While this is ostensibly called “strong longtermism”, the precision of saying “near-best” instead of “best” makes (i) hard to deny (the opposite statement would be “one ought to choose an option that is significantly far from the best for the far future”). The best cruxes against (ii) would be epistemic ones i.e. whether benefits rapidly diminish or wash out over time.
Imagine a strong fruit loopist, believes there’s an imperative to maximise total fruit loops.
If you are not a strong fruit loopist there’s no need to minimise total fruit loops, you can just have preferences that don’t have much of an opinion on how many fruit loops should exist (I.e. everyone’s position).
While this is ostensibly called “strong longtermism”, the precision of saying “near-best” instead of “best” makes (i) hard to deny (the opposite statement would be “one ought to choose an option that is significantly far from the best for the far future”). The best cruxes against (ii) would be epistemic ones i.e. whether benefits rapidly diminish or wash out over time.
I don’t think the opposite of (i) is true.
Imagine a strong fruit loopist, believes there’s an imperative to maximise total fruit loops.
If you are not a strong fruit loopist there’s no need to minimise total fruit loops, you can just have preferences that don’t have much of an opinion on how many fruit loops should exist (I.e. everyone’s position).