Horizon & Ecology #164
Longtermism
original term: longtermism (Eng.) · długoterminizm, silny longtermizm
Global-circulation concept — no documented lineage in Central Europe. jump to documentation ↓
Working Definition
Longtermism is the ethical stance holding that the impact of our decisions on the far future is one of the most important—and in its “strong” version, the single most important—determinants of the value of our actions today. It rests on three premises: future people matter morally just as much as people alive now, there may be vastly more of them than of us, and certain actions we take today (above all reducing existential risk and preventing the permanent “lock-in” of bad values) can predictably alter their fate. In loose everyday usage, the term means little more than caring seriously about future generations; in its technical philosophical usage, it is a priority thesis that weighs millions of lives today against trillions tomorrow inside a single expected-value calculation. Public and academic controversy concerns almost exclusively this second, stronger version.
A seat for future generations is placed at today's decision table, treating their interests as morally weighty even though they cannot speak for themselves now.
AI-assisted illustration · conceptual metaphor View in visual quiz →Genesis and Global Lineage
Derek Parfit laid the conceptual foundation in Part Four of Reasons and Persons (1984), introducing modern population ethics, the “Repugnant Conclusion,” and the famous comparison arguing that the moral gulf between a nuclear war killing 99% of humanity and one killing 100% is far greater than the gulf between peace and the 99% catastrophe. In “Astronomical Waste” (2003), Nick Bostrom translated that intuition into an opportunity-cost calculation: every century of delayed cosmic expansion forfeits an astronomical number of potential flourishing lives, making existential-risk reduction the overriding moral maxim. The word longtermism itself was coined in the Oxford effective-altruism milieu in the late 2010s and received its canonical statement in three texts: Toby Ord’s The Precipice (2020), Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill’s working paper “The Case for Strong Longtermism” (Global Priorities Institute, 2021), and MacAskill’s trade book What We Owe the Future (2022). The lineage thus runs from classical utilitarianism through Oxford analytic philosophy into a philanthropic movement equipped with its own foundations and research institutes; in its latest phase, the concept has been captured both by debates over frontier artificial intelligence and by media commentary equating it with Silicon Valley ideology.
Central European Lineage
We found no documented link between this concept and the intellectual history or historical experience of Central Europe.
We found no documented link between this concept and the intellectual history or historical experience of Central Europe (by our methodology, this means “none found,” not “none exists”; as of October 2026).
Why Now
Three sequences of events between 2020 and 2024 carried longtermism from philosophy seminars into high politics. First, the COVID-19 pandemic lent credibility to Ord’s warnings about global biological risks and gave longtermists a vocabulary soon adopted by international civil servants: in 2021 the UN Secretary-General’s report Our Common Agenda proposed a Special Envoy for Future Generations, and in September 2024 the UN Summit of the Future adopted the Declaration on Future Generations. Second, MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future appeared in August 2022, only to be followed three months later by the November 2022 bankruptcy of Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX—one of the largest financial backers of longtermist philanthropy—turning an abstract debate about moral philosophy into a public reckoning over money, governance, and accountability. Third, the explosion of large language models from November 2022 onward and the March 2023 open letter calling for a pause in frontier AI training pushed longtermist arguments about existential risk onto front pages and into legislative hearings. In parallel, sharp critiques crystallized: Émile P. Torres’s essays from 2021 onward, the 2023–2024 “TESCREAL” indictment, and within analytic philosophy David Thorstad’s papers challenging the mathematical assumptions behind “astronomical value.”
Explanatory Power
Longtermism brings into focus an asymmetry that standard short-horizon cost-benefit analysis erases: the difference between a disaster from which civilization rebuilds and an irreversible curtailment after which no one is left to repair anything. Three practical applications follow. In biosecurity policy, it explains why it is rational to fund pathogen early-warning and metagenomic sequencing infrastructure whose probability of decisive use in any single legislative term is low. In AI governance, it explains why researchers treat “value lock-in”—the permanent entrenchment of a single firm’s or regime’s norms inside self-perpetuating automated systems—as a threat comparable in gravity to physical extinction. And in climate economics, it clarifies why a positive rate of “pure time preference,” routinely built into integrated assessment models, is a substantive moral choice rather than a neutral technical parameter: discounting future welfare at 3% per year implies that someone living five hundred years from now counts for virtually nothing in today’s ledger.
Axes of Debate
Fanaticism of expected-value calculus
Decision theorists and several of the framework’s own authors (Greaves and MacAskill explicitly flag this as the most vulnerable premise of their argument) ask whether a theory that requires sacrificing certain present benefits for a tiny probability of an astronomical future payoff is merely a secularized version of Pascal’s Wager. Strongest counterargument: Longtermists reply that their core probabilities are far from microscopic: Ord estimates the risk of existential catastrophe this century at roughly one in six, and at probabilities of that magnitude no decision-theoretic fanaticism is needed to treat survival as an urgent priority. Critics like Thorstad counter that persistently high per-century risk actually slashes the expected duration—and thus the astronomical value—of the future. Nature of the dispute: substantive — it turns on formal decision theory and cumulative risk modeling, with both sides publishing in the same philosophical journals.
Epistemic cluelessness
Critics in philosophy and the social sciences argue that we possess no reliable method for predicting how specific interventions today will ripple across thousands of years, making long-horizon expected-value estimates a fiction of precision that in practice rubber-stamps whatever projects a given donor circle already favored. Strongest counterargument: Proponents point to a restricted class of actions whose sign of impact remains clear even when exact magnitudes are unknown: avoiding human extinction, preventing permanent totalitarian lock-in, and not handing irreversible control to opaque automated systems. Ignorance of distant details does not invalidate negative guardrails. Nature of the dispute: mixed — the epistemological objection about deep uncertainty is substantive, while part of the debate projects grievances against specific philanthropic foundations onto the philosophical thesis itself.
Whose future and at whose expense
Critics on the political left, in global ethics, and in critical technology studies (Torres, Timnit Gebru, and others) view longtermism as an ideology of the privileged that diverts attention and philanthropic billions away from global poverty, hunger, and near-term climate damages toward speculative AI scenarios, and in its extreme variants could license surveillance or coercion in the name of unborn trillions. Strongest counterargument: Most concrete longtermist policy priorities—pandemic preparedness, nuclear non-proliferation, clean energy, resilient institutions—directly benefit people alive today, and mainstream longtermist philosophers explicitly reject violating deontological rights for expected utility. The critique often targets a caricature or the conduct of particular donors rather than the ethical thesis. Nature of the dispute: rhetorical — although the allocation of philanthropic funds is a real material stake, much of the public exchange consists of mutual attribution of malign motives.
Underappreciated Angle
The most intellectually fertile part of longtermism is not extinction, but permanence: the argument about “value lock-in” observes that future technologies of surveillance, longevity, or artificial agency could for the first time in history arrest moral change itself by giving a single generation or ruling group an irreversible monopoly on power. That shifts the core question from “how do we survive?” to “how do we preserve humanity’s capacity to correct its own moral mistakes?” Framed as an anti-lock-in principle, longtermism stands much closer to Hans Jonas’s 1979 ethics of responsibility—which counseled giving priority to the bad prognosis over the good whenever irreversibility looms—than to utilitarian schemes for maximizing cosmic population, and paradoxically counsels caution toward the very technologies some longtermists wish to accelerate. Much of the controversy around longtermism is therefore a dispute inside a single word: between maximizing a speculative ideal and keeping the future open.
One-Sentence Takeaway
Longtermism does not ask us to love future people more than present ones; it asks us to notice that there may be so many of them in the moral ledger that any theory refusing to discount them to zero starts to look like longtermism.
Related Concepts Network
How this concept reinforces, constrains, or complements other analytical frameworks in the corpus. View on graph →
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Existential risk reinforces
Longtermism supplies the axiological justification for why existential risk reduction should be a top priority: what is at stake is not only the current population, but all future value.
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Effective altruism reinforces
Longtermism grew out of the effective altruism movement as an answer to the question of where a marginal unit of resources yields the greatest expected good.
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Critique of effective altruism in tension
Objections against expected-value calculus, fanaticism, and philanthropic unaccountability hit longtermism even harder than EA's original global-health programs.
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AI alignment complements
For longtermists, unaligned artificial intelligence is the primary source of risk of losing the future, and alignment research is the primary practical investment.
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Anthropocene complements
Both frameworks extend the horizon of responsibility to geological scales, but the Anthropocene looks backward at cumulative impacts while longtermism looks forward to expected value.
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Degrowth in tension
Longtermism typically treats technological and economic growth as a precondition for realizing humanity's future potential, whereas degrowth sees growth itself as the primary threat.
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Technological solutionism in tension
Critics read longtermism as solutionism scaled up to millions of years: present problems are to be solved by future technologies, whose risks are to be mitigated by still more technology.
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Moloch and coordination failure complements
Value lock-in and AI arms races are treated in longtermism as coordination traps that could permanently determine the shape of the far future.
Reading Canon & Translation Bridge
Foundational texts, introductions, and critical perspectives—with availability of English and Polish editions.
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foundational text 2022 · English
William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future
The most widely read exposition of the view: the argument from the sheer number of future people, the risk of permanent value lock-in, and population ethics explained for general readers.
In English: original text written in English
In Polish: Polish edition not verified
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introduction & synthesis 2020 · English
Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
A systematic survey of existential risks with explicit probability estimates and the thesis that humanity is passing across a “precipice” where technical power outstrips wisdom.
In English: original text written in English
In Polish: Polish edition not verified
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foundational text 2021 · English
Hilary Greaves, William MacAskill, The Case for Strong Longtermism
The most rigorous formulation of the axiological and deontic thesis (Global Priorities Institute, Working Paper 5–2021), explicitly identifying its two weakest points: epistemic cluelessness and fanaticism.
In English: original text written in English
In Polish: no Polish edition
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foundational text 2003 · English
Nick Bostrom, Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development
A brief article in “Utilitas” (vol. 15, no. 3) extending opportunity-cost reasoning to cosmic scales and deriving the maxim of minimizing existential risk.
In English: original text written in English
In Polish: Polish edition not verified
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cross-disciplinary 1984 · English
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons
Part Four on population ethics, the “Repugnant Conclusion,” and the comparison between extinction and a war killing 99% of humanity form the conceptual foundation to which longtermists most frequently return.
In English: original text written in English
In Polish: Polish edition not verified
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critical perspective 2023 · English
David Thorstad, High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation
A critique from within analytic philosophy: if per-century existential risk remains persistently high, the expected value of mitigating it is orders of magnitude smaller than longtermists assume.
In English: original text written in English
In Polish: no Polish edition
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critical perspective 2024 · English
Émile P. Torres, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation
A history of the idea of human extinction written by a former insider who became its loudest critic, tracing the genealogy of “astronomical value.”
In English: original text written in English
In Polish: Polish edition not verified
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cross-disciplinary 1979 · German
Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung. Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation
An earlier Continental ethics of responsibility toward future generations grounded in the heuristics of fear and the primacy of the bad prognosis rather than expected-value maximization—a natural counterpoint.
In English: English edition not verified
In Polish: Polish edition not verified
Primary-Source Quotes
Let axiological (resp. deontic) strong longtermism be the thesis that far-future effects are the most important determinant of the value of our options (resp. of what we ought to do).