Like Richard, I was quite confused while reading the piece about the use of this term. I agree with him that if you are trying to get normative mileage out of this idea, then it doesn’t work. In representative democracies like the US, we elect people to represent us in the highest levels of national decision-making. They are allowed to act in our narrow self-interest, but also in furtherance of our ideals. Indeed, they are aren’t constrained to leading from the back — to leading people to where they already want to go. They are also allowed to to lead from the front — to use good judgment to see things the public hadn’t yet seen, to show why it is an attractive course of action and to take it. Indeed, when we think of great Presidents or Prime Ministers it is often this quality that we most admire. So it seems entirely fine to me to appeal to people in government on moral grounds — including on longtermist grounds such as the effects on future generations. To say otherwise would involve some surprising judgments about other acts of moral leadership that are widely celebrated (such as in the ending of slavery).
I think the best version of this argument about democratic acceptability is not a moral or political philosophy argument (that it is wrong or unjust or undemocratic for governments to implement policies on these grounds) because there is little evidence it would be any of those things. Before a funding allocation reached those levels it would likely become politically unacceptable — i.e. it couldn’t practically be implemented and you would get less in the long run than if you asked for a more modest amount. I think there is broad agreement among longtermists that political feasibility is a key constraint, so the question is then about where it kicks in and what we can do to loosen the constraint by raising moral awareness.
At times it sounds like you agree with this, such as when you explicitly say “democratically unacceptable, by which we mean it could not be adopted and maintained by a democratic government”, but at other times you seem to trade on the idea that there is something democratically tainted about political advocacy on behalf of the people of the future — this is something I strongly reject. I think the paper would be better if it were clearer on this. I think using the term ‘democratically infeasible’ would have been more apposite and would dispel the confusion.
(I should add that part of this is the question of whether you mean infeasible vs normatively problematic, and part of it is the question of whether you are critiquing use of longtermist considerations (over and above CBA considerations) vs whether you are critiquing attempts to impose the policies one would come up with on strong longtermism + ignoring feasibility. I’ll address that more in another comment, but the short version is that I agree that imposing wildly unpopular policies on voters might be normatively problematic as well as infeasible, but think that comparison is a straw man.)
at other times you seem to trade on the idea that there is something democratically tainted about political advocacy on behalf of the people of the future — this is something I strongly reject.
I reject that too. We don’t mean to suggest that there is anything democratically tainted about that kind of advocacy. Indeed, we say that longtermists should advocate on behalf of future generations, in order to increase the present generation’s altruistic willingness to pay for benefits to future generations.
What we think would be democratically unacceptable is governments implementing policies that go significantly beyond the present generation’s altruistic willingness to pay. Getting governments to adopt such policies is infeasible, but we chose ‘unacceptable’ because we also think there would be something normatively problematic about it.
So I think we are addressing your strawman here. Certainly, we don’t take ourselves to be arguing against anyone in particular in saying that there would be something wrong with governments placing heavy burdens on the present generation for the sake of small reductions in existential risk. But it seems worth saying in any case, because I think it helps ward off misunderstandings from people not so familiar with longtermism (and we’re hoping to reach such people—especially policymakers—with this paper). For suppose that someone knows only of the following argument for longtermism: the expected future population is enormous, the lives of future people are good in expectation, and it is better if the future contains more good lives. Then that person might mistakenly think that the goal of longtermists in the political sphere must be something like a strong longtermist policy.
we chose ‘unacceptable’ because we also think there would be something normatively problematic about it.
I’m not so sure about that. I agree with you that it would be normatively problematic in the paradigm case of a policy that imposed extreme costs on current society for very slight reduction in total existential risk — let’s say, reducing incomes by 50% in order to lower risk by 1 part in 1 million.
But I don’t know that it is true in general.
First, consider a policy that was inefficient but small — e.g. one that cost $10 million to the US govt, but reduced the number of statistical lives lost in the US by only 0.1, I don’t think I’d say that this was democratically unacceptable. Policies like this are enacted all the time in safety contexts and are often inefficient and ill-thought-out, and I’m not generally in favour of them, but I don’t find them to be undemocratic. I suppose one could argue that all US policy that doesn’t pass a CBA is undemocratic (or democratically unacceptable), but that seems a stretch to me. So I wonder whether it is correct to count our intuitions on the extreme example as counting against all policies that are inefficient in traditional CBA terms or just against those that impose severe costs.
I wouldn’t call a small policy like that ‘democratically unacceptable’ either. I guess the key thing is whether a policy goes significantly beyond citizens’ willingness to pay not only by a large factor but also by a large absolute value. It seems likely to be the latter kinds of policies that couldn’t be adopted and maintained by a democratic government, in which case it’s those policies that qualify as democratically unacceptable on our definition.
‘Democratically unacceptable’
Like Richard, I was quite confused while reading the piece about the use of this term. I agree with him that if you are trying to get normative mileage out of this idea, then it doesn’t work. In representative democracies like the US, we elect people to represent us in the highest levels of national decision-making. They are allowed to act in our narrow self-interest, but also in furtherance of our ideals. Indeed, they are aren’t constrained to leading from the back — to leading people to where they already want to go. They are also allowed to to lead from the front — to use good judgment to see things the public hadn’t yet seen, to show why it is an attractive course of action and to take it. Indeed, when we think of great Presidents or Prime Ministers it is often this quality that we most admire. So it seems entirely fine to me to appeal to people in government on moral grounds — including on longtermist grounds such as the effects on future generations. To say otherwise would involve some surprising judgments about other acts of moral leadership that are widely celebrated (such as in the ending of slavery).
I think the best version of this argument about democratic acceptability is not a moral or political philosophy argument (that it is wrong or unjust or undemocratic for governments to implement policies on these grounds) because there is little evidence it would be any of those things. Before a funding allocation reached those levels it would likely become politically unacceptable — i.e. it couldn’t practically be implemented and you would get less in the long run than if you asked for a more modest amount. I think there is broad agreement among longtermists that political feasibility is a key constraint, so the question is then about where it kicks in and what we can do to loosen the constraint by raising moral awareness.
At times it sounds like you agree with this, such as when you explicitly say “democratically unacceptable, by which we mean it could not be adopted and maintained by a democratic government”, but at other times you seem to trade on the idea that there is something democratically tainted about political advocacy on behalf of the people of the future — this is something I strongly reject. I think the paper would be better if it were clearer on this. I think using the term ‘democratically infeasible’ would have been more apposite and would dispel the confusion.
(I should add that part of this is the question of whether you mean infeasible vs normatively problematic, and part of it is the question of whether you are critiquing use of longtermist considerations (over and above CBA considerations) vs whether you are critiquing attempts to impose the policies one would come up with on strong longtermism + ignoring feasibility. I’ll address that more in another comment, but the short version is that I agree that imposing wildly unpopular policies on voters might be normatively problematic as well as infeasible, but think that comparison is a straw man.)
I reject that too. We don’t mean to suggest that there is anything democratically tainted about that kind of advocacy. Indeed, we say that longtermists should advocate on behalf of future generations, in order to increase the present generation’s altruistic willingness to pay for benefits to future generations.
What we think would be democratically unacceptable is governments implementing policies that go significantly beyond the present generation’s altruistic willingness to pay. Getting governments to adopt such policies is infeasible, but we chose ‘unacceptable’ because we also think there would be something normatively problematic about it.
So I think we are addressing your strawman here. Certainly, we don’t take ourselves to be arguing against anyone in particular in saying that there would be something wrong with governments placing heavy burdens on the present generation for the sake of small reductions in existential risk. But it seems worth saying in any case, because I think it helps ward off misunderstandings from people not so familiar with longtermism (and we’re hoping to reach such people—especially policymakers—with this paper). For suppose that someone knows only of the following argument for longtermism: the expected future population is enormous, the lives of future people are good in expectation, and it is better if the future contains more good lives. Then that person might mistakenly think that the goal of longtermists in the political sphere must be something like a strong longtermist policy.
I’m not so sure about that. I agree with you that it would be normatively problematic in the paradigm case of a policy that imposed extreme costs on current society for very slight reduction in total existential risk — let’s say, reducing incomes by 50% in order to lower risk by 1 part in 1 million.
But I don’t know that it is true in general.
First, consider a policy that was inefficient but small — e.g. one that cost $10 million to the US govt, but reduced the number of statistical lives lost in the US by only 0.1, I don’t think I’d say that this was democratically unacceptable. Policies like this are enacted all the time in safety contexts and are often inefficient and ill-thought-out, and I’m not generally in favour of them, but I don’t find them to be undemocratic. I suppose one could argue that all US policy that doesn’t pass a CBA is undemocratic (or democratically unacceptable), but that seems a stretch to me. So I wonder whether it is correct to count our intuitions on the extreme example as counting against all policies that are inefficient in traditional CBA terms or just against those that impose severe costs.
I wouldn’t call a small policy like that ‘democratically unacceptable’ either. I guess the key thing is whether a policy goes significantly beyond citizens’ willingness to pay not only by a large factor but also by a large absolute value. It seems likely to be the latter kinds of policies that couldn’t be adopted and maintained by a democratic government, in which case it’s those policies that qualify as democratically unacceptable on our definition.