Rethinking Longtermism in the Shadow of Suffering

When has the world ever been net positive? Look back and you see famine, slavery, war, oppression. Look around and you see billions of animals raised in confinement, killed by the trillions in seas and rivers. Even in wealthy countries, despair and loneliness are common. Place suffering on one side of the scale and flourishing on the other, and the balance is not obvious.

Longtermism—the view that our greatest moral responsibility is to protect the far future—rests on a quiet assumption. It assumes the future is worth saving. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if humanity is more likely to multiply suffering than to end it? Essays on Longtermism already acknowledges versions of this concern—in its discussion of wild-animal suffering, critical-level utilitarianism, and futures filled with digital minds. Yet those possibilities often appear as technical consequences of population ethics. This essay takes them as central.

The argument here is not that people ought to be killed to prevent future suffering. The thought is quieter: what if allowing nature to take its course—not intervening to prevent extinction—turns out to be the least harmful option? If the future might be worse than the past, or if the balance is simply unknowable, the meaning of longtermism becomes harder to pin down.

The Temptation of Extinction
The book brushes against this worry in several places. It notes that many wild animals reproduce in huge numbers, most offspring dying painfully and young. Some philosophers take this as evidence that suffering predominates in nature. It discusses population-ethics frameworks where even lives just above zero may still contribute negatively, leading to the suggestion that “the world would be better without almost everything that moves in the waters, in the air, or upon the earth.” It also considers futures of “emulated minds”—cheap digital copies, short-lived and disposable—whose existence could multiply suffering on a vast scale.

From these angles, extinction can start to look like mercy. If life produces more misery than joy, then letting humanity end might appear less like a tragedy and more like a release.

Why Extinction Falters
And yet, extinction is a hard conclusion to accept.

Uncertainty is the first barrier. No one knows which moral theory is true. Certain strands of utilitarianism might support extinction if suffering dominates. But rights-based and pluralist views see extermination as wrong regardless of the calculus. Leaning entirely on one theory under deep ignorance looks reckless.

Extinction is also irreversible. To close the door on the future forever, without confidence that it is worthless, feels like a gamble no one is qualified to make.

And any attempt to actively cause extinction would be disastrous in practice. It would unleash misery on its way, repeating the mistake of past utopian projects that promised relief and delivered atrocity.

Yet the distinction remains between active extermination and passive nonintervention. To ask whether survival is always worth fighting for is not the same as advocating violence. Doing nothing is not neutral either, since ignoring preventable risks is itself a kind of choice. The real tension lies in how to tell the difference: when does action multiply misery, and when does inaction do the same?

The Balance We Cannot Measure
At the core lies a question that resists proof: has existence, on balance, been good or bad?

There is no shared unit for adding joy and suffering together. People disagree on whether pain counts for more than happiness, or whether goods like love and beauty can be reduced to hedonic arithmetic at all. Empirically, the problem is no easier. How do we measure the life of a fish, the balance of joy and terror in wild animals, or the quiet despair of billions of people?

The honest answer is that we cannot. The ledger of suffering and flourishing is beyond demonstration.

Longtermism Under Uncertainty
If the balance cannot be known, longtermism takes on a different light. Its role may be less about ensuring a glorious future and more about navigating uncertainty.

In that light, the most vivid risks are not failed utopias but futures dominated by suffering: misaligned artificial intelligence, authoritarian lock-ins, the unchecked expansion of industrial animal agriculture. These possibilities loom larger than confident stories of flourishing.

Extinction prevention can still hold meaning, though perhaps not in the way it is usually presented. Survival does not guarantee value. It matters only if it avoids collapse that spreads misery and if it preserves the possibility—no matter how slim—that the future might finally tip toward the good.

This is not a call to abandon hope. It is a recognition that both blind optimism and active extermination miss the point. The task is not to force survival at any price or to end it on purpose, but to face the uncertainty honestly, without pretending the balance sheet has already been settled.

Conclusion
The idea that extinction might be the most humane outcome is unsettling, but it cannot be ignored. Essays on Longtermism surfaces versions of this possibility in its discussions of suffering, population ethics, and low-quality futures. What often appears in the book as a technical consequence of theory becomes here the central question: what if the future is not guaranteed to be good?

The answer is not to embrace extermination. It is to recognize that longtermism is less a promise of utopia than a confrontation with uncertainty. Perhaps its role is not to guarantee heaven, but to prevent hell—and to keep alive, however tenuously, the fragile possibility of something better.