Why Effective Altruism and “Longtermism” Are Toxic Ideologies

It also gives you cover to do destructive things in the name of creating this vast ultimate good. So not just not caring about contemporary problems, but making problems worse if they get us towards that glorious, long term utopian future. In fact, you’ve cited longtermist arguments that it’s actually more moral to care about people in the West than in the Global South because they’re the people who can go on and do all the good.

Torres

Yes, exactly. I think there are two related but distinct issues here. One is the possibility that the longtermist ideology will lead true believers to minimize, trivialize, or ignore the contemporary problems because one ought to be focusing instead on the very far future, millions, billions, trillions of years from now. The other issue is the possibility that it might actually “justify” in the minds of true believers extreme, potentially violent, actions today for realizing this kind of techno-utopian world among the stars, full of astronomical amounts of value.

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