Longtermism silences the marginalized in its false invention of the future

While this book was going through the copyediting process “longtermism,” a particular application of Effective Altruism (EA) touched on in Chapters 6 and 15, captured the public’s attention. Using the resources of EA, longtermism urges us to make the current generation’s impact on future generations a moral priority (Ord 2021,; MacAskill 2022). Concern for future generations is not new within ethics and social thought. There are long-standing moral and political traditions that stress our obligations to the not yet existing. Overlapping strands of feminist and antiracist thought have critically targeted social structures responsible for intergenerational setbacks with an eye toward repair for past injustices, while urging greater justice for succeeding generations. Environmentalists have placed particular emphasis on our duties to safeguard the earth and its ecosystems for those who come after us. In some ways, longtermism takes up these earlier concerns. The main difference between earlier discussions of our obligations to future generations and the recent discussions is that in the earlier discussions utilitarian concepts and categories were rarely central. These concepts generally played no role at all, and, when they did come into question, they were often found wanting. Like other effective altruists, longtermists adopt substantial utilitarian commitments in arguing for maximizing the well-being of all. They insist that not-yet-existing beings are within the sphere of moral considerability—and that the interests of future people are on par with the interests of those who currently exist. In the chapters of this book, we have again and again heard that EA’s characteristic fixation on the greatest return in the form of quantitatively measurable indices of well-being distracts attention from unjust social structures that regularly reproduce grievous injustices. We have also heard that Effective Altruists often oppose investments of time or money in thoughtful efforts to dismantle these structures, and so actively impede work against injustice. Longtermism doesn’t address these problems. It rehearses EA’s familiar “utilitarianesque” moves, now with regard to future generations, in ways that replicate EAs current threats to crucial social justice work, bringing the threats into the future. Longtermists’ commitment to interventions that result in the greatest number of people whose lives go well leads them to project indefinitely into time to come. Their texts are scattered with references to enormous human populations not only millions but billions and even trillions of years in the future. The question of how best to act in reference to the potentially vast numbers of future humans is, for them, at base a mathematical one. If 100 trillion future people will exist whose lives can go better and there are only 8 billion people currently alive, then, when we crunch the numbers, the well-being of those of us living here and now is too small to really worry much about when we can improve the lives of so many more. As two prominent longtermists once put the point: “[F]or the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years, focusing primarily on the further-future effects. Short-run effects act as little more than tie-breakers” (Greave and MacAskill, quoted in Samuel 2022). The intensity of current anthropogenic human devastation of the earth has allowed this extreme movement to position itself as part of the answer to our current problems. This is ironic, because longtermists urge us to turn our attention away from the crises and injustices currently bearing down on us. The quantitative calculations they rely on indicate that these crises and injustices won’t extinguish human life on the planet. So, if we have to spend billions of dollars now to ensure that smart and unprincipled (or “unaligned”) machines won’t someday destroy human society, or if we have to spend similar sums to construct a device that could blast a meteor out of the atmosphere before it crashes into earth, then this is what we ought to do for future people. They think we should not be swayed from these endeavors by the fact that currently existing poor people, other people who are disadvantaged, and animals who currently exist may be suffering and dying from targeted violence and the consequences of social neglect. Nor should we be swayed by the fact that immediately devoting funds and other social resources will help enormously with the desperate circumstances of these human and nonhuman groups. There is good reason to doubt that longtermists’ probabilistic calculations are reliable guides to the prospects for such urgent interventions. There is equally good reason to doubt that these calculations are reliable guides to the prospects for longtermists’ own futuristic interventions. Despite lacking any plausible case for doing so, longtermists urge us to set aside the plight of existing people who are, they stress, small in number compared to future generations. And in this concern with an abstract future, longtermists largely ignore how that future will come to exist. They explore reproduction not as it is experienced by those who are pregnant, but in terms of increases or decreases in birth rates. Longtermists join other Effective Altruists in ignoring the experiences and work of those on the front lines of social justice movements. Longtermists advocate an outlook on which protecting democracy and building solidarity for social justice here and now may not be as ethically important as taking actions that promote the most good in the very long term. They speak the language of enfranchising future people, while adopting a fundamentally apolitical stance that promises to disenfranchise not only marginalized existing humans, many of whom are actively agitating for a better future, but all existing nonhuman animals. Like other EAs, longtermists are doing the opposite of what we’ve tried to do in this volume, lift up and listen to the voices of those working for justice and equality for humans and other animals. Longtermism is perhaps at its most objectionable with regard to nonhuman animals. Although, as many of the contributors to this volume explain, the welfare-oriented pro-animal interventions enjoined by non-longtermist Effective Altruists serve to strengthen social structures that cause massive animal suffering, these Effective Altruists are at least seriously concerned with animal suffering. The same cannot be said of longtermists. Despite paying lip service to EA’s characteristic commitment to animal well-being, longtermists take nonhuman animals’ well-being to be dependent upon and secondary to human flourishing. They tell us that we should prioritize endeavors that give humanity a chance to achieve its potential in the long run, and—counter to current fact—suggest that doing so will give nonhuman animals their best chance at future well-being. Readers of longtermist texts can be forgiven for wondering whether this is a bad joke. The record of human treatment of animals is horrific. Human beings have developed a global enterprise of the industrial production and slaughter of animals, subjecting trillions of land and sea creatures annually to unfathomable suffering, then relentlessly killing them on assembly lines. Human activities have brought the earth into a sixth mass extinction, with species dying off at 100 to 1,000 the background rate. So, what are longtermists thinking? Alongside improbable welfare calculations that seem to show wild or nondomestic animals have such low well-being that their dying off is not to be lamented, longtermists offer us cherry-picked facts in support of a naive understanding of modernity that shows steady moral improvement, including with regard to attitudes toward animals. This magical thinking is what seems to support the idea that preserving humanity’s long-term potential is nonhuman animals’ best bet. Longtermism will not save EA from the criticisms leveled at it in this book. On the contrary, by developing core themes of EA in reference to the future, it brings out yet more luridly the moral bankruptcy of a tradition that, with its deceptive talk of doing the “most good,” silences marginalized voices that should be starting points in any conversation about how to move toward a livable, more just, and more compassionate future.