"If we recognise that it is a part of human nature to be prepared to sacrifice for others principally through emotive relationships and a lived experience of solidarity and empathy, we are left facing the awkward reality that, as a facet of cosmic complexity, utilitarianism, so well equipped to recognise the need to develop our relationship with future generations, may not be well equipped to do much about it."
A common frustration for those visiting Rome is the impossibility of seeing everything. Even those committed to score-of-thousand stepped and stomach-stretching days merely scratch at the interwoven cultural strands densely packed over millennia into a hard surface. This is one reason why I am grateful for having studied there, eight years being time enough to reach a working familiarity with the city’s seemingly endless sources of spiritual, aesthetic, and earthly refreshment. My last weeks in the eternal city, then, were not spent frantically completing a ‘Things to Do in Rome’ list but rather making the most of a different opportunity. As a freshly minted Roman Catholic priest who had read Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’, I was trying to develop my piqued curiosity from the muddled acknowledgement of the importance of the issues raised into a PhD proposal. I was grateful also, then, for the chance to seek out advice from some of the big, (relatively speaking), names of Catholic theology that can be found in Rome. These conversations included a memorable one-liner which is as simple as it is disarming: “Ah, those Oxford academics: they couldn’t even stop Brexit, what makes them think they can stop the end of the world?”
Whilst this may, at first, appear to be an uncharitable dismissal from social conservatism and exactly the sort of sense-of-an-end-assuring apocalypticism Thomas Moynihan explains so admirably (Moynihan 2020, 33), my theological master makes no immediate moral claim. The criticism raises more general questions about how moral philosophy is communicated and whether the way in which we think might introduce limitations to our capacity to invite others to share in our conclusions.
Such issues are not irrelevant to social-political commentary in a post-2016 world which cannot be recreated here, however it should suffice to say that, if the general voting public responds to big questions in a way that surprises or, dare we say, at times frustrates those who have opportunity to engage with those questions more fully, advocates of Longtermism have a Public Relations challenge ahead of them. This essay, then, hopes to point to the apparent absence of addressing such considerations in the recently published compendium Essays on Longtermism. To be clear; I am not criticising the compendium itself for not being more accessible to the general public, (that is evidently not its intended audience), however it appears to neglect study of some inherent challenges which future publications intended for public engagement, building on the efforts of Ord’s “The Precipice” or MacAskill’s “What we Owe the Future”, would need to face.
In the following summary of some of these challenges, I assume that a moderate form of Longtermism is, in principle, uncontroversial. I concur with the simple claim by Owen Cotton-Barratt and Rose Hadshar that most people agree that future people matter. (Cotton-Barratt and Hadshar 2025, n. 2) Likewise, as I cast my mind over several years of speaking about my own PhD research, I do not recall anyone objecting to the basic idea of the Hinge of History; that the coming chapter of human history is characterised by the novel challenge of learning to mitigate hazards we create for ourselves. This would mean, gratefully receiving Charlotte Franziska Unruh’s helpful note that causing harm is intuitively worse than not producing benefit (Unruh 2025, 146), it is not ultimately all that controversial, in principle, that it is a moral good to safeguard future generations from the harms that we ourselves might otherwise cause.
If the principle of such moderate Longtermism is, in fact, relatively uncontroversial, we rightly wonder why society is so myopic. There appears to be a gap between initial moral judgement and concrete action. This is problematic if the effective mitigation of existential risks requires a broader societal acceptance of Longtermist attitudes. There is already a gap between acknowledging the present poverty and suffering around the world, and the apparent inactivity of those who would be able to help. Things only get harder when the future becomes involved, if only because policies that rebalance resource expenditure away from addressing near-term needs towards the benefit of future generations, experienced as sacrifice, do not help win elections. In debates, loops can form as discourse passes back and forth between two negative states; from resisting the acceptance of significant new responsibilities to intuited concern about what it might mean in practise if such responsibilities are not fulfilled. How might that loop be disrupted? What solutions are forthcoming towards overcoming resistance, either in populations or in high-powered individuals, to working towards climate sustainability, better regulated Artificial Intelligence development and biotechnological development, or nuclear disarmament? When such a barrier is perceived between judgement and action, one instinct is further to clarify the judgement in the hope that making a stronger case can overcome uncertainty. I would argue, however, that there appear to be two obstacles to this approach in the case of advocating for safeguarding future generations on utilitarian terms, suggesting that a point of diminishing returns may have already been reached for further developing the philosophical case for forms of Longtermism strong enough to make some difference.
As a first observation: If the case for safeguarding future generations requires the depth and nuance present in the collections of articles this essay is responding to, then we might well despair as it is difficult to foresee a future of broader public discourse that could effectively operate at that level. Fortunately, as already noted, I do not believe that promoting Longtermism requires such depth of argumentation. It is not as if there are crowds of people who are waiting, for example, for non-fanatical decision theory to develop sufficiently to see if the high price asked by longtermism is definitely worth paying before allowing Longtermist principles to shape their decision making. (C.f. Greaves and MacAskill 2025, 38)
The first challenge I would identify, then, is acknowledging that reaching deeper into moral rationalism creates stronger moral motivation only for a certain personality type. The friend who introduced me to Effective Altruism once said: “One of the problems we have is that educated people who like graphs are good at convincing other educated people who like graphs, but not necessarily anyone else.” To express this more formally: There are the sorts of people who are intuitively motivated by rationally deducing a requirement to do something, but the strength of this response varies. Moral motivation in utilitarianism generally comes both from an assumption that acting in a way that maximises the good for society will also attain a good for the agent, as well as, sharing ground with deontological thought, through an emotional experience that can arise when moral judgements are made which bring a duty into relief. (de Colle and Werhane 2008, 751) However, it is possible to argue that many do not have as strong an emotional response to the recognition of duties, or the possibility of maximising abstract goods, as Longtermism requires. In this case, something other than developing moral arguments further still will be required to promote Longtermism amongst those who do not respond to such arguments with sufficient emotion to overcome affections for self, family, and tribe to a sufficient degree to sacrifice for others who are distant across space and time.
This motivational challenge is intensified as the nature of future ethics disrupts auxiliary sources of motivation that ethics can rely on in present application. (Birnbacher 2012, 276) When looking to the future, moral judgements do not have recourse to the experience of present situations which generates friction within ethical frameworks developed with contemporary relationships in mind. This is why Longtermist claims begin to strain to the limit ethical approaches which otherwise rely on empathy and solidarity for motivating concrete action. I would argue there is something amiss in assumptions, often encountered in the literature, that Longtermism is but a further step of an expansion of our circle of moral concern to include future generations, failing to recognise the particularity of future ethics. Previous developments in societal norms were supported by a vicinity to harm caused: the tragedy of human slavery can be seen, activist for animal welfare can show footage of great animal suffering, and other forms of contemporary injustice create visible injury by which we, in good conscience, are repulsed. This repulsion is greatly diminished when contemplating future harms and so the next step of moral expansion cannot rely on what has worked elsewhere. Likewise, whilst it is true that, in the past, the emotive effects of ongoing war led populations to accept the loss of certain prerogatives, such as the consumption of luxuries, it is a mistake to apply this directly to future ethics, expecting the possibility of future harm to illicit a comparable response. (C.f. Greaves and MacAskill 2025, 40; Kitcher 2025, 209)
I have so far proposed that the obstacles to promoting Longtermism exist on a level of emotional bonds, rather than of uncertainty of moral argumentation, and that there are at least two inherent weaknesses to promoting greater responsibilities for the future through moral argumentation; disruptions to moral motivation that come from variations in emotional response to rationally deduced responsibilities and the unavailability of experience of future harm as a source of empathy. If we recognise that it is a part of human nature to be prepared to sacrifice for others principally through emotive relationships and a lived experience of solidarity and empathy, we are left facing the awkward reality that, as a facet of cosmic complexity, utilitarianism, so well equipped to recognise the need to develop our relationship with future generations, may not be well equipped to do much about it.
Reading ‘Essays on Longtermism’ with this in mind reframes epistemic humility into a lack of aspiration. Kitcher copes with myopia and speculates what the world might look like if it was filled with ‘unusually thoughtful, other directed, and public-spirited people’ but does not consider how we move together in that direction. (Kitcher 2025, 207–8) Challenges such as bias, partiality, and myopia are understood and modelled but little is proposed in terms of exploring the deeper root causes within the human experience and how they might be overcome. Owen Cotton-Barrat and Rose Hadshar describe what Longtermist societies might look like to a lesser or greater degree, but not what can be done to make a state more or less Longtermist, other than rather dystopian scenarios of a coercive state with a strict commitment to Longtermism, ruling over a people that does not share its views. (Cotton-Barratt and Hadshar 2025) The concept of Cultural Evolution is not applied to a possible greater spread of Longtermism itself, neglecting to describe the possible persistence of valuing future goods and recognising a moral relationship with future generations.(Vallinder 2025, 251) Riedener considers how the temporal gap disrupts authenticity of action, but not how values and intuitions which determine authenticity can develop and be promoted to enable authentic concern for future generations. (Riedener 2025, 155)
The question then arises: what would it look like for Longtermism not to see ‘common moral intuitions’ as an issue, a source of objections on the grounds of fanaticism, (C.f. Askell-Barratt and Neth 2025) but something that can be developed in a favourable way? What impact could be made by rigorous and wider-reaching studies of how we might inspire others to change the way they live their lives, not by being even more certain about the judgement, but by considering the required middle stage of moral motivation that enables action, especially sacrifice for others? (This could be of benefit if only because of political figures who are content to leverage the stronger emotional response of near-term needs for electoral benefit.) (Friedrichs et al. 2022) It is true that Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ and MacAkskill’s ‘What We Owe the Future’ present the utilitarian argument in a way that might maximise an emotional response, both offering emotive portrayals of what is at stake for good or ill to overcome bias and neglect. However there is only so far this path can lead if emotive expressions of utilitarianism are bound by the same limitations described above. My first hope then, to begin concluding, would be to see Longtermism consider with its characteristic rigour how it might expand its scope for engaging a more ambitious and wholistic approach to communicating its goals and principles.
There is a broader set of moral resources available to overcome temporal parochialism and taking our place in the human story but this will require honestly asking some difficult questions. As Samuel Scheffler points out, there is, at the very least, an irony that a worldview that has sought to break bonds with past generations to maximise individual freedom from unchosen obligations has now recognised, for the sake of the future, the need to reforge links in the chain of human history and the duties towards others that those bonds enjoin. (Scheffler 2020, 7–8) Aspirations that each generation be unburdened by others undermine imagery of humanity being as one united individual which, at this moment in time, is like a young-person facing life-determining decisions and perils. (C.f. Ord 2020, 52; Greaves and MacAskill 2025, 17–18) The question I would hope to see Longtermists answer is whether the presently pervasive understanding of duties is capable of reconciling the individualism and radical autonomy that contemporary liberal accounts of the human person elevate with the obligations and self-sacrifice Longtermism requires? A strict methodological presumption that obligations only be accepted if they are demonstrated to be required (C.f. Unruh 2025, 144), may not be the best place to start to describe a relationship of generous charity with future generations, especially if most people experience relationships of sacrificial generosity on a different plane of reflection.
I recognise that my direction of travel will invoke accusations of fanaticism but, as someone who is committed to a rather different account of the human person, I can propose this widening of scope. As a person of faith, I am left wondering if moral rationalism can fully capture the possible greatness of the human condition when we are often at our best when we are behaving in an apparently irrational way: the mad scientific or artistic genius, the blinded lover, the radically generous saint. Might it be that our relationship with future generations best fits amidst these hard-to-rationalise aspects of human life, with something of fanaticism about them? Might it be that our relationship with future generations requires a heroic response of seemingly irrational generosity? I only signpost here some efforts I have made to explore how the Christian faith[i] can equip us to answer these questions (Wygnanski 2024), noting that Ord too has turned to saints and theologians to invoke radical generosity better to justify the costs Longtermism demands. (Ord 2014, 185) As someone with shared concerns for humanity’s future wellbeing, my hope with this essay is simply to make a case that all might benefit from a widening of Longtermism’s methods and a greater boldness in proclaiming that it is a part of the greatness of being human to be heroically, even slightly irrationally, generous in our relationship with others, including future generations, out of our love for humanity itself.
[i] I believe the varied landscape of Christianity and its relation to politics and culture in regrettably fundamentalist forms explains the correlation between religious affiliation and in-group favouritism observed by Schubert et al. 2025, 570, 573.
Bibliography
From Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, edited by H. Greaves, J. Barrett, and D. Thorstad. Oxford University Press.
Askell-Barratt, Amanda, and Sven Neth. 2025. ‘Longtermist Myopia’.
Cotton-Barratt, Owen, and Owen Hadshar. 2025. ‘What Would a Longtermist Society Look Like?’
Greaves, Hilary, and William MacAskill. 2025. ‘The Case for Strong Longtermism’.
Kitcher, Philip. 2025. ‘Coping with Myopia’.
Riedener, Stefan. 2025. ‘Reasons to Care Less About Far-Future People’.
Schubert, Stefan, Lucius Caviola, Julian Savulescu, and Nadira S. Faber. 2025. ‘Temporal Distance Reduces Ingroup Favouritism’.
Unruh, Charlotte Franziska. 2025. ‘Against a Moral Duty to Make the Future Go Best’.
Vallinder, Aron. 2025. ‘Longtermism and Cultural Evolution’.
Other Sources
Colle, Simone de, and Patricia H. Werhane. 2008. ‘Moral Motivation across Ethical Theories’. Journal of Business Ethics 81 (4): 751–64.
Friedrichs, Jörg, Niklas Stoehr, and Giuliano Formisano. 2022. ‘Fear-Anger Contests: Governmental and Populist Politics of Emotion’. Online Social Networks and Media 32 (November): 100240.
Ord, Toby. 2014. ‘Global Poverty and the Demands of Morality’. In God, the Good, and Utilitarianism: Perspectives on Peter Singer, edited by John Perry. Cambridge University Press.
-2020. The Precipice. Bloomsbury.
MacAskill, William. 2022. What We Owe the Future. Oneworld.
Moynihan, Thomas. 2020. X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. Urbanomic.
Scheffler, Samuel. 2020. Why Worry About Future Generations? Oxford University Press.
Birnbacher, Dieter. 2012. ‘What Motivates Us to Care for the (Distant) Future’. In Intergenerational Justice, edited by A Grosseries and L Meyer. Oxford University Press.
Wygnanski, Piotr. 2024. ‘Motivation from Joseph Ratzinger’s Eschatological Realism for Protecting Humanity’s Future’. New Blackfriars, Vol 105.5, 2024 (September): 492–505.
This is a very interesting approach, and I don't think it is in conflict with the approach in the volume. I hope you develop it further.
Thank you for your encouraging words. They mean a great deal.
Maybe this is a me problem but I found this essay pretty impenetrable. I can't figure out what the thesis is, and I struggle to even understand what most of the individual sentences are saying.
I personally found it a very refreshing change of language/thinking/style from the usual EA Forum/LessWrong post, and found spending some extra effort to (hopefully) understand it worth it and highly enjoyable.
My one sentence summary/translation would be that advocating for longtermism would likely benefit on the margin from using more of a virtue ethics approach (e.g. using saints and heroes as examples) instead of a rationalist/utilitarian approach, as most people feel even less of an obligation towards future beings than towards the global poor, and many of the most altruistic people act altruistically for emotional/spiritual reasons rather than rational ones.
I could have definitely misunderstood the post though, so someone correct me if I misinterpreted it, and there are a lot more valuable points. E.g. that most people agree on an abstract level that future people matter, and that actively causing them harm is bad. So I think it claims that longtermists should focus less on strengthening that case and more on other things. Another interesting point is that to "mitigate hazards we create for ourselves" we could take advantage of the fact that "causing harm is intuitively worse than not producing benefit" for most people.
I think SummaryBot below also did a good job at translating.
Thank you for this.
There are two slightly 'meta' issues here in that a) I cannot help but already be working in a different style, as that is my background, which I appreciate some will find cumbersome), and b) I wanted to avoid giving 'my' solutions as I am interested to see how else the challenges I raise can be responded to.
I would further add only that I too recommend the SummaryBot for a TL;DR
I really agreed with you when I was just glancing at the post trying to get a sense of what it was about, but then I looked at the comments and got convinced to try reading it in earnest, from the beginning. Then I flipped, and now I think the thesis is clear, the individual sentences are clear, and the writing is beautiful.
An unfortunate fact about some academic writing, specifically some writing in philosophy, in many of the humanities, and in some of the social sciences, is that there's a lot of time-wasting, inscrutable papers and books. This kind of writing does not reward additional time and effort spent on reading it, or at least does so at such a miserly trickle that it's not worthwhile. The preponderance of inscrutable texts makes it hard to tell, at a glance, what's not worth reading and what's written in sumptuous prose. This essay is sumptuous prose.
Executive summary: This reflective essay argues that while moderate Longtermism’s moral principles are broadly acceptable, its utilitarian, rationalist framing fails to motivate real-world moral action; the author proposes that genuine concern for future generations may require appealing to emotion, solidarity, and even “irrational” heroic generosity rooted in lived human experience and faith.
Key points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
I really loved this post, both probably because I agree with the core of the thesis (even if I am an atheist) as I've understood it and because I like the style (not a very EA one, but then again my own background is mostly in the Humanities). I think it's spot-on on the recommendations and on the critical appraisal on what is effective to move most people who are not in the subset of young, highly numerical/logical and ambitious nerds who I'd guess are the core audience of EA. Then again, there's an elitistic streak within EA that might say that the value of the movement is precisely in attracting and focusing on that kind of people.
Embedded within this essay focused specifically on the question of what could motivate (practically, emotionally, not just logically or intellectually) our generosity or altruism toward distant future generations is a more general idea about the limits of thinking and argumentation, at least in the form that thinking and argumentation typically take in academic analytic philosophy or on the Effective Altruism Forum.
One experience that changed how I think and feel about deep time was watching the documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog, about the 30,000-year-old cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave in France. That documentary reached into my heart and changed something in it. Before then, the thought about Stone Age people that preoccupied me is how terrible life must have been then and how sorry I feel for them. Instead what I felt when watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that people in the Stone Age got to experience the miracle of being alive, and so do I, and I am so grateful.
There is something important that must be said for things that can't be rationally expressed, or, more truthfully, that can't be expressed according to the existing social conventions of rationality. In the documentary, there is a powerful interview with a scientist who describes his first experience going into the Chauvet Cave, how his experience of contact with deep time overcame his mind, how he dreamed vividly each night of lions — of paintings of lions, and real lions too. After a few days, he decided to stop going into the cave, to take time to process what the cave was telling him. (To decide to stop going into the cave is a serious decision because, to preserve the rock art in the cave, access is restricted to a small number of scientists for a short period each year.) Somehow, just watching the film, I felt affected on a deep nervous system level, perhaps a little bit like he was. Experiences like these are not about argumentation, as we typically think about it, and they're not about thinking, as we typically think about thinking, but they are some of the most valuable things we get in life.
Philosophy is so much about intuitions, and where do intuitions come from? They are slippery, and hard to get a handle on. They are not easy to examine. They come from an overall source that mixes cognition, perception, experience, emotion, personal history, and intergenerational history. In philosophy, there is a trade-off between precision and complexity. The more precise we want to be, the more we must shrink the scope of what we talk about. In our most precise forms of argument, those in formal logic, we shrink the subject matter down to nothing at all. Or in the words of the poet Mervyn Peake:
I can say something about non-rational, or, more accurately, non-conventionally rational, explorations of ideas and intuitions as they pertain to longtermism. Things can't be transactional. You can't say, okay, I'll give people opportunities to have spiritual experiences related to deep time and, in exchange, they'll vote for politicians who allocate funding to longtermist projects. That just turns spirituality into a tool used to the serve the purposes of conventional rationality. Another way of saying this is you can't be instrumental about this. You have to be sincere. And you certainly can't be paternalistic or think about it in terms of the most effective way to manipulate people to do what you want or believe what you believe. (Unfortunately, this is a tendency I’ve seen too many times in effective altruism and although I can empathize with where this impulse comes from, ultimately it’s misguided. Instead, you should find that place in you where your convictions really come from and appeal to that place in other people. I think it’s more persuasive when you speak authentically rather than with an intent to manipulate people. Even when it isn’t persuasive, at least it’s honest.)
You have to actually be open to such explorations as a source of truth, or at least a source of guidance about how you will personally act. You can't treat such explorations as a way to strengthen or reinforce the conclusions you already believe about longtermism. You need to have real openness. You can't go in with foregone conclusions. If you do, and you aren't really open to changing your mind, then maybe you are accepting that for others non-conventionally rational sources of philosophical intuition are fine, but you’re not accepting it for yourself. Maybe there’s a way for this to be an internally consistent position — to accept it for others but not yourself — I don’t know. But, internally consistent or not, I don’t think you can hope to motivate others to care about longtermism for reasons you don’t sincerely share.
To put it more plainly, if you explore why you, personally, are practically, emotionally motivated to work on projects related to longtermism, you might find that you don’t feel motivated to work on them at all, and even if you intellectually accept the arguments for longtermism, advancing longtermism is not how you want to live your life. I can anticipate that someone might worry about this — might worry that others will realize that they aren’t motivated or worry that they, themselves will realize aren’t motivated. And so, they might double down on the intellectual arguments and try to put this exploration on a leash. But that won’t work. That’s a half-measure or worse. That’s going through the motions of exploring without really exploring. You might as well not explore at all. I think you should explore (really explore) and see what you find.
The person who has most shaped my thinking about this is the social worker and emotions researcher Brené Brown. She is almost always speaking and writing about epistemic concerns in the context of one’s personal life, but I don’t see why what she says shouldn’t be applied to academic philosophy as well. For example, so much of philosophy and philosophical reasoning is about connecting to your intuition. Many times, you have a feeling that an idea or argument is wrong, but it takes time to work out why. In her book Rising Strong, which I love, Brené Brown describes how to do this process when it comes to your beliefs about yourself and your life story. (She also covers aspects of this in her lecture series The Power of Vulnerability and Rising Strong as a Spiritual Practice, both of which I love.) I have never seen a better discussion of how to do epistemic practice in real life. She’s a social worker writing and speaking about the contexts social workers typically think about, but I don’t see why you wouldn’t apply her ideas to philosophy, science, politics, and so on.
Related to this, something I always appreciated about my great philosophical hero Daniel Dennett is that he was sensitive to the emotional dimensions of philosophical debates. For example, he devotes the beginning of his book Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting to discussing why people find the idea of causal determinism disturbing or frightening in the context of free will. His discussion of consciousness in other books is similarly empathetic and emotionally aware. I’ve long thought that he was a better philosopher for thinking more deeply than one typically sees in philosophy about the anxieties and hopes at play in philosophical debates and putting them front and centre in the discussion. I wonder if this approach was influenced by his views about the role of emotion in cognition. He emphasized that without emotion, thinking wouldn’t be possible in the human brain. I love Dennett and miss him.
On a final note, I want to say that this essay by Fr. Peter Wyg is beautiful, deeply perceptive, and it’s my favourite essay that I’ve read so far for the longtermism essay competition. I would be happy to see it win one of the prizes.
I think that most longtermists are aware of the motivational challenge you point out. In fact, major works on longtermism address this challenge, such as Toby Ord's "The Precipice", which argues for the importance of mitigating existential risks from a wide range of moral views. Since the motivational challenge is already understood, I think that the most valuable part of this post are the final paragraphs that sketch how the motivational challenge could be overcome. Like Toby, I'd encourage you to further develop these ideas of yours - especially since they seem to come apart from moral philosophy's obsession with the question whether we are 'required' or 'obligated' to do the right/best thing.