I think some of the differences in opinion about what the definition should be may be arising because there are several useful but distinct concepts: A) an axiological position about the value of future people (as in Hilary’s suggested minimal definition) B) a decision-guiding principle for personal action (as I proposed in this comment) C) a political position about what society should do (as in your suggested minimal definition)
I think it’s useful to have terms for each of these. There is a question about which if any should get to claim “longtermism”.
I think that for use A), precision matters more than catchiness. I like Holly’s proposal of “temporal cosmopolitanism” for this.
To my mind B) is the meaning that aligns closest with the natural language use of longtermism. So my starting position is that it should get use of the term. If there were a strong reason for it not to do so, I suppose you could call it e.g. “being guided by long-term consequences”.
I think there is a case to be made that C) is the one in the political sphere and which therefore would make best use of the catchy term. I do think that if “longtermism” is to refer to the political position, it would be helpful if it were as unambiguous as possible that it were a political position. This could perhaps be achieved by making “longtermist” an informal short form of the more proper “member of the longtermism movement”. Overall though, I feel uncompelled by this case, and like just using “longtermist” for the thing it sounds most like — which in my mind is B).
I think some of the differences in opinion about what the definition should be may be arising because there are several useful but distinct concepts:
A) an axiological position about the value of future people (as in Hilary’s suggested minimal definition)
B) a decision-guiding principle for personal action (as I proposed in this comment)
C) a political position about what society should do (as in your suggested minimal definition)
I think it’s useful to have terms for each of these. There is a question about which if any should get to claim “longtermism”.
I think that for use A), precision matters more than catchiness. I like Holly’s proposal of “temporal cosmopolitanism” for this.
To my mind B) is the meaning that aligns closest with the natural language use of longtermism. So my starting position is that it should get use of the term. If there were a strong reason for it not to do so, I suppose you could call it e.g. “being guided by long-term consequences”.
I think there is a case to be made that C) is the one in the political sphere and which therefore would make best use of the catchy term. I do think that if “longtermism” is to refer to the political position, it would be helpful if it were as unambiguous as possible that it were a political position. This could perhaps be achieved by making “longtermist” an informal short form of the more proper “member of the longtermism movement”. Overall though, I feel uncompelled by this case, and like just using “longtermist” for the thing it sounds most like — which in my mind is B).