Longtermism and its Limits

Is humanity on its way out? It’s hard to say for sure, but the deck is certainly stacked against us. We are currently facing a constellation of existential risks. Climate change may wipe us out. Or perhaps nuclear war or another global pandemic. But even if we deal with those threats, there is the possibility of unaligned artificial intelligence taking over and deciding that things are better off without us. There is also, unfortunately, the non-zero probability of a giant asteroid striking Earth and causing a mass extinction event. The list goes on. If we don’t act fast, we could be gone soon. 
 
So what should we do? Longtermists say that we should direct a significant portion of our attention and resources towards making things go best for future generations. What counts as a significant portion? Longtermists disagree on the details. But according to one variant of the view—call it strong longtermism—there is no morally relevant difference between future people and the living, and since future people vastly outnumber the living, when considering what we ought to do, the interests of future people always trump the interests of the living.
 
Strong longtermism has radical implications. Much of our talk about what we owe to each other often focuses on those who are temporally close to us: the living, or perhaps the next generation, or, in rare cases, the next couple of generations. Yet if each person counts for one and only one on the long timeline of human history, then we ought to radically revise our moral and political goals. We ought to spend much more on reducing the risk of human extinction. Those funds, however, will have to come from somewhere, and given that we live in a world of scarcity, we will have to make some difficult trade-offs. A few billion dollars spent benefiting the living may do a lot of good. But a few billion dollars spent benefiting future generations could do astronomically more good simply because future people, by some estimates, will outnumber us by 100,000 to 1. Which choice is best? When faced with a choice between these two options—benefiting the living or future people—strong longtermists tell us that we ought to choose the latter over the former. Opting for the reverse, they say, is evidence that we have not fully cleansed ourselves of temporal bias. 
 
But perhaps it is not time that makes the moral difference in these cases. Perhaps it is the much more mundane fact that we are permitted to be partial to friends and lovers and those near and dear to us. Or perhaps our bias towards the near-term is simply a reflection of some other morally significant value: namely, respecting the rights of others, our concern for fairness or equality or democracy, or our desire to live a life with the sort of integrity that makes other valuable projects possible. These other values—if they are of value at all—seem to tell us something about the limits of longtermism.
 
And indeed, many are inclined to reject strong longtermism on these grounds. We have weighty reasons of partiality, some say, to fulfill our duties to our fellow citizens, even when doing so will result in a suboptimal state of affairs for future generations. Others object on empirical grounds: do the calculations really add up? Some might raise epistemic worries about just how difficult it is to calculate the effects of our actions on the long-term future and hold instead that, as a practical matter, we should be focused on doing good in the near-term. 
 
But even if we are inclined to reject strong longtermism, it is harder to reject the motivating idea behind the longtermist project: namely, that we ought to care about the future of humanity. Morality can’t just be about what we owe to each other; it’s also about what we owe the future. These considerations, then, function not so much as counterexamples to longtermism per se. They rather place limits on how demanding a longtermist moral ideal might be. 
 
So facts about the living and our relations with them seem to place limits on longtermism. But I want to explore another limiting factor on longtermism: namely, its seeming inability to capture the moral significance of the past. 
 
We live our lives not only in relation to the living and future generations, but also in relation to the dead. It matters to us, for instance, that posthumous rights are respected, that posthumous wishes and promises of all sorts are fulfilled, and, more generally, that the dead are given their due. 
 
Consider our practice of private memorialization. Upon hearing of the death of a loved one, we grieve, mourn, remember, and reflect. Shortly thereafter, we start asking questions: What should be written on their tombstone? Where should they be buried? What should they wear? Or if the deceased wanted to be cremated, we may ask: Should we place the ashes in an urn or cast them to the sea? In asking these questions, we reveal not only that we have some prudential concern for the living, but that we have a deeper sense of respect for the dead themselves. 
 
We also memorialize together. Aside from holding and attending funerals, we often come together to publicly deliberate about how to give the dead their due. Here, too, we find ourselves asking all sorts of questions. Should the memorial be large or small? Should the memorial be representational? What is the point of publicly memorializing the dead? Again, our asking these questions reveals that we have a deep sense of respect for the dead themselves—even when we are not well acquainted with them. We feel that we must do something to acknowledge the dead, and that the character of that “must” is moral through and through. Cécile Fabre, in her book Cosmopolitan Peace, puts the point nicely when she writes: “Valuing all human beings wherever they are, and in particular attending to the plight of those who suffer from and through war, provides us with a reason to ensure as much as we can that they are not forgotten. Not doing anything publicly to remember them is a failure to acknowledge the seriousness of the wrongdoings to which they were subject and, thereby, a failure of respect”. Taking a cue from Fabre, we might say that our practice of public memorialization matters deeply to us—so much so that the failure to publicly memorialize the dead, at least in some instances, provokes a whole range of reactive attitudes among the living. 
 
Why all this talk about memorialization and the dead? Two reasons. The first is that these practices seem just as morally significant as our concern for respecting the rights of the living, partiality, fairness, equality, and so on. The second is that these practices cost an awful lot of money. Reflecting on them thus raises the question of whether one can be a thoroughgoing longtermist and also wholeheartedly participate in our practices of memorialization. 
 
The answer to this question turns, in part, on a few empirical facts. Relevant for our purposes is the fact that in the United States, for instance, it is estimated that the average price of a funeral ranges between $7,000 and $12,000. With around 3.4 million people in the United States dying each year, this makes funerals a big business, generating over $39 billion in annual revenue, give or take a few billion. What is more, the global market for death care services is estimated to reach over 189 billion dollars by 2030. 
 
With these empirical facts on the table, suppose a longtermist asks the following normative question: What could possibly justify spending personal and public funds—and time—on memorializing the dead when we are currently standing at the precipice of existential risk?
 
It is hard to know what to say in reply. And it is equally hard to shoehorn in a justification by appealing to personal prerogatives alone; it seems ad hoc to stipulate that our memorialization practices, as they are, are compatible with fulfilling our duties to future generations. We may be required to make a radical departure from our status quo. While this loss may be regrettable, the gain could be the continued existence of humanity. For the trillions of dollars we are collectively set to spend on memorialization practices over the next few decades could be diverted into research on preventing global catastrophic risk, which could, in turn, contribute to diverting a humanity-ending disaster. Talk of weighing this in the balance against giving the dead their due is morally dubious—or so says the strong longtermist.
 
Perhaps longtermism has its limits. But why think that we should draw those limits around our practices of memorialization? One consideration that comes to mind is that we can’t help but engage in these practices of memorializing the dead. This seems to be a significant psychological fact about us. In asking the question of whether we should give up our practices of memorialization, we ought to take this into account. We ought to, in other words, take people as they are and not as we would like them to be. So, how are we? 
 
It is plain that many of us are thoroughly attached to the past and spend a great deal of time and money while grieving, mourning, remembering, and reflecting. To try and wrest ourselves free from such attachments—to become like Meursault—seems psychologically infeasible. And it sounds strange—at least to my ears—to attribute moral mistakes to ordinary people for having these ordinary dispositions and subsequently acting on them. 
 
Yet the preceding paragraph may sound like I am failing to grasp the point that longtermism can be both true and difficult to endorse. So, in the interest of keeping the dialectic moving forward, let’s suppose that we had a way to resolve this worry about the psychological difficulty of living as a longtermist. Suppose, for instance, there was a pill—call it the indifference pill—that would completely eliminate your disposition to grieve, mourn, remember, reflect, and so on. Upon taking the indifference pill, you would become emotionally indifferent and detached from the past. All of your backward-looking attitudes would fade away, and you would thereafter be free to put forward-looking attitudes in their place, in particular, attitudes directed at making things go best for future generations. 
 
Should you take the indifference pill? What would be lost in taking it? Doing so would certainly eliminate a lot of the pain that comes along with grief. That seems like a reason to take it. More importantly, though, taking the pill would allow you to live up to longtermist ideals. Free from your imperfect psychological makeup, this new morally enhanced version of yourself would care almost effortlessly about future generations. So should you take the indifference pill? 
 
Most of us wouldn’t take the pill. But why? Some of us might say that our practices of memorialization are on a par with other valuable practices. Others may say that failing to memorialize the dead is tantamount to expressing disrespect to them. Still others might complain that they would lose a sense of themselves as historical beings if they took the indifference pill. Whatever reason one cites against taking the indifference pill, it is telling that so many of us are reluctant to giving up our practices of memorialization, even once we fully recognize the costs. 
 
Of course, none of this amounts to much more than intuition pumping. To some philosophers, our practices of memorialization seem all well and good. Others may disagree. I don’t purport to have resolved that dispute here. I simply hope to have shown that, alongside our concern for those near and dear to us, there is also another significant domain of our lives—the domain of what we owe to the dead—that ought to feature in our discussions of longtermism and its limits. 
 
We are both historical and temporal beings. And giving our historicity its due complicates the sorts of questions we ask when we talk about duties to future generations. Many of us ask: how should we balance our concern for the living against our concern for future generations? But we should also be asking ourselves: how should we balance our concern for giving the dead their due against our concern for making things go best for future generations? 


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This essay draws on an unpublished manuscript, titled “Longtermism and the Dead.”

Jordan Walters

Jordan Walters is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He recently received his PhD in Philosophy from McGill University. He works in metaethics, normative ethics, and social, political, and legal philosophy.