Against longtermism

Émile P. Torres · 19 Oct 2021

A change of mind in this piece

Longtermism, which treats fulfilling humanity's long-term potential as the overriding moral priority, is a worldview worth defending.

Recalls holdingI believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.

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Émile P. Torres did not write this page.

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Our reading
Longtermism, which treats fulfilling humanity's long-term potential as the overriding moral priority, is a worldview worth defending.

Recalls holdingI believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.

Their words nowLongtermism might, in other words, be incompatible with the attainment of ‘existential security’, meaning that the only way to genuinely reduce the probability of extinction or collapse in the future might be to abandon the longtermist ideology entirely.
Our reading
Longtermism is not the same thing as caring about the long-term future or about future generations; it goes far beyond that.

Their wordsThe initial thing to notice is that longtermism, as proposed by Bostrom and Beckstead, is not equivalent to ‘caring about the long term’ or ‘valuing the wellbeing of future generations’.
Our reading
Making humanity's long-term potential the overriding priority licenses imposing real costs on people who are alive today.

Their wordsThe short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death.
Our reading
The commitments of longtermism are themselves a major reason humanity faces so many risks to its survival in the first place.

Their wordsFor example, there’s a good case to make that the underlying commitments of longtermism are a major reason why humanity faces so many unprecedented risks to its survival in the first place.
Our reading
Effective altruism is deeply utilitarian in practice, whatever its members say about not being utilitarians.

Their wordsThe fact is that the EA movement is deeply utilitarian, at least in practice, and indeed, before it decided upon a name, the movement’s early members, including Ord, seriously considered calling it the ‘effective utilitarian community’.
Our reading
The moral theory underneath longtermism treats people as containers of value rather than as the point of it, which is why creating more of them counts as making the universe better.

Their wordsIn a phrase: people exist for the sake of maximising value, rather than value existing for the sake of benefitting people.

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