To counter our human tendency to focus on the “short term”, the philosophy of Longtermism was developed, which aims to evaluate present choices in terms of their long term consequences.
Often this ends up postulating a far distant future, where trillions of humans thrive for billions of years across the galaxy. To reach such a future, they argue, we should accept costs in the present that seem unintuitively large. The most urgent practical example of this is Elon Musk’s project to colonize the galaxy, to which end he is building the Starship program.
As I have noted previously, if we take Musk’s projections for the Starship seriously, it will use create more CO2 emissions than the rest of human activity put together. Musk is a Longtermist, and this is a logical outcome of Longtermist thinking—it is entirely rational to destroy the earth and everyone on it if it ensures a future of flourishing on a billion worlds.
Obviously this view is problematic on any number of fronts, not least because present destruction is certain and future galactic empires uncertain (or in my view, impossible—the speed of light isn’t a recommendation).
One of the underlying issues is how Longtermism reduces morality to a rationalistic calculation. This is a problem with academic moral philosophy generally, but good philosophers are aware of it and have a more balanced approach. Longtermism grew out of the Utilitarianism of Peter Singer, but he rejects it.
In the real world, morality is a complex and undefinable thing that stems from any number of mutually incompatible sources—divine revelation, personal experience, emotional disgust, self interest—and which is negotiated as a society as much as by individuals. Our culturally inherited sense of morality is notoriously irrational. Why is it unacceptable to kill a dog in the street, yet we kill pigs by the billions in factory farms?
Yet for all its folly, culturally inherited morality has a wisdom that cannot be replaced. It is shaped by many hands and informed by many lives. The fallacy of conservatives is to imagine that everything in the past was good and they they know what the past was, and our moral virtue is guarded by keeping everything the same as our imagined forbears. The fallacy of progressives is that, like teenagers discovering sex, we imagine we are the first people to ever deal with these issues, and we create clean-slate solutions for things that have been part of human culture for thousands of years.
The past is neither perfect nor knowable nor irredeemable. Rather, the past was a journey that led us to the present, and at any time in the past, things were complex, conflicting, and changing. The present is our participation in the journey from the past to the future.
One of the essential aspects of any morality is to lift our eyes from our immediate self-concern. We are not the be-all and end-all. Becoming a good person means extending the range of our moral concern, realizing that others around us, and those in the future, deserve to be taken seriously.
Yet the further away from our immediate person our attention shifts, the less we understand, and the less capable we are of acting in a genuinely useful way. I read an article on this, sorry I can’t recall it, where a young aid worker from the US, fresh out of college, gone to Indonesia to help people, landed in a community of expat aid workers. He was rather shocked at the level of cynicism and disappointment that he saw, and he realized that all these people are simply further down the same path he has taken. Aid is hard, because we don’t really understand other people very well, and the more distant they are the less our assumptions will work.
The problem remains: we are too focused on the short term. Hence my proposal. Rather than taking the vast leap from worrying about what I’ll have for lunch to worrying about what humanity will look like in a billion years, we expand our moral horizon in a more modest way: Midtermism.
Midtermism is what is practiced in the more reasonable and practical sectors of our culture. The IPCC, for example, considers the impacts of climate change typically until the end of the century—which is drawing closer by the day. We extend from what we can see; we extrapolate that within the medium term of actual human lifespan; we can test results over that period by comparing with historical data; and we can make policy changes whose effects can be demonstrated.
In an individual life, Midtermism is also what characterizes a wise life. We know that if we live our lives only for the present, indulging in pleasures and whatever we make of the moment, it’s likely to burn out pretty quickly. On the other hand, if we obsess too much about our future, or the future in general, we can easily get stuck in a way of living our life according to a template based in a young person’s idea of old age. We can sidestep these problems by focusing on the medium term. We act now because it is good now and for others, and because it creates the next good thing, and the one after that.
Midtermism mitigates the Longtermist extreme faith in rationality, suggesting we have more faith in humanity. The future is not created by some people sitting in an office and thinking about what the future should be. It is created by people making choices about how they want to live their lives. This is not to say that they will always make good choices. Far from it. It is rather to say that if we take the time to consider the consequences of our current choices, and see how that plays out in those around us, and in the course of our own life, we will be better placed to make healthy and productive choices for the future.
And, given the messy and organic way that the world evolves, it seems to me more probable that a healthy forward movement from where we are is more likely to grow a healthy future in the long term, as well.
