Minimal and Expansive Longtermism

Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford) and Christian Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)

GPI Working Paper No. 3-2023, forthcoming in Essays on Longtermism

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, and will continue to do so over the coming decades even if we make substantial investments in longtermist priorities. This chapter highlights the gap between the minimal form of longtermism established by standard arguments and this more expansive view, and considers (without reaching any firm conclusions) which form of longtermism is more plausible.

Other working papers

Longtermist institutional reform – Tyler M. John (Rutgers University) and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)

There is a vast number of people who will live in the centuries and millennia to come. Even if homo sapiens survives merely as long as a typical species, we have hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. And our future potential could be much greater than that again: it will be hundreds of millions of years until the Earth is sterilized by the expansion of the Sun, and many trillions of years before the last stars die out. …