Thanks for writing this, I’m reading a lot of critiques of longtermism at the moment and this is a very interesting one.
Apart from the problems that you raise with expected value reasoning about future events, you also question the lack of pure time preference in the Greaves-MacAskill paper. You make a few different points here, some of which could co-exist with longtermism and some couldn’t. I was wondering how much of your disagreement might be meaningfully recast as a differing opinion on how large your impartial altruistic budget should be, as an individual or as a society?
I think this might be helpful because you say things like: “While longtermism says we should be thinking primarily about the far-future consequences of our actions (which is generally taken to be on the scale of millions or billions of years), strong longtermism says this is the only thing we should think about.” This is slightly misleading because the paper stresses that strong longtermism is only true of your genuinely impartial altruistic resources, therefore even on the section on deontic strong longtermism, there is no claim about what we should exclusively care about. (This seems uber nitpicky but I think it is consequential- though the authors of the paper may have stronger views on the ideal size of impartial altruistic budgets, they are very careful not to tie strong longtermism to the truth of those far less rigourously defined arguments).
However, a belief that we should be biased towards the present (such as you say you hold) could be understood as shrinking the amount of your time and resources you think should be spent on impartial causes at all, and consequently also on longtermist causes.
To disambiguate, your other claim that “We should prefer good things to happen sooner, because that might help us to bring these good things about” could plausibly bear on how we should use our impartial resources, as an instrumental reason for acting as if we were partial towards the present. There isn’t an argument in your essay for this but it could be an interesting lever to push on because it would disagree with longtermism more directly.
Thanks for writing this, I’m reading a lot of critiques of longtermism at the moment and this is a very interesting one.
Apart from the problems that you raise with expected value reasoning about future events, you also question the lack of pure time preference in the Greaves-MacAskill paper. You make a few different points here, some of which could co-exist with longtermism and some couldn’t. I was wondering how much of your disagreement might be meaningfully recast as a differing opinion on how large your impartial altruistic budget should be, as an individual or as a society?
I think this might be helpful because you say things like: “While longtermism says we should be thinking primarily about the far-future consequences of our actions (which is generally taken to be on the scale of millions or billions of years), strong longtermism says this is the only thing we should think about.” This is slightly misleading because the paper stresses that strong longtermism is only true of your genuinely impartial altruistic resources, therefore even on the section on deontic strong longtermism, there is no claim about what we should exclusively care about. (This seems uber nitpicky but I think it is consequential- though the authors of the paper may have stronger views on the ideal size of impartial altruistic budgets, they are very careful not to tie strong longtermism to the truth of those far less rigourously defined arguments).
However, a belief that we should be biased towards the present (such as you say you hold) could be understood as shrinking the amount of your time and resources you think should be spent on impartial causes at all, and consequently also on longtermist causes.
To disambiguate, your other claim that “We should prefer good things to happen sooner, because that might help us to bring these good things about” could plausibly bear on how we should use our impartial resources, as an instrumental reason for acting as if we were partial towards the present. There isn’t an argument in your essay for this but it could be an interesting lever to push on because it would disagree with longtermism more directly.