Against Strong Longtermism: A Response to Greaves and MacAskill | by Ben Chugg | Curious | Medium
A community of people who are curious to find out what others have already figured out // Curious is a new personal growth publication by The Startup (https://medium.com/swlh). Follow publication 226 2 Listen Share The new moral philosophy of longtermism has staggering implications if widely adopted. In The Case for Strong Longtermism, Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill write The idea, then, is that for the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1000) years, focussing primarily on the further-future effects. Short-run effects act as little more than tie-breakers. (pg. 1; emphasis mine) The idea energizing this philosophy is that most of our “moral value” lies thousands, millions, or even billions of years from now, because we can expect many more humans and animals to exist in the future than right now. In the words of Greaves and MacAskill: “If humanity’s saga were a novel we would still be on