Representing future generations in the political process

Hi Tobias,

I'm glad to see CRS take something of an interest in this topic and I'm particularly happy to see some meta-level discussion of representing the interests of future generations which has been sorely missing from the longtermism space.

We are in full agreement that most extant proposals to represent future generations involve very weak institutions and often rely on tenuous political commitments. In fact, it's because political commitments are so tenuous that political institutions to represent future generations must at first be weak. Strong institutions for future generations have historically been repealed very rapidly, as Jones, O'Brien, and Ryan (2018) have argued from a couple case studies.

We are also in full agreement that there are problems of predicting the interests of future generations, and that getting more objective information about their interests is a key problem. This problem proliferates with increasingly longer timescales. This is why many of the solutions I am personally most favorable to are information interventions, such as creating research bodies like the now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment, which can distill and package extant expertise for legislative bodies, as well as posterity impact assessments, which can create strong incentives to gather more information about the future.

I find much less compelling the idea that "if there is the political will to seriously consider future generations, it’s unnecessary to set up additional institutions to do so," and "if people do not care about the long-term future," they would not agree to such measures. The main reason I find this uncompelling is just that it overgenerates in very implausible ways. Why should women have the vote? Why should discrimination be illegal?

The main long-term function that I see longtermist institutional reform, or any other kind of institutional reform playing is an institutional signalling role. There is compelling evidence that legal and political reform significantly shifts the norms and attitudes that people come to see as acceptable (Berkowitz and Walker 1967, Bilz and Nadler 2009, Flores and Barclay 2015, Tankard and Paluck 2016, 2017, Walker and Argyle 1964). Shifting laws and institutional norms credibly signals information about group attitudes to anyone who has access to information about those laws and norms. In this case, it signals that good, sensible, right-thinking people think that future generations are of great importance and that our political systems must be responsive to their interests. For this reason, there is a chicken and egg problem for institutional reform, but this chicken and egg problem is very friendly to supporters of institutional reform. Reforming institutions changes attitudes, which in turn creates the political will necessary to reform institutions further. Reformed institutions in turn create stable shelling points that prevent value drift away from core values.

For this reason, longtermist institutional reform is quite beneficial for information-gathering purposes. Representing future generations creates greater political and cultural will to gather objective information about the interests of future generations. It's an exercise in movement-building.

I don't know if you meant to narrow in on only those reforms I mention which attempt to create literal representation of future generations or if you meant to bring into focus all attempts to ameliorate political short-termism. In the latter case, it's worth noting that there are a large variety of likely causes of short-termism. Some of them are epistemic (we don't know what to do) and motivational (we lack the political will), but others are merely institutional. In these latter cases, the problem is not that we don't have enough information or will, but rather that the right information is not getting to the right people or that institutional mechanisms are preventing appropriately-motivated and informed actors from acting for the long term. These sorts of problems sometimes require different fixes, and they can sometimes be fixed simply by creating designated stakeholders who create relevant coordination points in government and have time allocated explicitly to considering the long-term. Political problems are often a problem of institutional incentives rather than of political will, and there are currently very strong incentives to focus on the short-term. I canvass many of the various causes of political short-termism in my (now rather lengthy) review on longtermist institutional design and policy.

As a classical utilitarian, I'm also not particularly bothered by the philosophical problems you set out above, but some of these problems are the subject of my dissertation and I hope that I have some solutions for you soon.

In short, I think there is reason for more optimism about longtermist institutional reform than you express here, but I am happy to have some further discussion of the problem and to see a call to consider more seriously the epistemic problems that plague such reform along with some possible solutions.

Nice post!

Realistically, we can only represent future moral agents, who may not adequately consider the interests of future moral patients (such as nonhuman animals or nonbiological beings).

Could you expand on what you mean by the first part of that sentence, and what makes you say that?

It seems true that only moral agents can "vote" in the sort of meaningful sense we typically associate with "voting". But it also seems like, in representing future beings, we're primarily representing their preferences, or something like that. And it seems like this doesn't really require them "voting", and thus could be done for future moral patients in ways that are analogous to how we could do it for future moral agents.

For example, you quote Paul Christiano's suggestion that we could:

Subsidize liquid prediction markets about the results of these surveys in all future years. For example, we can bet about people in 2045’s answers to “Did we do too much or too little about climate change in 2015-2025?”

We will get to see market odds on what people in 10, 20, or 30 years will say about our current policy decisions. For example, people arguing against a policy can cite facts like "The market expects that in 20 years we will consider this policy to have been a mistake."

It seems we could analogously subsidize liquid prediction markets for things like the results in 2045, conditional on passing X or Y policy, of whatever our best metrics are for the welfare or preference-satisfaction of animals, or of AIs whose experiences matter but who aren't moral agents. And then people could say things like "The market expects that [proxy] will indicate in that [group of moral patients] will be better off in 2045 if pass [policy X] than if we pass [policy Y]."

Of course, coming up with such metrics is hard, but that seems like a problem we'll want to fix anyway.

And perhaps, at the least, we could use a metric along the lines of "the views in 2045 of experts or the general public on the preference-satisfaction or welfare of those moral patients". Even if this still boils down to asking for the views of future moral agents, it's at least asking about their beliefs about this other thing that matters, rather than just what they want, so it might give additional and useful information. (I'd imagine this being done in addition to asking what those moral agents want, not instead of that.)

I should mention that I hadn't thought about this issue at all till I read your post, so those statements should all be taken as quite tentative. Relatedly, I don't really have a view on whether we should do anything like that; I'm just suggesting that it seems like we could do it.