Longtermism, as a growing strand within Effective Altruism (EA), has rightfully expanded our ethical horizon by emphasizing the moral importance of positively affecting the far future. The recent Essays on Longtermism volume, edited by Greaves, Barrett, and Thorstad, thoroughly explores this stance, posing challenging questions about our priorities over millennia rather than merely decades or centuries. Yet, as one reflects on the widespread appeal and critique of longtermism, important tensions emerge—especially around how human societies measure progress, happiness, and success, and how this shapes the adoption of EA and longtermist ideals themselves.
Longtermism’s rise to prominence owes much to Effective Altruism’s foundational ethos: doing the most good we can, wherever and whenever it matters. By extending moral concern into deep time, longtermism challenges present-focused myopia, inviting us to weigh actions by their colossal downstream impact. This idea resonates amid existential threats and the potential for trillions of future lives, yet it also demands grappling with profound uncertainty and probabilistic diminishment of effect over time—a key philosophical concern David Thorstad highlights in his exploration of longtermism’s scope. This intellectual rigor has helped longtermism grow from a niche idea into a major movement within EA.
However, this growth is not without complications. The way modern societies measure progress—through metrics like GDP or productivity—often fails to capture human well-being or happiness. The United States exemplifies this paradox: despite leading global economic output, it ranks only thirteenth in happiness indices. Japan’s postwar transformation into an economic powerhouse also brought with it a culture of workaholism and social loneliness, indicating that success measured by productivity alone can be maladaptive to human flourishing. These observations expose a critical blind spot: longtermism tends to focus on the scale and duration of impact, but it can be “myopic” to the quality of life and cultural well-being in the present.
The implications for Effective Altruism as a movement are significant. If longtermism creates psychological or philosophical barriers to widespread adoption—because it demands lofty, uncertain commitments to distant futures—it may limit EA’s ability to foster broad cultural engagement. A cultural shift toward valuing well-being, gift economies, and reduced forced labor might align better with sustainable, meaningful progress than purely quantitative longtermist calculations. In this light, a core belief for Effective Altruists seeking systemic change could be that genuine effectiveness demands volunteering for and advocating a cultural transformation—from economies of compulsion and extraction toward gift-based systems premised on cooperation, care, and communal well-being. Such shifts may underpin better long-term outcomes than merely optimizing for far-future lives without addressing the structural issues that degrade quality of life today.
Thus, from reflecting on the Essays on Longtermism and broader EA discourse, a key theme emerges: while longtermism rightly heightens our ethical responsibilities toward the distant future, its integration into social practice requires attentive cultural sensitivity. An effective EA movement might balance the boldness of longtermism with pragmatic commitments to improving present-day well-being, thereby knitting together productivity, happiness, and altruism into a more holistic vision of progress and sustainability.
This approach would recognize that the challenge is not simply to calculate the largest expected future value but to cultivate societies where present and future human flourishing are intimately intertwined—where effectiveness in altruism includes advocating for cultural economies that empower gift relations over forced labor, and where happiness metrics guide as much as productivity metrics. In doing so, Effective Altruism can aspire not only to save distant future lives but also to enrich the lives of those living now in meaningful, sustainable ways.
This expansion on the thought highlights how longtermism is a compelling but incomplete picture unless paired with cultural shifts that confront existing social malaises and redefine success beyond conventional economic metrics. It both celebrates the insights within longtermism and critiques its potential blind spots, grounding the argument in the deeper ethical mission of Effective Altruism as both a philosophy and a global movement.
