The brief life of longtermism (1)

By Jesús Zamora Bonilla September 22, 2025 0 comments Print

One of the most popular versions today of the idea that there can be moral progress—in the sense that our values and moral standards can keep improving—is the claim, much in vogue now, that such progress takes the form of what’s often called the expansion of the circle of empathy. The idea is that, in the past, only a very small group of people were considered “fully dignified subjects.” Over time, that circle has widened to include all human beings equally, and the next logical step is to extend it even further, to all sentient creatures, human or not.

longtermism — Photo: Giulia May / Unsplash

This idea echoes, in a way, the account of world history proposed by the idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in the early 19th century: history as a movement from societies where only one person was free (say, the Pharaoh of Egypt or the Emperor of China), to societies where a small group enjoyed freedom (for instance, male citizens in Athens or medieval nobles), and finally to societies in which everyone is free (modern states governed by the rule of law).

One of the main champions of this moral-progress story, philosopher Peter Singer, highlighted the analogy directly in the title of his most famous book: Animal Liberation. Not everyone, of course, agrees that respecting animal rights is the same as “granting them freedom” (beyond freeing them from mistreatment, that is). A non-human animal living “in the wild” cannot really be said to be free in the political sense in which we think people are—or ought to be—free: namely, by possessing civil liberties such as freedom of expression, the right to education, private property, freedom of religion, the right to vote, and so on. Still, whatever caveats we might add, the example of animals does help to clarify what we mean by the “expansion of the circle of empathy.”

Respect for future generations?

As my readers know, I have raised several objections to the idea that we should feel the same degree of empathy toward other animal species as we see as morally obligatory toward human beings, so I won’t go into that debate here. Instead, I want to focus on the latest version of the “expanded circle”: the theory that future generations deserve exactly the same respect and consideration as people alive today—or as our immediate descendants—regardless of how far into the future they may live, whether a thousand years from now or a million. This theory has been given the rather unfortunate name longtermism. I say “unfortunate” because almost everyone already agrees that it’s good to “think long term,” not just about what benefits us now or in the near future. Longtermists, however, argue that it’s not enough to think about leaving a livable planet to our grandchildren or great-grandchildren; we must also consider the consequences of our actions on the longest possible timescale. And the longest possible timescale, of course, is as long as the universe itself endures. For these thinkers, caring only about the well-being of ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren would be just as objectionable as caring only about the well-being of our own nation, race, gender, or species. By this logic, to nationalism, racism, sexism, and speciesism we might add another vice just as serious: medium-termism.

Longtermism at its core

The core ideas of longtermism (or “longest-possible-term-ism”) were recently laid out in philosopher William MacAskill’s book What We Owe the Future—probably the most heavily publicized philosophy book ever released. MacAskill’s argument has two main parts. First, he tries to persuade us of the unusual claim that the value we should place on the lives of people who will exist hundreds of thousands or even millions of years from now is exactly the same as the value we place on those who will live a century from now. He presents this as a self-evident corollary of the principle that all human lives are equally valuable. On this view, it’s as obvious as saying that spending fifty euros to save the life of a stranger in a very poor country is ethically better than spending the same money on a gift for a friend you’ve recently offended and want to reconcile with.

But to the supposed self-evidence of that claim, we might reply with a point made—brilliantly, in fact—by Joseph Henrich in his book The WEIRDest People in the World: this obsession with absolute impartiality is largely a quirk of Western culture. For understandable reasons, perhaps, but still a peculiarity, and one that hardly any other human culture has shared throughout history. So we should see it as more of an oddity of us “weird” modern Westerners than as a universal moral truth. And in fact, the psychological reality that we are often more troubled by being on bad terms with a friend than by the preventable death of a stranger on the other side of the globe—this basic fact of human psychology—isn’t something we should dismiss lightly. It may not be such a bad thing, after all, that our moral vision is a little short-sighted.

They do not exist

However, I think that the main objection to the longtermist thesis—remember, the claim that we should care about people in the distant future just as much as we care about those alive today—is that, at the end of the day, those future people don’t exist, at least not yet. Much of MacAskill’s argument is devoted to trying to convince us that (A) a future in which people exist and enjoy high levels of well-being is morally better than (B) a future in which those same people suffer terribly, and also morally better than (C) a future in which those people simply don’t exist. In other words, if we had to choose among the three, MacAskill claims we would all agree that A is “morally better” than B and C.

But in truth, many of us don’t share the intuition that the preference for A over C is morally decisive enough to justify the sweeping conclusion that we have a categorical moral duty to bring into existence as many people as possible—not only at any given moment, but across the whole of the future. At the very least, how important we think the existence of those happy future people is to us right now depends on many factors: the cost of creating them, the impact their existence might have on others, on other beings, or on the environment.

Even MacAskill himself admits that, while he sees promoting population growth as a moral imperative, he doesn’t have children (at least at the time he published the book). Surely he had good reasons for deciding against increasing the number of happy people in the world—reasons that outweighed the supposed duty to do so. If MacAskill can have reasonable grounds for not having children now—and thereby depriving countless potential people of the chance to live, since any children he might have in the future would not be the same individuals as the ones he might already have had—then surely the rest of us can also have reasonable grounds for caring very little about whether humanity survives for a million years or a billion.

Put more sharply: preventing the existence of people who will never be conceived simply isn’t comparable to what we normally regard as genuine evil—depriving someone of life who already has it. To admit otherwise would force us to treat people who decide not to have children—whether William MacAskill or Teresa of Ávila—as criminals. And we are clearly not prepared to think such a thing. Any theory that leads us to such an absurd conclusion must, beyond doubt, contain some very serious flaw. But we´ll see a few more flaws of longtermism in the next entry, aspects that may explain why the longtermism vogue has had so short duration.