We can go to a distant country and observe what is going on there, and make reasonably informed decisions about how to help them.
We can make meaningful decisions about how to help people in the distant future. For example, to allow them to exist at all, to allow them to exist with a complex civilisation that hasn’t collapsed, to give them more prosperity that they can use as they choose, to avoid destroying their environment, to avoid collapsing their options by other irreversible choices, etc. Basically, to aim and giving them things near the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or to give them universal goods — resources or options that can be traded for whatever it is they know they need at the time. And the same is often true for international aid.
In both cases, it isn’t always easy to know that our actions will actually secure these basic needs, rather than making things worse in some way. But it is possible. One way to do it for the distant future is to avoid catastrophes that have predictable longterm effects, which is a major reason I focus on that and suggest others do too.
I don’t see it as an objection to Longtermism if it recommends the same things as traditional morality — that is just as much a problem for traditional theories, by symmetry. It is especially not a problem when traditional theories might (if their adherents were careful) recommend much more focus on existential risks but in fact almost always neglect the issue substantially. If they admit that Longtermists are right that these are the biggest issues of our time and that the world should massively scale up focus and resources on them, and that they weren’t saying this before we came along, then that is a big win for Longtermism. If they don’t think it is all that important actually, then we disagree and the theory is quite distinctive in practice. Either way the distinctiveness objection also fails.
We can make meaningful decisions about how to help people in the distant future. For example, to allow them to exist at all, to allow them to exist with a complex civilisation that hasn’t collapsed, to give them more prosperity that they can use as they choose, to avoid destroying their environment, to avoid collapsing their options by other irreversible choices, etc. Basically, to aim and giving them things near the base of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs or to give them universal goods — resources or options that can be traded for whatever it is they know they need at the time. And the same is often true for international aid.
In both cases, it isn’t always easy to know that our actions will actually secure these basic needs, rather than making things worse in some way. But it is possible. One way to do it for the distant future is to avoid catastrophes that have predictable longterm effects, which is a major reason I focus on that and suggest others do too.
I don’t see it as an objection to Longtermism if it recommends the same things as traditional morality — that is just as much a problem for traditional theories, by symmetry. It is especially not a problem when traditional theories might (if their adherents were careful) recommend much more focus on existential risks but in fact almost always neglect the issue substantially. If they admit that Longtermists are right that these are the biggest issues of our time and that the world should massively scale up focus and resources on them, and that they weren’t saying this before we came along, then that is a big win for Longtermism. If they don’t think it is all that important actually, then we disagree and the theory is quite distinctive in practice. Either way the distinctiveness objection also fails.