I donāt think Will or any other serious scholar believes that it is āworkableā. It reads to me like a theoretical assumption that defines a particular abstract philosophy.
āLooking at every possible action, calculating the expected outcome, and then choosing the best oneā is also a laughable proposition in the real world, but the notion of āutilitarianismā still makes intuitive sense and can help us weigh how we make decisions (at least, some people think so). Likewise, the notion of ālongtermismā can do the same, even if looking 1000 years into the future is impossible.
I also find utilitarian thinking to be more useful/āpractical than ālongtermist thinkingā. That said, I havenāt seen much advocacy for longtermism as a guide to personal action, rather than as a guide to research that much more intensively attempts to map out long-term consequences.
Maybe an apt comparison would be āutilitarianism is to decisions I make in my daily life as longtermism is to the decisions Iād make if I were in an influential position with access to many person-years of planningā. But this is me trying to guess what another author was thinking; you could consider writing to them directly, too.
(I assume youāve heard/āconsidered points of this type before; Iām writing them out here mostly for my own benefit, as a way of thinking through the question.)
I donāt think Will or any other serious scholar believes that it is āworkableā. It reads to me like a theoretical assumption that defines a particular abstract philosophy.
āLooking at every possible action, calculating the expected outcome, and then choosing the best oneā is also a laughable proposition in the real world, but the notion of āutilitarianismā still makes intuitive sense and can help us weigh how we make decisions (at least, some people think so). Likewise, the notion of ālongtermismā can do the same, even if looking 1000 years into the future is impossible.
Sure, but not even close to the same extent.
I also find utilitarian thinking to be more useful/āpractical than ālongtermist thinkingā. That said, I havenāt seen much advocacy for longtermism as a guide to personal action, rather than as a guide to research that much more intensively attempts to map out long-term consequences.
Maybe an apt comparison would be āutilitarianism is to decisions I make in my daily life as longtermism is to the decisions Iād make if I were in an influential position with access to many person-years of planningā. But this is me trying to guess what another author was thinking; you could consider writing to them directly, too.
(I assume youāve heard/āconsidered points of this type before; Iām writing them out here mostly for my own benefit, as a way of thinking through the question.)