Essays on longtermism

By David Thorstad @ 2025-09-08T05:16 (+102)

Introduction

We are pleased to announce the publication of Essays on Longtermism, now available from Oxford University Press. This is the first peer-reviewed edited volume on longtermism, containing an introduction and 30 substantive chapters, which are all available open access here. (Please bear with us as we work through a few issues with the ebook).

The book is edited by Hilary Greaves (University of Oxford), Jacob Barrett (Vanderbilt University), and David Thorstad (Vanderbilt University).

Here is the blurb for the volume:

Longtermism, broadly speaking, is the view that positively influencing the long-term future is one of the key moral priorities of our time. Calls for taking a long-term view towards global problems such as climate change and poverty are familiar, typically urging us to plan on a scale of decades or perhaps a century. By contrast, longtermism asks us to take seriously the idea that what we should do right now may depend on the effects of our actions thousands, even millions, of years into the future. Essays on Longtermism brings together leading scholars to discuss four sets of overlapping questions raised by the longtermist approach. First, should we accept some version of longtermism? Second, to what extent can we predict and control the far future? Third, which ethical priorities are recommended by longtermism, and how revisionary are they? Finally, what implications would longtermism have for the design or reform of social, political, and legal institutions? Contributors, who include both supporters and critics of longtermism, are drawn from a range of disciplines including philosophy, economics, psychology, law, political science, and mathematics, and from private industry.

The essays are wide ranging, and each can be read on its own, so we hope that many readers of this forum will find something of interest. In this post, we provide a brief outline of the volume. More substantive summaries of each essay can be found in the introduction.

Part 1: Evaluating the case for longtermism

The essays in Part 1 focus on articulating and evaluating arguments for and against different longtermist theses.

The first essay lays out a classic argument for both axiological longtermism (roughly: an action’s value depends primarily on its long-term effects) and deontic longtermism (roughly: whether we ought to choose an action depends primarily on its long-term effects):

• Chapter 2: Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill, “The Case for Strong Longtermism.”         

The next four essays discuss issues related to axiological longtermism:

• Chapter 3: Katie Steele, “Longtermism and Neutrality about More Lives.”

• Chapter 4: Johan E. Gustafsson and Petra Kosonen, “Prudential Longtermism.”

• Chapter 5: Andreas L. Mogensen, “Would a World Without Us Be Worse? Clues from Population Axiology.”

• Chapter 6: Christian Tarsney and Hayden Wilkinson, “Longtermism in an Infinite World.”

And the final three essays provide critical discussions of deontic longtermism:                                      

• Chapter 7: Emma J. Curran, “Longtermism and the Complaints of Future People.”

• Chapter 8: Charlotte Franziska Unruh, "Against a Moral Duty to Make the Future Go Best.”

• Chapter 9: Stefan Riedener, "Authenticity, Meaning, and Alienation: Reasons to Care Less about Far-Future People.”

Part 2: Predicting and evaluating the future

The essays in Part 2 focus on the challenge of predicting and persistently affecting the far future.

The first two essays directly take up the question of how well we can predict the far future:

• Chapter 10: David Rhys Bernard and Eva Vivalt, “What Are the Prospects of Forecasting the Far Future?”

• Chapter 11: Rachell Powell, “Taking the Long View: Paleobiological Perspectives on Longtermism.”  

The remaining three essays focus on how we might beneficially influence the far future, especially in light of the predictive difficulties of doing so:

• Chapter 12: Philip Kitcher, “Coping with Myopia.”

• Chapter 13: Toby Ord, “Shaping Humanity’s Longterm Trajectory.”

• Chapter 14: Aron Vallinder, “Longtermism and Cultural Evolution”

Part 3: Ethical priorities

The essays in Part 3 focus on which types of interventions are most strongly recommended by the goal of improving the course of the far future, and on how revisionary these priorities are. 

The first two essays focus on the mitigation of existential risks, the usual central focus of contemporary concern for the far future: 

• Chapter 15: Olle Häggström, “The Hinge of History and the Choice between Patient and Urgent Longtermism.”

• Chapter 16: Carl Shulman and Elliott Thornley, “How Much Should Governments Pay to Prevent Catastrophes? Longtermism’s Limited Role.”

The next three essays focus on how revisionary the practical implications of longtermism are: 

• Chapter 17: Amanda Askell and Sven Neth, “Longtermist Myopia.”

• Chapter 18: Hilary Greaves and Christian Tarsney, “Minimal and Expansive Longtermism.”

• Chapter 19: Owen Cotton-Barratt and Rose Hadshar, “What Would a Longtermist Society Look Like?”

The next two essays take up questions about the course of the long-run future, and our prospects of influencing it, through the lenses of (respectively) economic and demographic models of population.

• Chapter 20: Gustav Alexandrie and Maya Eden, “Is Extinction Risk Mitigation Uniquely Cost-Effective? Not in Standard Population Models.”

• Chapter 21: Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, "Depopulation and Longtermism.”

The next three essays concern the relevance of emerging technologies to the course of the long run future, focusing in particular on existential risks from advanced AI and on life-extending technologies:

•  Chapter 22: Joe Carlsmith, "Existential Risk from Power-Seeking AI."

•  Chapter 23: Richard Ngo and Adam Bales, "Deceit and Power: Machine Learning and Misalignment." 

• Chapter 24: Kevin Kuruc and David Manley, "The Ethics, Economics, and Demographics of Delaying Senescence."

And the final essay focuses on the role that non-human animals should play in longtermist thought:

• Chapter 25: Heather Browning and Walter Veit, “Longtermism and Animals.”

Part 4: Institutions and society

The essays in Part 4 concern the relationship between society today and the far future. 

The first three essays take up questions about the design and reform of political institutions and policies:

• Chapter 26: Andreas T. Schmidt and Jacob Barrett, “Longtermist Political Philosophy: An Agenda for Future Research.”

• Chapter 27: Tyler M. John, “Retrospective Accountability: A Mechanism for Representing Future Generations.”

• Chapter 28: H. Orri Stefánsson, “Longtermism and Social Risk-Taking.”

The next focuses on how the discipline of economics might be reformed to better accommodate a concern with the long-term future: 

• Chapter 29: Ilan Noy and Shakked Noy, "The Short-Termism of ‘Hard’ Economics."

And the final two essays present and discuss empirical results concerning existing attitudes about the long-run future:

• Chapter 30: Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter, “The Intuitive Appeal of Legal Protection for Future Generations.”

• Chapter 31: Stefan Schubert, Lucius Caviola, Julian Savulescu, and Nadira S. Faber, “Temporal Distance Reduces Ingroup Favoritism.”