Longtermism

We are at a civilisational turning point. This is the message in a literary celebration of longtermism by one of its most visible advocates. William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future begins by asking us to engage in a thought experiment. We are asked to first imagine living all the lives of all humans who have existed before in history and prehistory for the past 300,000 years. Then, considering the average life expectancy of mammals and other animals on the planet (700,000–1 million years), we are asked to imagine living the lives of hundreds of thousands of generations and trillions of people in the future. The thought experiment is our introduction to a moral philosophy that privileges humans, past, present, and future. We are also asked to imagine that on balance these are happy lives and that there are potentially humans filling vast spaces on earth and in space for millennia and more. The thought experiment asks us to expand our imaginations to the possibility of vast human happiness on future worlds, far into the future.

William MacAskill, What  We Owe the Future, OneWorld, Oxford, 2022.

The publication of the book came out with a lot of fanfare and excitement in Silicon Valley and elsewhere with its roots in the effective altruism movement and transhumanism circles. Longtermism is associated with MacAskill and his friend Toby Ord based on ideas of Nick Bostrom and others. The basic premise is that we should not discount the future, but rather take moral responsibility for the happiness of future generations — for the good of the species. MacAskill is a moral philosopher and Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford, so be warned that there are a few deep, but navigable chapters that dive into moral change, value lock-in, and the metrics of happiness. Some of it is likely to be over the head of readers without philosophy backgrounds; I did not find all of it entirely persuasive, but it is logically presented. There are fifty pages of footnotes – generally worth exploring – the bibliography is not included but can be found on the book’s website. 

Overall, I found the book worth the time to read with some caveats. I do not trust many of his conclusions or arguments but found the text both informative and provocative. On balance, there is much more that I like about the book than I dislike. First and foremost, as a futurist, I celebrate the long view, the long-term perspective offered by this moral philosophy. One of the challenges of the times is a short-term perspective, particularly noticeable in large governmental and corporate organisations. Longtermism theory requires a commitment to consider distant futures -centuries, millennia, and even further into the timestream. It also assumes we are a migratory species that will eventually expand into outer space. Those are domains of the foresight enterprise. The concepts of utopia, eutopia, and dystopia get some attention – we should probably expect a eutopian future—unfortunately the narrative or bibliography does not connect with the rich literature and history related to those concepts. That was a disappointment. Similarly, there seems to be no awareness in the text of existing futures studies and foresight literature on long-term futures.

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