Great, thank you so much for writing this and saving me from having to do it.
I think it’s worthwhile comparing obligations to the past with those to the future. In many but not all ways ways obligations to the past look more plausible:
Future people are separated from us in time and their existence is uncertain; past people may be temporally distant but their existence is certain, which matters for the person-affecting view.
There are some ways of helping people (e.g. ensuring they have enough food) that work for future people but not past people.
We have better information about the values of people in the past. We don’t know what religions people will believe in the future, but we know past people would prefer we didn’t dynamite the Hagia Sofia.
There are a lot more people in the past than the present, but many more again in the future (hopefully).
Past people were much poorer than current people (and, conditional on non-extinction, likely also future people) and hence egalitarianism pushes in favour of helping them.
Thanks—this comparison was clarifying to me! The point about past people being poorer was quite novel to me.
Intuitively for me, the strongest weights are for “it’s easier to help the future than the past” followed by “there are a lot of possible people in the future”, so on balance longtermism is more important than “pasttermism” (?). But I’d also intuit that pasttermism is under-discussed compared to long/neartermism on the margin—basically the reason I wrote this post at all.
Yeah I basically agree with that. I think pasttermism is basically interesting because there are plausibly some very low hanging fruit, like respecting graves, temples and monuments. The scope seems much smaller than longtermism.
Has this low-hanging fruit remained unpicked, however? I feel like “respecting graves, temples, and monuments” is already something most people do most of the time. Are there particularly neglected things you think we ought to do that we as a society currently don’t?
Great, thank you so much for writing this and saving me from having to do it.
I think it’s worthwhile comparing obligations to the past with those to the future. In many but not all ways ways obligations to the past look more plausible:
Future people are separated from us in time and their existence is uncertain; past people may be temporally distant but their existence is certain, which matters for the person-affecting view.
There are some ways of helping people (e.g. ensuring they have enough food) that work for future people but not past people.
We have better information about the values of people in the past. We don’t know what religions people will believe in the future, but we know past people would prefer we didn’t dynamite the Hagia Sofia.
There are a lot more people in the past than the present, but many more again in the future (hopefully).
Past people were much poorer than current people (and, conditional on non-extinction, likely also future people) and hence egalitarianism pushes in favour of helping them.
Thanks—this comparison was clarifying to me! The point about past people being poorer was quite novel to me.
Intuitively for me, the strongest weights are for “it’s easier to help the future than the past” followed by “there are a lot of possible people in the future”, so on balance longtermism is more important than “pasttermism” (?). But I’d also intuit that pasttermism is under-discussed compared to long/neartermism on the margin—basically the reason I wrote this post at all.
Yeah I basically agree with that. I think pasttermism is basically interesting because there are plausibly some very low hanging fruit, like respecting graves, temples and monuments. The scope seems much smaller than longtermism.
Has this low-hanging fruit remained unpicked, however? I feel like “respecting graves, temples, and monuments” is already something most people do most of the time. Are there particularly neglected things you think we ought to do that we as a society currently don’t?