Extinction first logic is a secular religion worshipping future value---while trivializing violence of millions, especially in the Global South.

It’s this line of reasoning that leads Bostrom, Greaves, MacAskill, and others to argue that even the tiniest reductions in “existential risk” are morally equivalent to saving the lives of literally billions of living, breathing, actual people. For example, Bostrom writes that if there is “a mere 1 percent chance” that 10^54 conscious beings (most living in computer simulations) come to exist in the future, then “we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.” Greaves and MacAskill echo this idea in a 2021 paper by arguing that “even if there are ‘only’ 1014 lives to come … , a reduction in near-term risk of extinction by one millionth of one percentage point would be equivalent in value to a million lives saved.” To make this concrete, imagine Greaves and MacAskill in front of two buttons. If pushed, the first would save the lives of 1 million living, breathing, actual people. The second would increase the probability that 1014 currently unborn people come into existence in the far future by a teeny-tiny amount. Because, on their longtermist view, there is no fundamental moral difference between saving actual people and bringing new people into existence, these options are morally equivalent. In other words, they’d have to flip a coin to decide which button to push. (Would you? I certainly hope not.) In Bostrom’s example, the morally right thing is obviously to sacrifice billions of living human beings for the sake of even tinier reductions in existential risk, assuming a minuscule 1 percent chance of a larger future population: 1054 people. All of this is to say that even if billions of people were to perish in the coming climate catastrophe, so long as humanity survives with enough of civilization intact to fulfill its supposed “potential,” we shouldn’t be too concerned. In the grand scheme of things, non-runaway climate change will prove to be nothing more than a “mere ripple” —a “small misstep for mankind,” however terrible a “massacre for man” it might otherwise be. Even worse, since our resources for reducing existential risk are finite, Bostrom argues that we must not “fritter [them] away” on what he describes as “feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy.” Such projects would include, on this account, not just saving people in the Global South—those most vulnerable, especially women—from the calamities of climate change, but all other non-existential philanthropic causes, too. As the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer writes about Bostrom in his 2015 book on Effective Altruism, “to refer to donating to help the global poor … as a ‘feel-good project’ on which resources are ‘frittered away’ is harsh language.” But it makes perfectly good sense within Bostrom’s longtermist framework, according to which “priority number one, two, three, and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” Everything else is smaller fish not worth frying. If this sounds appalling, it’s because it is appalling. By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I’ve come to see longtermism as an immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of “future value,” complete with its own “secularised doctrine of salvation,” as the Future of Humanity Institute historian Thomas Moynihan approvingly writes in his book X-Risk. The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the West—especially the socioeconomic elite—makes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty, but you are actually a morally better person for focusing instead on more important things—risk that could permanently destroy “our potential” as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life. To drive home the point, consider an argument from the longtermist Nick Beckstead, who has overseen tens of millions of dollars in funding for the Future of Humanity Institute. Since shaping the far future “over the coming millions, billions, and trillions of years” is of “overwhelming importance,” he claims, we should actually care more about people in rich countries than poor countries. This comes from a 2013 PhD dissertation that Ord describes as “one of the best texts on existential risk,” and it’s cited on numerous Effective Altruist websites, including some hosted by the Centre for Effective Altruism, which shares office space in Oxford with the Future of Humanity Institute. The passage is worth quoting in full: “Saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards—at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards—saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.” Never mind the fact that many countries in the Global South are relatively poor precisely because of the long and sordid histories of Western colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, political meddling, pollution, and so on. What hangs in the balance is astronomical amounts of “value.” What shouldn’t we do to achieve this magnificent end? Why not prioritize lives in rich countries over those in poor countries, even if gross historical injustices remain inadequately addressed? Beckstead isn’t the only longtermist who’s explicitly endorsed this view, either. As Hilary Greaves states in a 2020 interview with Theron Pummer, who co-edited the book Effective Altruism with her, if one’s “aim is doing the most good, improving the world by the most that I can,” then although “there’s a clear place for transferring resources from the affluent Western world to the global poor … longtermist thought suggests that something else may be better still.”