Book Review: What We Owe the Future
I have a book review up at the EA for Christians Substack “Christ and Counterfactuals” which you can find here:
Effective Altruism as a movement is highly concerned with rational practicality and longtermism arises out of practical concerns with Utilitarian ethics taken to an extreme that may no longer be practical. Because the future has a chance to be so much vastly better than the present or so much vastly worse, it makes sense that every decision should be filtered through the lens of the future rather than the present. Lives can stop mattering for themselves, but for how many trillions of happy descendants they might create.
Like much of Utilitarianism’s strange edge cases, I consider some of the scenarios considered by longtermism to be reductio ad absurdums that are nevertheless taken seriously by people deeply concerned with being good. They are reductios because ethics ultimately does not boil down to “find a simple infinitely generalizable principle for what the good is then apply it rigorously to all contexts,”1 but is far more confusing and case sensitive. It does not make ethical sense to do great evil to the present based on slim probabilities of the future.
Fortunately, longtermism does not need to be about such edge cases. Many of the concerns raised by longtermism are actually just important concerns for ethical thinking in general. It can sometimes be difficult to find cases where the longterm and the enlightened shortterm significantly diverge. It is also hard to know anything for sure about the longterm other than what we know about the shortterm. I am concerned about asteroid strikes and engineered pandemics because they might happen. But the fact that we did not know about either possibility until relatively recently suggests the future will have its own unimaginable existential risks. Some may say that people are not concerned enough about existential risks because they are not sufficiently concerned about the longrun future. I would answer that people are concerned about existential risks (plenty of movies highlight it as the worst outcome possible) but that they are also lazy and selfish and like to stick with the status quo; these are not problems that will be solved by better ethics.
But there is another less-practical domain where longtermism offers something different. Much of Christian morality, especially that of the early Church, urges believers to base their lives not on the present or the shortterm, but what is to come. “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col 3:2). Many religions hold out the same command, not to become enslaved to the concerns of the present, but to focus one’s mind on the better world. Our secular present has failed to be able to imagine a better world, to imagine a true future which leaves behind the worldly concerns of our present. The future imagined by longtermists can fill this role. Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments uses the future in this way, not as something to be rationally calculated (although it is worth engaging in rational speculation), but as something to hope for and to drive humanity further. I hope that longtermism sticks and around and succeeds not as a new area for worry and arguing about utiltitarian edge cases, but as an opportunity for all to join as believers in a shared and shining future.
I will not elaborate here, but I hope to soon.