But essential to the criticism is that I shouldn’t decide for them.
It seems like this is a central point in David’s comment, but I don’t see it addressed in any of what follows. What exactly makes it morally okay for us to be the deciders?
It’s worth noting that in both US philanthropy and the international development field, there is currently a big push toward incorporating affected stakeholders and people with firsthand experience with the issue at hand directly into decision-making for exactly this reason. (See participatory grantmaking, the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, and the process that fed into the Sustainable Development Goals, e.g.) I recognize that longtermism is premised in part on representing the interests of moral patients who can’t represent themselves. But the question remains: what qualifies us to decide on their behalf? I think the resistance to longtermism in many quarters has much more to do with a suspicion that the answer to that question is “not much” than any explicit valuation of present people over future people.
It seems like this is a central point in David’s comment, but I don’t see it addressed in any of what follows. What exactly makes it morally okay for us to be the deciders?
It’s worth noting that in both US philanthropy and the international development field, there is currently a big push toward incorporating affected stakeholders and people with firsthand experience with the issue at hand directly into decision-making for exactly this reason. (See participatory grantmaking, the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, and the process that fed into the Sustainable Development Goals, e.g.) I recognize that longtermism is premised in part on representing the interests of moral patients who can’t represent themselves. But the question remains: what qualifies us to decide on their behalf? I think the resistance to longtermism in many quarters has much more to do with a suspicion that the answer to that question is “not much” than any explicit valuation of present people over future people.