The freedom of future people
Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
GPI Working Paper No. 10-2023
What happens to liberal political philosophy, if we consider not only the freedom of present but also future people? In this article, I explore the case for long-term liberalism: freedom should be a central goal, and we should often be particularly concerned with effects on long-term future distributions of freedom. I provide three arguments. First, liberals should be long-term liberals: liberal arguments to value freedom give us reason to be (particularly) concerned with future freedom, including freedom in the far future. Second, longtermists should be liberals, particularly under conditions of empirical and moral uncertainty. Third, long-term liberalism plausibly justifies some restrictions on the freedom of existing people to secure the freedom of future people, for example when mitigating climate change. At the same time, it likely avoids excessive trade-offs: for both empirical and philosophical reasons, long-term and near-term freedom show significant convergence. Throughout I also highlight important practical implications, for example on longtermist institutional action, climate change, human extinction, and global catastrophic risks.
Other working papers
Doomsday rings twice – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
This paper considers the argument according to which, because we should regard it as a priori very unlikely that we are among the most important people who will ever exist, we should increase our confidence that the human species will not persist beyond the current historical era, which seems to represent…
Egyptology and Fanaticism – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Various decision theories share a troubling implication. They imply that, for any finite amount of value, it would be better to wager it all for a vanishingly small probability of some greater value. Counterintuitive as it might be, this fanaticism has seemingly compelling independent arguments in its favour. In this paper, I consider perhaps the most prima facie compelling such argument: an Egyptology argument (an analogue of the Egyptology argument from population ethics). …
Longtermism in an Infinite World – Christian J. Tarsney (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin) and Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The case for longtermism depends on the vast potential scale of the future. But that same vastness also threatens to undermine the case for longtermism: If the future contains infinite value, then many theories of value that support longtermism (e.g., risk-neutral total utilitarianism) seem to imply that no available action is better than any other. And some strategies for avoiding this conclusion (e.g., exponential time discounting) yield views that…