The suffering of future people outweighs the suffering of present people. By a lot. This framework has consequences.
Literal meaning: Longtermism is a philosophical position — associated primarily with effective altruism philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord — holding that the moral weight of the far future is vastly greater than the present, because there are potentially trillions of future people whose wellbeing depends on decisions made now. On this view, preventing extinction risks is among the most important moral priorities, because it preserves the possibility of all that future value.
Origin: The philosophical foundations were developed by Nick Bostrom and Derek Parfit (population ethics), with MacAskill and Ord bringing them into the effective altruism movement. MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future (2022) was the mainstream introduction. The framework gained influence in Silicon Valley through its overlap with AI safety concerns and through the effective altruism movement’s success in attracting tech philanthropy.
A moral framework that makes the suffering of speculative future people more important than the suffering of present people — with significant consequences for what counts as justified today.
The Appeal: Longtermism takes existential risk seriously, which is a genuine ethical and practical priority. The mathematical argument is coherent: if there are vastly more potential future people than present people, and their wellbeing matters equally, then the expected value of preventing extinction is enormous. The framework mobilises resources toward long-term civilisational risks that short-term policy thinking ignores.
The Friction: The framework has been extensively critiqued, most comprehensively by Émile Torres and philosopher Timnit Gebru. The core problem: if the present is infinitely less morally important than the future, then present harms — poverty, climate change, inequality — can always be justified by sufficiently large future benefits. The people who tend to find longtermism compelling are also the people whose present circumstances are comfortable enough that deferring present moral action is affordable. Transhumanism and longtermism share the orientation toward a post-human future. Doomerism is the mirror: both take catastrophic future risk seriously, but doomerism accepts it as inevitable while longtermism treats it as the paramount prevention priority. Situated Knowledge — Haraway’s insistence that all knowledge is produced from a position — is the epistemological corrective: whose future is being prioritised?
Why This Matters: Longtermism names a framework that can make almost anything in the present justifiable in terms of future benefit. Once you see the structure — infinite future value discounting present harm to zero — you can identify it wherever it appears, not just in explicit EA discourse.
Related terms: Doomerism · The Singularity · Transhumanism · Fortress Futurism · Situated Knowledge · Mars Colonization · Objectivism (Rand)
Read more:
- The Moral Case for Long-Term Thinking — Greaves, H., MacAskill, W. & Thornley, E. (2021). In The Long View: Essays on Policy, Philanthropy, and the Long-term Future
- The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” — Torres, É. P. (2021). Current Affairs
- Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo — Torres, É. P. (2021). Aeon — expanded critique of existential-risk culture, Effective Altruism, and longtermist philosophy as a politically influential worldview.
- The toxic ideology of longtermism — Crary, A. (2023). Radical Philosophy — critique of longtermism’s fixation on existential risk and its relationship to concentrated wealth and technocratic power
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies — Bostrom, N. (2014). Oxford University Press — foundational work on existential AI risk, superintelligence, and longtermist reasoning.