I’m uneasy about loading empirical claims about how society is doing into the definition of longtermism (mostly part (ii) of your definition). This is mostly from wanting conceptual clarity, and wanting to be able to talk about what’s good for society to do separately and considering what it’s already doing.
An example where I’m noticing the language might be funny: I want to be able to talk about a hypothetical longtermist society, perhaps that we aspire to, where essentially everyone is on board with longtermism. But if the definition is society-relative this is really hard to do. I might say I think longtermism is true but we should try to get more and more people to adopt longtermism and then longtermism will become false and we won’t actually want people to be longtermists any more — but we would still want them to be longtermist about 2019.
I think this happens because “longtermism” doesn’t really sound like it’s about a problem, so our brains don’t want to parse it that way.
How about a minimal definition which tries to dodge this issue: > Longtermism is the view that the very long term effects of our actions should be a significant part of our decisions about what to do today ?
(You gesture at this in the post, saying “I think the distinctive idea that we should be trying to capture is the idea of trying to promote good long-term outcomes”; I agree, and prefer to just build the definition around that.)
I’m uneasy about loading empirical claims about how society is doing into the definition of longtermism (mostly part (ii) of your definition). This is mostly from wanting conceptual clarity, and wanting to be able to talk about what’s good for society to do separately and considering what it’s already doing.
An example where I’m noticing the language might be funny: I want to be able to talk about a hypothetical longtermist society, perhaps that we aspire to, where essentially everyone is on board with longtermism. But if the definition is society-relative this is really hard to do. I might say I think longtermism is true but we should try to get more and more people to adopt longtermism and then longtermism will become false and we won’t actually want people to be longtermists any more — but we would still want them to be longtermist about 2019.
I think this happens because “longtermism” doesn’t really sound like it’s about a problem, so our brains don’t want to parse it that way.
How about a minimal definition which tries to dodge this issue:
> Longtermism is the view that the very long term effects of our actions should be a significant part of our decisions about what to do today
?
(You gesture at this in the post, saying “I think the distinctive idea that we should be trying to capture is the idea of trying to promote good long-term outcomes”; I agree, and prefer to just build the definition around that.)