This essay is written in the spirit of promoting the human values that define Effective Altruism (compassion, humility, integrity, openness, and collaborative spirit). The Essays on Longtermism competition provides an ideal space to reflect on how our philosophical frameworks can remain grounded in the virtues that first inspired people to "do good better." By emphasizing EA’s moral foundations, this piece aims to contribute to a more humane, inclusive, and human values driven conversation about safeguarding the future.
Introduction
The collection "Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future" presents some of the most sophisticated arguments yet for prioritizing humanity’s long-term future. Across its chapters, philosophers, economists, and decision theorists confront one of the most important ethical questions of our age: how should we act today, knowing that our choices may shape lives and civilizations far beyond our lifetimes? Yet amid this intellectual precision, one striking absence emerges - a sustained engagement with the human values that must ultimately motivate and constrain longtermist action. The analytic clarity is there, but the moral imagination feels faint.
While the contributors rigorously defend longtermism’s theoretical foundations, few ask the deeper question: why should we care about future people in ways that connect to our lived moral experience? Human values such as compassion, humility, solidarity, and respect for human dignity that animate Effective Altruism at its best receive little attention. Without such grounding, longtermism risks drifting into an abstract numbers game: ethically ambitious, but emotionally weightless; visionary, yet disconnected from the human intuitions that make moral action possible.
This essay argues that longtermism’s moral force depends on making those values explicit. Without them, longtermism risks becoming an abstract numbers game, detached from the emotional and ethical intuitions that make morality compelling. The essay explores how three core longtermist claims about scale, tractability, and neglectedness, require value-based justification that the collection largely overlooks. It shows how centering EA’s human values of compassion, integrity, humility, and collaborative spirit can strengthen longtermism’s persuasive and practical power while protecting it from its potential excesses.
The Value Gap in Longtermist Arguments
Scale Without Compassion
"The Case for Strong Longtermism" epitomizes the collection's analytical approach mainly with the arguments: humanity's future could contain an enormous number of people; we can influence that future by reducing existential risks; and the impact of our actions on this vast future can be a primary moral concern. The essays are rigorous and the logic sound. The gap would be a compelling explanation of why we should care about these future people beyond the numbers. Future individuals appear primarily as quantities in calculations rather than as real people who will experience joy, suffering, love, and meaning. They are actually conscious beings whose lives matter inherently, not just numerically.
Longtermism's persuasive power depends on more than valid arguments. It needs to connect with our fundamental human values: our capacity for compassion, our instinct to care for those who come after us, our recognition that every life has inherent dignity. The mathematics shows the scale of what's at stake, but values explain why it matters - not because the numbers are large, but because we genuinely care about the wellbeing of real people, of our next generations, whether they live today or millennia from now.
One of the strongest examples is Peter Singer's classic arguments for helping those in extreme poverty. Singer didn't just count lives; he invoked the vivid image of a drowning child to awaken moral feelings. The power lay not in the math but in compassion made concrete. The early effective altruism movement succeeded for the same reason. It united rigorous analysis with genuine empathy, channeling our natural concern for others into more effective action.
In contrast, longtermist arguments often proceed through abstract quantitative reasoning that can feel emotionally distant. The careful analysis demonstrates that even with significant temporal discounting, the sheer scale of potential future populations means that long-term effects can dominate our moral calculations. While the logic is rigorous and the conclusions sound, this framing risks making longtermism appear as primarily a mathematical exercise rather than a natural extension of human empathy across time. The argument succeeds on its own terms, but it could be strengthened by also appealing to our intuitive care for our descendants, and our sense of connection to those who will inherit the world we shape.
A values-centered longtermism would reframe the argument: We should care about the far future because each future person will be a conscious being capable of joy, love, suffering, and meaning like us. Their life matters just as much as ours, through our labor, effort, and care, we can give them a better world than we inherited, so they can be even better than us. Our commitment to their wellbeing sets a powerful challenge: to demonstrate that each generation has an obligation to those who follow because they are our kin, our family, a part of our humanity. Our generation's care for the future can inspire future generations to extend the same care forward, creating a chain of moral responsibility across time. The numbers remain vast, but their significance becomes humane: each digit represents a unique life with intrinsic worth connected to our own. This shift doesn’t weaken the logic of longtermism. It instead makes that logic resonate to our humanity, to the next generation, and even to future generations.
Tractability Without Humility
A second theme across the Essays is tractability, the question of how much influence present actions can have on the far future. "What Are the Prospects of Forecasting the Far Future?" examines our ability to predict long-term outcomes, revealing limitations, and the importance of epistemic humility. Other chapters grapple with decision-making under radical uncertainty about future consequences. Yet these discussions, while technically sophisticated, underemphasize the deeper virtue of humility that should shape our response to such uncertainty. It is not just as a matter of calculating appropriate confidence intervals, but as a fundamental moral stance toward our limited wisdom and our responsibilities to those who will live with the consequences of our choices.
Effective Altruism itself has learned humility the hard way. Early emphasis on “earning to give” evolved as the community recognized the unpredictability of global impact and personal fit. The FTX collapse, more recently, exposed how moral overconfidence and instrumental reasoning can corrode integrity when unchecked by ethical reflection. This lesson applies even more forcefully to longtermism. When Ord discusses existential risk, he frames caution as a matter of expected value under uncertainty. But humility is not just epistemic prudence; it is moral wisdom. It reminds us that our values are provisional, our foresight limited, and our power potentially dangerous.
Consider the example of genetic enhancement technologies. A purely consequentialist longtermist calculus might favor aggressive intervention to improve future humanity, reasoning that enhanced cognitive abilities could help solve more problems and thus benefit the astronomical number of future people. Yet value-grounded humility counsels restraint on multiple grounds: we cannot know what capabilities future societies will prize, we risk imposing our standards on descendants who may have different values, and we should hesitate to irreversibly alter human nature based on our limited understanding.
"Longtermist Political Philosophy: An Agenda for Future Research" addresses related concerns about present generations' power over the future. They explore how longtermist institutions must balance promoting long-term value with respecting the autonomy and agency of future generations. The analysis examines how political values like democracy, freedom, and legitimacy might constrain or complement longtermist priorities. However, the discussion frames these constraints primarily in political and institutional terms rather than as flowing from fundamental moral values about respect for persons and epistemic humility. A values-centered longtermism would go deeper: restraint in shaping the future expresses not merely political prudence or democratic procedure, but essential moral wisdom about the limits of our knowledge, the particularity of our current values, and our obligations to respect future generations' autonomy to define their own flourishing. This is not just about avoiding illegitimate institutional power, it's about the humility that should characterize our entire relationship with those who will inherit our choices.
Neglectedness Without Solidarity
Longtermists often argue that future generations are neglected because they lack political representation. That is true, but it misses the heart of the problem. The deeper failure is not institutional but relational: a waning sense of solidarity with those who will come after us. We have built mechanisms of power and policy that can speak for the absent, yet we have not cultivated the moral imagination to feel their presence.
Effective Altruism’s most transformative insight was that distance of geography, species, or time should not dilute compassion. Yet the power of that insight has never rested on logic alone. It has always drawn strength from empathy and imagination, from the human capacity to picture a stranger’s suffering as one’s own. Peter Singer’s drowning child compels not through reasoned calculus but through visceral recognition: the child could be mine. Climate activists appeal to this same moral reflex when they speak of protecting “our children and grandchildren,” not anonymous “future persons.” They invite us to feel kinship with the unseen.
Longtermism, however, stretches that moral kinship to its breaking point. The people of the year 4000 cannot be imagined in the same way a drowning child or a future grandchild can. They will inhabit different worlds, languages, even values. To ask for solidarity across millennia is to ask for a faith in humanity so profound it borders on the spiritual. The Essays offer reasons why we should extend our moral circle so far, but little guidance on how to inhabit that vast circle meaningfully. There is scant attention to the psychological and cultural work required to make distant lives feel real, to make the far future part of our shared moral community rather than a cold abstraction.
Effective Altruism learned early that conviction alone cannot sustain moral commitment. It built practical structures like earning to give, career pledges, communities of reflection that transform ideals into habits. These institutions give form to compassion. Longtermism, if it is to endure, will need its own equivalents: rituals that remind us of the passage of generations, stories that bridge centuries, and collective projects that make care for the future tangible in the present. It will require forms of art, education, and culture that train our imaginations to dwell in deep time, not just to reason about it. Without such living practices of solidarity, longtermism risks remaining a philosophy of the privileged. The danger is not apathy but abstraction: that we speak endlessly of “future persons” without ever learning to love them. To truly care for the unborn, we must recover what the language of rational optimization cannot capture - the warmth of belonging to a story that began before us and will continue long after. Only then can longtermism cease to be a moral theory and become what it aspires to be: a human calling.
The Dangers of Value-Deficient Longtermism
The absence of explicit moral grounding exposes longtermism to three critical risks: fanaticism, abstraction, and elitism. Each arises when reason outpaces reflection, when moral vision is not anchored in human values.
Fanaticism
When moral reasoning is dominated by expected-value calculations, almost any present harm can appear justified. If preventing a 0.01% chance of extinction outweighs all other considerations, then the moral boundaries that protect us from cruelty and arrogance begin to dissolve. What starts as prudence can end as zealotry. History offers sobering lessons: utopian movements, certain of their righteousness, have often inflicted suffering “for the greater good.” Effective Altruism’s value of integrity stands as a vital safeguard against this drift. Integrity insists that how we pursue moral goals matters as much as whether we achieve them. It is a reminder that moral progress cannot be measured only by outcomes, but by the dignity preserved along the way.
Abstraction
When people become data points in vast moral equations, their individuality is lost. The danger is subtle: in trying to care for everyone, we may cease to truly see anyone. Each future person will have a name, a voice, a life filled with hope and grief and love. Longtermism must honor that uniqueness rather than aggregate it away. The EA value of collaborative spirit points toward this richer vision. Moral concern is not an optimization problem but a relationship - a shared act of stewardship across generations. We are not managers of humanity’s future but participants in its unfolding story. To preserve that sense of co-authorship is to keep compassion human-sized, even when our moral horizons expand to infinity.
Elitism
When longtermism leans too heavily on technical reasoning and formal models, it risks becoming a language spoken only by the educated few. Yet the desire to protect the future is not the property of philosophers or economists - it is woven into the human condition. Parents feel it when they plant a tree their grandchildren will enjoy; communities express it when they build institutions meant to last beyond them. The moral impulse to leave the world better than we found it is ancient, instinctive, and shared. Making longtermism accessible through common human values is not an act of simplification - it is an act of restoration. It returns the idea to where it belongs: the moral imagination of ordinary people.
Longtermism will flourish only if it remains both visionary and humane. It should be rooted not only in probability and policy, but also in empathy, humility, and solidarity. Without those moral anchors, even the noblest aspirations for the future can drift into distortion. But grounded in them, longtermism can become what it was meant to be: not a cold calculus of eternity, but a living testament to care that transcends time.
Centering Effective Altruism Values in Longtermism
If longtermism is to inspire lasting change, it must be rooted once more in the values that gave Effective Altruism its moral vitality. The five core EA values of commitment to others, scientific mindset, openness, integrity, and collaborative spirit provide a ready-made moral compass for longtermism, ensuring that care for the far future remains anchored in the best of our present humanity.
Commitment to Others
Moral concern begins not with equations, but with empathy. To extend our circle of care is not merely to calculate future lives, but to feel their worth. This value invites us to begin from love. The same love a parent feels for a child, extended outward and forward, generation by generation, until it embraces all who will live after us. True longtermism is not abstract altruism; it is an act of kinship across time.
Scientific Mindset
Science, rightly understood, is not the arrogance of mastery but the humility of discovery. A value-centered longtermism must embody that same humility before uncertainty. It should favor interventions that are robust across many futures, acknowledging how little we truly know about the centuries ahead. To act scientifically is not only to measure, but to remain teachable. To let reality, not ideology, have the final word.
Openness
Intellectual transparency is the lifeblood of trust. Longtermism should welcome dissent, curiosity, and revision, treating itself not as a creed to be defended but as a hypothesis to be tested. Only through open dialogue can it remain alive to moral growth and correction. A future worth building is one that no single mind or ideology can monopolize.
Integrity
Even noble ends cannot sanctify every means. Integrity reminds us that the path toward a better future must itself be good. It is the quiet conscience that guards against the seductions of moral exceptionalism: the belief that our cause excuses our conduct. In a field tempted by grand stakes, vast resources and long timelines, integrity keeps our feet on human ground.
Collaborative Spirit
The future is not a possession to be managed but a commons to be tended. Longtermism should unite rather than isolate. It should build coalitions across disciplines, faiths, and cultures. Stewardship is inherently collaborative; it calls for dialogue between generations, between science and story, between reason and reverence. Only together can we sustain a future that belongs to all.
Reconnecting longtermism to these five values would give it both moral clarity and human warmth. It would transform a philosophy about distant centuries into a living ethic of care. One that begins here and now, among the people and communities already striving to leave the world better than they found it.
Toward a Values-Centered Longtermism
The task is not only to refine our reasoning but to reawaken our moral imagination, to build a movement that speaks both to the mind and to the heart. A values-centered longtermism would be lived as much as it is theorized, embodied in stories, rituals, and institutions that keep the future alive in the present.
Narrative and Imagination
To care for the distant future, we must first be able to see it. Numbers and models can describe what is at stake, but only stories can make it felt. Science fiction and myth have long accomplished what philosophy alone cannot: they transform abstract possibility into emotional reality. Longtermists could nurture art, education, and media that make the far future vivid and personal. To tell stories of the future that let us walk its landscapes, hear its languages, and glimpse the hopes of those yet unborn. Imagination, after all, is the bridge between knowledge and compassion.
Practices of Solidarity
Empathy needs ritual to endure. Just as Effective Altruism translated concern into concrete acts of pledges, donations, and communities of reflection, longtermism must cultivate its own practices of solidarity. This contest is a great start, and this could also include ceremonies of commitment to future generations, collective service projects that restore ecosystems or preserve knowledge, or annual gatherings where people renew their moral vows to the centuries ahead. Such practices would give shape to care, turning abstract concern into shared moral rhythm.
Ethical Guardrails
Moral ambition without boundaries invites error. Longtermist organizations should adopt clear ethical standards that define unacceptable tradeoffs, ensure transparency, and create structures for accountability. These guardrails are not constraints on moral vision but expressions of moral integrity. It should protect the purity of intention from the corruptions of power and self-deception. In the long run, accountability is not a bureaucratic duty but a spiritual one: a recognition that no vision of the future is beyond moral scrutiny.
Inclusive Participation
A truly global concern for the future cannot grow from a single cultural root. Longtermism must listen outward to indigenous traditions of stewardship, to religious teachings about intergenerational responsibility, to the universal language of human rights. Each offers a distinct grammar of care. When longtermism draws from these diverse moral lineages, it ceases to be a technocratic project and becomes something richer: a human movement, grounded in the shared intuition that the future is sacred because life itself is continuous.
Humility in Practice
Finally, a values-centered longtermism must cultivate humility. Not as timidity, but as wisdom in the face of vast uncertainty. To act humbly is to preserve option value for future generations, to favor learning over dogma, and to revise our beliefs as evidence evolves. Moral progress, like scientific progress, is iterative, not final. The future will not be shaped by those who claim to know it, but by those willing to learn from it.
A longtermism guided by these values would not seek merely to predict the future but to honor it. It would transform the ethics of distant generations into a daily practice of care, rooted in solidarity, sustained by humility, and enlivened by imagination. Only then can our concern for tomorrow become an act of love that begins today.
Conclusion: Doing Good Better Across Time
Essays on Longtermism is a remarkable achievement. It is rigorous in reasoning, far-reaching in vision, and sincere in its hope for humanity. Yet philosophy alone cannot move hearts or sustain action. For that, we need human values.
The power of Effective Altruism lay in its fusion of moral feeling with analytic clarity. It turned compassion into precision, and then through lived commitment, transformed precision back into compassion. Longtermism now faces the same task: to ensure that its concern for the vastness of time remains anchored in the intimacy of care. The moral weight of the future will not be carried by logic alone, but by love disciplined through wisdom.
Future generations will not thank us for our models or probabilities. They will thank us for our integrity when it was costly, our restraint when ambition tempted excess, our imagination when despair seemed easier, and our love when indifference was fashionable. To "do good better" across millennia is to remember that reason without empathy is empty. The most enduring legacy we can leave is not control over the future, but compassion that endures through it.
Longtermism’s missing heart is not a new theory but an ancient truth: that human values give reason its purpose, and hope its direction. If we can restore that heart, then our care for tomorrow will no longer be an abstraction. It will be an act of faith in humanity's ongoing story.
Note
In keeping with this essay's central argument that longtermism must be grounded in accessible human values, this essay simplified some of the more technical philosophical arguments from the Essays on Longtermism collection. The Effective Altruism movement succeeds when it combines rigorous thinking with inclusive participation. If longtermism is to become more than an academic exercise, we need conversations that welcome diverse voices and perspectives. This essay is simplified with the hope that anyone who cares about the future would participate in the discussions, especially those who believe in the impact of our human values.