The case for strong longtermism
Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 5-2021
A striking fact about the history of civilisation is just how early we are in it. There are 5000 years of recorded history behind us, but how many years are still to come? If we merely last as long as the typical mammalian species, we still have over 200,000 years to go (Barnosky et al. 2011); there could be a further one billion years until the Earth is no longer habitable for humans (Wolf and Toon 2015); and trillions of years until the last conventional star formations (Adams and Laughlin 1999:34). Even on the most conservative of these timelines, we have progressed through a tiny fraction of history. If humanity’s saga were a novel, we would be on the very first page.
Other working papers
How to neglect the long term – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Consider longtermism: the view that, at least in some of the most important decisions facing agents today, which options are morally best is determined by which are best for the long-term future. Various critics have argued that longtermism is false—indeed, that it is obviously false, and that we can reject it on normative grounds without close consideration of certain descriptive facts. In effect, it is argued, longtermism would be false even if real-world agents had promising means…
Minimal and Expansive Longtermism – Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford) and Christian Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
The standard case for longtermism focuses on a small set of risks to the far future, and argues that in a small set of choice situations, the present marginal value of mitigating those risks is very great. But many longtermists are attracted to, and many critics of longtermism worried by, a farther-reaching form of longtermism. According to this farther-reaching form, there are many ways of improving the far future, which determine the value of our options in all or nearly all choice situations…
Calibration dilemmas in the ethics of distribution – Jacob M. Nebel (University of Southern California) and H. Orri Stefánsson (Stockholm University and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)
This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several “calibration dilemmas,” in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities—e.g., inequalities in which half the population would gain an arbitrarily large quantity of well-being or resources…