What is long-termism?

ON NOVEMBER 6TH Sam Bankman-Fried was king of crypto, worth $16bn. His fortune vanished a week later when FTX, the crypto exchange he headed, went bankrupt. FTX’s collapse has destabilised not just the crypto-sphere but also effective altruism (EA), the young and growing social movement to which Mr Bankman-Fried belongs. Effective altruists claim to use evidence and reason to maximise the good they do for others, no matter where the beneficiaries live or when they are born. Effective altruists give the bulk of their money to global health and development (think malaria nets), to animal welfare (many are vegans) and, more recently, to “long-termism”. What is it?

Long-termism is a moral view that puts great importance on the lives of future people. For long-termists like Will MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University who provided EA with many of its founding ideas and helped turn it into a movement, “distance in time is like distance in space”. If people living thousands of miles away matter, so do those living thousands of years away, argues Mr MacAskill in his book “What We Owe The Future”. Long-termists advocate causes ranging from boosting economic growth to minimising the risk to humanity posed by rogue artificial intelligence. “Strong long-termism” posits that future people are just as important as those living today. People who take that view judge actions mainly on the basis of their impact in the years ahead. Mr MacAskill notes that if humanity lasts as long as the typical species of mammal (around 1m years), and our population size stays constant, future people would outnumber us by 10,000 to one.