Longtermism and Tenet: Are We At War With The Future?

Longtermism is the idea that we should treat the long-term future as a key moral priority. As William MacAskill writes in What We Owe the Future, ‘longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it’. His reasoning is that, based on the average duration of a mammalian species (around 1 million years), we are only at the beginning of our potential lifespan (having been around for only 300,000 years):

If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in the most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people […] Previous social movements, such as those for civil rights and women’s suffrage, have often sought to give greater recognition and influence to disempowered members of society. I see longtermism as an extension of these ideals. Though we cannot give genuine political power to future people, we can at least give consideration to them. By abandoning the tyranny of the present over the future, we can act as trustees — helping to create a flourishing world for generations to come

This notion, that we are trustees, was stressed by Edmund Burke (1729–1797), who rejected the theory of ‘the social contract’ as a deal among living…