Longtermism is extremely intuitive.
As long as you can view human progress through multiple lenses, you end up as a longtermist.
Longtermism seeks to consider the welfare of the quintillions, septillions, or even octillions of potential future human beings, each with a likely higher level of consciousness and ability to feel pain/pleasure compared to us. Humanity has the ability to create astronomically high amounts of future beings, so much so that we should dedicate our resources towards reaching said teleological goals of actualizing long-term potential. Humans have only been around for 300,000 years—anatomically similar humans only arose 70,000 years ago. Exponential scientific and technological development has only occurred within the past 300 years, or the past 0.1% of human history.
As a relatively new species, humanity could have time to settle on distant planets, create artificial biospheres, upload digital minds, and achieve unfathomably high amounts of total utility. It seems intuitive from any consequentialist standpoint that we have a moral obligation to create this future, yet tons of people reject it based on irrational reasons.
I. Temporal discounting.
If I gave you an iPhone 15 right now versus an iPhone 15 in 10 years, you would prefer to receive the iPhone right now—so why should we not temporally discount benefits into the far, far future? A simple objection against this response is to analyze the diminishing marginal utility of the iPhone—10 years from now, an iPhone 15 is worth much less, and consequently carries much less social status.
If you gain an iPhone right now, the posititve benefits of having it can ripple into the far future; if your iPhone allows you to make money off of social media, it might allow you to buy the newest Apple release in 10 years.
None of this applies to pain and pleasure. Getting spontaneously kicked in the balls now is just as bad as getting spontaneously kicked in the balls 10 years from now. Receiving a sporadic dose of pleasurable feelings now is just as good as receiving those feelings 10 years later. It’s irrational to believe that the feelings of people are worth less as long as they’re further away temporally.
If person A were to set up a booby trap explicitly targeting a person born 50 years into the future, A deserves to be held equally accountable compared to if he targeted a person alive right now (assuming that A is still alive but in old age).
II. Genocide, famine, and atrocities.
Under longtermism, reducing existential risks that bring about the total annihilation of humanity, ones that prevent any future progress towards creating vast quantities of happy beings, lead to fanatacist utility calculations that justify real-world atrocities. Longtermists don’t justify genocides, famines, and suffering in places like the global South, as this claim is blatantly false.
It holds true that if there are 100 trillion people yet to be born, and AI ex-risk scenarios have a 1% chance of triggering before any of those 100 trillion people are born, reducing AI risk to 0.9% is the equivalent of saving 100 billion people in the far future. Simultaneously, you have to analyze the distant temporal effects of programs like homelessness aid, AIDs prevention, food distribution, etc. If we prevent existential risks from occurring, 2 humans today can produce thousands of humans across many generations.
Assuming every generation lasts 25 years and 2 people have 4 children every generation, in the 300 years that constitute the most recent 0.1% of human history, 2 people could’ve been responsible for creating 4,096 humans who are alive right now. This is a naive estimate when considering historical mortality rates and declining fertility, but future technology will likely make procreation less of an economic and bodily liability.
If we invest into welfare programs to alleviate the social status of disadvantaged people in distant countries, a small number of them pushing their country towards modern medical care will result in trillions of lives saved in the long run! It’s morally paramount to do this—saving lives in faraway places where saving lives is cheapest allows astronomically high amounts of future happy people to exist for a relatively small price.
Helping countries develop and contribute to long-term development is morally necessary under longtermism. Preserving future generations to actualize humanity’s potential entails both preventing ex-risks, preventing atrocities, and making everybody better off.
The vast majority of people who critique longtermism forget that utilitarianism is not only impartial in accounting for everyone’s interests equally, it also strives for maximum equality when it comes to morally positive outcomes. If a utilitarian could either grant $100 to a wealthy billionaire or $100 to a homeless person, the utilitarian would no doubt choose the latter option—$100 makes significantly less impact on a billionaire than a homeless person who needs money.
III. Racism and oppression of the impoverished
Apparently, longtermism advocates for racist, capitalist policies. If preserving very happy, well-off, and productive individuals should be preferred over less happy, impoverished ones, doesn’t that mean longtermism prioritizes predominantly white, Western lives over lives in the global South or other impoverished regions of the world? Absolutely not.
Most people actually do find it intuitive to save the life of a productive member of society over a criminal in the trolley problem—meaning they do prefer individuals that contribute more to society in such moral dichotomies. If you asked a longtermist, they’d also agree, and there is no real argument for treating the two people equally. The impact of these preferences on longtermism is cancelled out within any utilitarian calculus.
When you’re in a scenario where you have to prevent death, it’s rational to prefer saving the higher-functioning, higher-utility person. When you’re in a scenario where you have to create happiness and utility, it’s rational to prefer benefiting the more impoverished, less happy person.
If I could either press a button to
Give $1,000 of welfare to a well-off citizen of Denmark.
Give $1,000 of welfare to an impoverished citizen in Indonesia.
The rational choice would be to prefer the person living in Indonesia over the person living in Denmark, as the Indonesian would gain vastly more utility from the aid than the already prospering person in Denmark.
You can’t cite the preference for higher-utility individuals in situations of loss-aversion but deliberately ignore the preference for lower-utility individuals in situations of gain-creation! Longtermism only borrows 2 basic, consequentialist intuitions and translates them to asymmetric prioritization of well-off individuals and not-so-well-off individuals in a very symmetric fashion. Cherrypicking one half of the balance to throw shade on the “racist real-world impacts of longtermism” (longtermism is just a practical implementation of utilitarianism) is intellectually dishonest.
IV. Eugenics/transhumanism.
Another common claim is that longtermism endorses eugenics. If specific scientists were able to create biologically enhanced, superhuman embryos that possessed increased IQ and physical attributes, that itself is a net good, as it increases the welfare of the future human being.
The commercialization of CRISPR or other gene-editing/enhancing technologies overwhelmingly favors the rich—which isn’t an intrinsically concerning issue; rich people have access to lifelong advantages that significantly alter who they are, the rich can afford better education, better food, easier lifestyles, among other things that all impact the development of their offspring.
Genetic modifications are, however, another layer that separates classes of society based on wealth, and, due to its flexibility and high potential efficacy, threaten to increase societal gaps massively. Gene editing can operate on the same layer as better food, healthcare, or tutoring, but the advantages are much harder to extinguish and it potential to be more lethal. The problem with the eugenics objection is that it relies on the assumption that people in charge of gene-editing technologies will not behave in a utilitarian way.
If everyone who influenced gene-editing strived to maximize welfare and utility for everybody, a descent into a genetic caste system shouldn’t be a liability. Unfortunately, not everybody has a clear, longtermist moral compass that steers them away from eugenics.
Using CRISPR as a way to remove propensities for life-threatening illness and not for genetic enhancement provides a simple solution for all of this—currently, that is the only acceptable use of CRISPR. Longtermism can operate without a need to edit genes, as future technology can make humans completely digital. If the risk of a descent into eugenics is too high, the negative outcomes of such a descent will compel longtermism to avoid it and regulate gene tech similarly to an existential risk.
V. Conclusion
It seems absurd that most people don’t find longtermism as an ideology compelling—most deontologists would even admit we have deontic obligations to preserving future generations, that we cannot use them as a means to our short-term gain. Longtermism only needs you to accept a simple premise: that we must stop viewing progress through a single temporal lens. Most of the conclusions are obvious—longtermism is mainly just a commitment to upholding the welfare of humanity as a whole long-term.
Most of the common objections brought up to longtermism simply don’t work, since the ideology is so simple and modifiable that its core premise is beyond intuitive.