Richard Fisher outlines a more pluralist version of longtermism that he calls "long-mindedness," drawing upon a variety of examples from history and the modern day.
Any moral framework/principle taken to the extreme leads to crazy town, but unfortunately many articles I've read on longtermism in the media focus on this potential. It's nice to read an article that takes the opposite approach for once, talking about ways that longtermism can have broad appeal.
This is probably my favourite part:
And later, in 1992, the vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk framed our cross-generational obligations with a simple question: “Are we being good ancestors?”
A couple of years ago, the writer and researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner — who co-wrote parts of William MacAskill’s longtermist book What We Owe The Future — proposed that longtermism could do more to embrace this approach. “Most of all, I hope that more will take seriously the long arc of time,” he wrote. “Our civilization is an intergenerational enterprise.”
I generally find Richard's writing moving and this article did not disappoint. I'm looking forward to the publication of his book The Long View tomorrow.
