yet” would do nothing to justify inaction’, which encapsulates the underlying motif of this philosophy. In essence, longtermism is important simply because future people matter.
Thus, longtermism poses divisive questions of what or which is more important – future generations or our current one? Longtermists would argue that humanity has a ‘potential’ of its own, which surpasses the potential of each individual human being, and therefore there would be an ‘existential catastrophe’, should any event actually extinguish this potential. However, a clear criticism of longtermism would be its reliance upon utilitarian principles. Torres (2021), outlines this clearly when he explains that for longtermists, such as Ord, MacAskill or Hilary Greaves, a world in which 1 trillion people live a life barely worth living, ‘would be morally better’, than one in which 999 billion people live lives which are ‘extremely good’. The suggestion here from Torres being that longtermists tend to treat human beings as a means to an end, due to longtermism’s emphasis on total utilitarianism. However, whilst longtermists acknowledge that total utilitarianism very much favours longtermism, they would offer that one of Toby Ord’s accomplishments in ‘The Precipice’, is pointing out longtermism’s alignment with other ‘ethical traditions’, such as conservatism. Essentially, it’s possible for someone to
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