Longtermism or Retrospectivism: The More Effective Utilitarian Alternative.

I recently had the occasion to read Professor Will MacAskill’s book “What We Owe The Future”. I admire the perspective presented in this book, for its intense and ambitious passion for achieving the utilitarian maximus. However, I believe that it is a probabilistically deficient theory with a good chance of doing more harm than good—if it emerges as a sustained framework for policy and philanthropic activity.

Let me explain.

Professor MacAskill’s “Longtermism” as an expansion of Utilitarian thinking into future times and generations is ambitious and, at face value, on purely numerical grounds, rational. It is an effort to expand the temporal limits of Utilitarian action to maximize the “common good” along the time axis.

But Longtermism is flawed, because its numerical allure risks almost entirely ignoring the possibility that the most direct path to maximizing the long-term common good of tomorrow’s beings is, in reality, to maximize the health and happiness of today’s beings.

Why? because today’s beings are the very source of tomorrow’s beings. Furthermore, if accepted as a formal school of thought upon which to base social and political policies and market products, in the hands of humankind’s limited personal and political adjudications, Longtermism risks overriding the rights of unique individuals, today, for the presumed sake of future generations’ “common good”. A most tangible example of such a failure of justice could conceivably become a woman’s right to choose motherhood: shall we create policies to override her choice to become a mother, in order that we secure/maximize utility to a future being? The critic of my position would state that, of course, this would be an abuse of the moral ground on which Longtermism is built, yet it would be a rationally consistent one to derive from the premise: Afterall, as the Longtermist would argue, What gives a person today, the right to eliminate all the vast potential of a future being only to secure her own comfort and convenience, today?

Not to mention that along the Longtermist trajectory of thinking, powerful and highly successful Longtermists, exercising their futuristic effective altruism, might even be willing (and able) to bend the rules of contemporary civil and legal conduct, and violate the rights and property of others—in order, presumably, to achieve the morally superior utilitarian aim of securing trillions’ well being, in the future. Perhaps the fate of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is telling in this regard—but let me not digress, nor play Monday morning quarterback on the self-evident nature of that disaster. But from my perspective the emergence of the fraud, dripping with moralistic futurism, committed by SBF, was only a matter of time—it was not a random event and is linked directly to a moral superiority argument implicit to the Longtermist approach to Utilitarian altruism.

To be clear, I am suggesting that the present generation (and by extension generations past, given that they contributed real members to today) serve as the most tangible and probabilistically accessible source for the trillions of individuals that MacAskill’s theory of Longtermism aims to secure the good life for, in the future. So it stands to reason that securing the utilitarian maximus, contemporaneously or with tangible/knowable generational proximity to today, is probabilistically a far more productive approach to securing the happiness/utility of future generations—in as much as their happiness (nay, their very future existence) relies on our existence, today. To formally and altruistically direct today’s limited resources on securing a complex and vastly unknowable future using the utilitarian theory of “Longtermism”, when the most direct path to futuristic utilitarianism is to maximize contemporaneous utilitarian metrics for all of today’s existing entities well, risks irrecoverable waste.

I will introduce a caveat, as one who doubts the knowability of the “common good”: I only accept the utilitarian metric as a practically valid one because most human societies of the 21st century have bought into Utilitarianism as their foundational cognitive algorithm—regardless of the national strategy used to achieve it (i.e., socialism vs. Market-based utilitarianism, or a combination thereof). After all, we live on “Utilitarian” earth, so we cannot operate using the physics of a “theoretical” Mars.

MacAskill’s ambitious postulate has, however, brought me to the idea that reaching to expand the limits of morally balanced utilitarianism (as juxtaposed against short-sighted and immoral superiority-based and market theories of utilitarianism) today, may include, not necessarily formal altruistic action on “Longtermist” ideology, but rather an attempt at materializing a “retrospective Utilitarianism” as the justification for spending social and philanthropic resources on repairing generational harms of the past, today.

Though retrospective utilitarianism will not make the dead happy, nor resurrect them from the crypt, it will ameliorate the generational unhappiness caused by past inefficiencies and injustices in miscalculated Utilitarian social constructs. In other words, why not dominantly extend our utilitarian actions, policies and philanthropy to focus on those excluded from happiness in the past by repairing their descendants, whose damaged existence is the direct result of the past failures of socially utilitarian constructs we, humans, miscalculated and now view as having been immoral....This idea (i.e., reparations) is the aim of some social justice movements and of tort law, and is, thus, not novel at all. But, if the utilitarian philosophical construct on which most contemporary humanity’s actions are built (albeit imperfectly, and in many cases, unjustly) is to be expanded in a formal way along the temporal axis as MacAskill is attempting, it may be far more prudent and effective to ascribe to the school of “retrospectivism” instead of “Longtermism”- because given the higher probability of efficient resource use in the knowable space of the past, it can build a more robustly balanced Utilitarian today for the ancestors of the future. In comparison, “Longtermism” risks wasting resources on an unknowable and vastly complex future as the damaged descendants of Utilitarian miscalculations whither, flail and harm themselves and others, today—trivial and knowable examples of Longtermism, (e.g., the broken glass on a hiking trail example, which MacAskill has used frequently), notwithstanding.

The practical truth, also, is that actualization of “Longtermism” demands reliance on development of novel more efficient technologies and political structures which are, by definition, stimulative of the financial marketplace—thus, there will be appetite for it on the part of today’s investors and innovators in search of riches—no matter how well garbed in the armor of effective altruism, “Longtermism” requires the generation of disposable wealth in a marketplace....No such luck with “retrospectivism”, however—it has only pure human rationality and empathy to rely on for its actualization, in a world where both virtues are vastly and increasingly deficient.

Consider, that “Retrospectivist Utilitarianism” today, as a foundation for policy and philanthropy, may be the most powerful approach to achieving the Utilitarian maximus in the long-term—not direct “longtermism”, which risks not only causing irrecoverable waste but also promotes a sense of corruptible moral superiority that could only serve to damage life today masked as Good. Because repairing damage is a far more probabilistically certain human endeavor, than is predicting the future.

I write this opinion, knowing that the foundational premise and metric of Utilitarianism (i.e., “The Common Good”) is not, nor ever has been, fully knowable by humankind in any era—but could easily become fire to civilization.

Then the serpent whispered in her ear: “You are as beautiful, as He”.