Thanks for writing this! I agree it’s helpful to have terms clearly defined, and appreciate the degree of clarity you’re aiming for here.
I agree with Holly when she says:
“we should have some way of distinguishing the view that time at which something occurs is morally arbitrary from a view that prioritizes acting today to try to affect the long-run future”.
To me this seems to be differentiating between a strictly value claim (like Hilary’s) and one that combines value and empirical claims (like yours). So maybe it’s worth defining something like Hilary’s definition (or claim (i) in your definition) with another term (eg Holly’s suggestion of ‘temporal cosmopolitanism’ or something else like that). And at the same time defining longtermism as something that combines that value claim (or a version of it) with the empirical claim that society today is behaving in a way that is in conflict with this value claim, to create a normative claim about what we should do.
Thanks for writing this! I agree it’s helpful to have terms clearly defined, and appreciate the degree of clarity you’re aiming for here.
I agree with Holly when she says:
“we should have some way of distinguishing the view that time at which something occurs is morally arbitrary from a view that prioritizes acting today to try to affect the long-run future”.
To me this seems to be differentiating between a strictly value claim (like Hilary’s) and one that combines value and empirical claims (like yours). So maybe it’s worth defining something like Hilary’s definition (or claim (i) in your definition) with another term (eg Holly’s suggestion of ‘temporal cosmopolitanism’ or something else like that). And at the same time defining longtermism as something that combines that value claim (or a version of it) with the empirical claim that society today is behaving in a way that is in conflict with this value claim, to create a normative claim about what we should do.