Sorry for replying to this ancient post now. (I was looking at my old EA Forum posts after not being active on the forum for about a year.)
Here’s why this answer feels unsatisfying to me. An incredibly mainstream view is to care about everyone alive today and everyone who will be born in the next 100 years. I have to imagine over 90% of people in the world would agree to that view or a view very close to that if you asked them.
That’s already a reason to care about existential risks and a reason people do care about what they perceive as existential risks or global catastrophic risks. It’s the reason most people who care about climate change care about climate change.
I don’t really know what the best way to express the most mainstream view(s) would be. I don’t think most people have tried to form a rigorous view on the ethics of far future people. (I have a hard enough time translating my own intuitions into a rigorous view, even with exposure to academic philosophy and to these sorts of ideas.) But maybe we could conjecture that most people mentally apply a “discount rate” to future lives, so that they care less and less about future lives as the centuries stretch into the future, and at some point it reaches zero.
Future lives in the distant future (i.e. people born significantly later than 100 years from now) only make an actionable difference to existential risk when the estimated risk is so low that it changes the expected value math to account for 10^16 or 10^52 or whatever it is hypothetical future lives. That feels like an important insight to me, but its applicability feels limited.
So: people who don’t take a longtermist view of existential risk already have a good reason to care about existential risk.
Also: people who take a longtermist view of ethics don’t seem to have a good reason to think differently about any other subject than existential risk. At least, that’s the impression I get from trying to engage open-mindedly and charitably with this new idea of “longtermism”.
Ultimately, I’m still kind of annoyed (or at least perplexed) by “longtermism” being promoted as if it’s a new idea with broad applicability, when:
A longtermist view of existential risk has been promoted in discussions of existential risk for a very long time. Like, decades.
If longtermism is actionable for anything, it’s for existential risk and very little (if anything) else.
Most people are already bought in to caring about existential risk for relatively “neartermist” reasons.
When I heard the hype about longtermism, I was expecting there to be more meat on the bone.
An incredibly mainstream view is to care about everyone alive today and everyone who will be born in the next 100 years. I have to imagine over 90% of people in the world would agree to that view or a view very close to that if you asked them.
I think we have an empirical disagreement here. If I felt strongly motivated to try to persuade you about this, I would go try to find studies about it; I suspect we may not even have 90% agreement on “everyone alive today is worthy of moral concern”, and I would strongly guess we don’t have that level of agreement on caring about people who will be born 50 years from now. (Although I would also guess that many people just don’t think about this kind of question very much and aren’t guaranteed to have very clear or consistent answers.)
Even if people agreed with the premises, we could try to justify longtermism as arguing that the consequences of this belief are underexplored, though I hear you that you don’t see a lot of neglected consequences.
At this point, though, I’m not actually that invested in trying to champion longtermism specifically, so I’m not the right person to defend it to you here. Let’s fix x-risk and check in about it after that :)
I haven’t looked at any surveys, but it seems universal to care about future generations. This doesn’t mean people will necessarily act in a way that protects future generations’ interests — doesn’t mean they won’t pollute or deforest, for example — but the idea is not controversial and is widely accepted.
Similarly, I think it’s basically universal to believe that all humans, in principle, have some value and have certain rights that should not be violated, but then, in practice, factors like racism, xenophobia, hatred based on religious fundamentalism, anti-LGBT hatred, etc. lead many people to dehumanize certain humans. There is typically an attempt to morally justify this, though, for example through appeals to “self-defense” (or similar concepts).
If you apply strict standards to the belief that everyone alive today is worthy of moral concern, then some self-identified effective altruists would fail the test, since they hold dehumanizing views about Black people, LGBT people, women, etc.
That’s getting into a different point than I was trying to make in the chunk of text you quoted. Which is just that Will MacAskill didn’t fall out of a coconut tree and come up with the idea that future generations matter yesterday. His university, Oxford, is over 900 years old. I believe in his longtermism book he cites the Iroquois principle of making decisions while considering how they will affect the next seven generations. Historically, many (most?) families on Earth have had close relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Passing down tradition and transmitting culture (e.g., stories, rituals, moral principles) over long timescales is considered important in many cultures and religions.
There is a risk of a sort of plagiarism with this kind of discourse where people take ideas that have existed for centuries or millennia across many parts of the world and then package them as if they are novel, without adequately acknowledging the history of the ideas. That’s like the effective altruist’s or the ethical theorist’s version of “not invented here”.
I agree that if you’re already bought in to moral consideration for 10^umpteen future people, that’s longtermism.
Sorry for replying to this ancient post now. (I was looking at my old EA Forum posts after not being active on the forum for about a year.)
Here’s why this answer feels unsatisfying to me. An incredibly mainstream view is to care about everyone alive today and everyone who will be born in the next 100 years. I have to imagine over 90% of people in the world would agree to that view or a view very close to that if you asked them.
That’s already a reason to care about existential risks and a reason people do care about what they perceive as existential risks or global catastrophic risks. It’s the reason most people who care about climate change care about climate change.
I don’t really know what the best way to express the most mainstream view(s) would be. I don’t think most people have tried to form a rigorous view on the ethics of far future people. (I have a hard enough time translating my own intuitions into a rigorous view, even with exposure to academic philosophy and to these sorts of ideas.) But maybe we could conjecture that most people mentally apply a “discount rate” to future lives, so that they care less and less about future lives as the centuries stretch into the future, and at some point it reaches zero.
Future lives in the distant future (i.e. people born significantly later than 100 years from now) only make an actionable difference to existential risk when the estimated risk is so low that it changes the expected value math to account for 10^16 or 10^52 or whatever it is hypothetical future lives. That feels like an important insight to me, but its applicability feels limited.
So: people who don’t take a longtermist view of existential risk already have a good reason to care about existential risk.
Also: people who take a longtermist view of ethics don’t seem to have a good reason to think differently about any other subject than existential risk. At least, that’s the impression I get from trying to engage open-mindedly and charitably with this new idea of “longtermism”.
Ultimately, I’m still kind of annoyed (or at least perplexed) by “longtermism” being promoted as if it’s a new idea with broad applicability, when:
A longtermist view of existential risk has been promoted in discussions of existential risk for a very long time. Like, decades.
If longtermism is actionable for anything, it’s for existential risk and very little (if anything) else.
Most people are already bought in to caring about existential risk for relatively “neartermist” reasons.
When I heard the hype about longtermism, I was expecting there to be more meat on the bone.
I think we have an empirical disagreement here. If I felt strongly motivated to try to persuade you about this, I would go try to find studies about it; I suspect we may not even have 90% agreement on “everyone alive today is worthy of moral concern”, and I would strongly guess we don’t have that level of agreement on caring about people who will be born 50 years from now. (Although I would also guess that many people just don’t think about this kind of question very much and aren’t guaranteed to have very clear or consistent answers.)
Even if people agreed with the premises, we could try to justify longtermism as arguing that the consequences of this belief are underexplored, though I hear you that you don’t see a lot of neglected consequences.
At this point, though, I’m not actually that invested in trying to champion longtermism specifically, so I’m not the right person to defend it to you here. Let’s fix x-risk and check in about it after that :)
I haven’t looked at any surveys, but it seems universal to care about future generations. This doesn’t mean people will necessarily act in a way that protects future generations’ interests — doesn’t mean they won’t pollute or deforest, for example — but the idea is not controversial and is widely accepted.
Similarly, I think it’s basically universal to believe that all humans, in principle, have some value and have certain rights that should not be violated, but then, in practice, factors like racism, xenophobia, hatred based on religious fundamentalism, anti-LGBT hatred, etc. lead many people to dehumanize certain humans. There is typically an attempt to morally justify this, though, for example through appeals to “self-defense” (or similar concepts).
If you apply strict standards to the belief that everyone alive today is worthy of moral concern, then some self-identified effective altruists would fail the test, since they hold dehumanizing views about Black people, LGBT people, women, etc.
That’s getting into a different point than I was trying to make in the chunk of text you quoted. Which is just that Will MacAskill didn’t fall out of a coconut tree and come up with the idea that future generations matter yesterday. His university, Oxford, is over 900 years old. I believe in his longtermism book he cites the Iroquois principle of making decisions while considering how they will affect the next seven generations. Historically, many (most?) families on Earth have had close relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Passing down tradition and transmitting culture (e.g., stories, rituals, moral principles) over long timescales is considered important in many cultures and religions.
There is a risk of a sort of plagiarism with this kind of discourse where people take ideas that have existed for centuries or millennia across many parts of the world and then package them as if they are novel, without adequately acknowledging the history of the ideas. That’s like the effective altruist’s or the ethical theorist’s version of “not invented here”.