Work in Progress: Longtermism
Friday 24 February 2023
One of my favorite passages from Kierkegaard is this from his Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
“If every time his gown reminds him that he has to say something, a privatdocent says de omnibus dubitandum est and writes briskly away on a system in which, on every other point, there is internal evidence enough that this man has never doubted anything — he is not considered mad.”
Kierkegaard’s lampoon of academic philosophers claiming to doubt everything while exhibiting a naïve trust in themselves and their work was aimed at the Hegelians of his time, but the Hegelians aren’t the only guilty party. There have been plenty of philosophers since Kierkegaard who seem bent on exemplifying this caricature.
Kierkegaard takes Cartesian doubt as his point of departure, but philosophy has been full of doubters and skeptics, with Descartes perhaps being paradigmatic, but now we have the perhaps even more pointed example of Nietzschean doubt — at least as corrosive and pervasive as Cartesian doubt, but contemporary philosophers have managed even to assimilate Nietzsche and yet continue in the same vein that Kierkegaard ridiculed. Here I am thinking of a particular example. Recently I purchased a copy of The Ethics of History, edited by David Carr, Thomas Robert Flynn, and Rudolf A. Makkreel, which is a collection of essays on the subject indicated by the title. In the introduction to this collection I found the following regarding the contributions to the volume:
“While none articulates an explicit ethical position, each acknowledges an ethical dimension to the historical enterprise, and views that dimension as integral to what history is. In other words, the positivist model, with its appeal to covering laws and its ideal of value-free historiography, is dead as far as these authors are concerned. Curiously, the most common cited philosopher is Nietzsche, a sign that the post-structuralist canon of his opinion is respected even by its critics.”
I will not here attempt to assess the relative merits of the contribution to this volume, nor whether the “post-structuralist canon” is capable of fully assimilating Nietzsche (or even of understanding Nietzsche), but I found it interesting that Nietzsche is the most cited philosopher. Nietzsche is pervasive these days, and yet, despite being pervasive, one could construct a caricature of a contemporary philosopher quoting Nietzsche all the while obviously not having internalized anything that Nietzsche wrote.
Nietzsche liked to call himself a psychologist rather than a philosopher, and rightly enough insofar as Nietzsche’s work shines a penetrating (and discomfiting) light on the moral psychology that lies behind moral theory. Nietzsche takes Kant as his punching-bag, but the implicit critique is applicable beyond Kantian ethics. Since Nietzsche one might have hoped that philosophers had learned at least one lesson from Nietzsche, viz. that moral theory without moral psychology is just wishful thinking that tempts us into every kind of self-justifying aggrandizement and dishonesty. I might also add that moral psychology without moral philosophy takes us to a dark place from which we will not extricate ourselves by it alone. We need both.
Despite Nietzsche’s best efforts, there remains a gap — perhaps a chasm — between moral theory and moral psychology, as was brought to my attention by William MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future, which I have just finished. Since I know this to be a popular and influential book I listened to it carefully and took notes throughout. I had to wait several weeks (maybe two or three months) to get it from my library, so I will try to listen through it again before I have to turn it in. There is enough in the book to justify a more thorough study.
I don’t know anything about the author, what his story is, what his struggles have been, but despite his sophisticated grasp of moral theory, be comes across as remarkably sheltered, and says some remarkably naïve things. Part of this naïveté became evident with the epic financial fraud of Sam Bankman-Fried, who was a backer of the effective altruism movement. MacAskill wrote an earlier book on effective altruism (I don’t know if he is the originator of the idea, but certainly he is among the most influential advocates of effective altruism, or EA). The EA movement became deeply entangled with Bankman-Fried, which meant that it became deeply entangled with financial fraud. Everyone in EA has subsequently distanced themselves from Bankman-Fried and from the scandal, roundly condemning the whole business, but they didn’t see any of this coming. Needless to say, they had an incentive not to see it coming.
Of course, what makes a successful financial fraud is the ability of the individual to conceal their crimes and to craft a veneer of capability, confidence, and selfless philanthropy, and I have no doubt that Bankman-Fried took in a great many people who should have known better, and who should have seen through the façade. Moral philosophers, especially since Nietzsche cast a light on a relationship between moral psychology and moral theory, should be on the watch for frauds. But who is going to turn down a rich philanthropist? This is how Jeffrey Epstein entangled so many in his still-untangled web of deceit: impractical people like philosophers are happy to have wealthy and well-connected people fund their impractical ideas. I would like this myself. I often fantasize about what I could do if I had access to real money. It would be pretty damn difficult to turn down the offer of someone who seems on the up-and-up to finance a non-profit endeavor, and one would be tempted to not ask too many questions about where the money comes from, but, at the same time, one would hope that one had the spine to keep one’s distance if one smells a rat. I have not been tested in this way, so I don’t know what I would do, and I have no “lived experience” to judge those who have been put in this position.
I doubt that EA has been permanently harmed by its association with Bankman-Fried, and I don’t suspect the founders of the movement of anything but good intentions and naïveté, but by its very nature it is vulnerable to grifters, and I suspect that, in the fullness of time, other grifters will pop up. EA tells clever young people that one way to do good — and we all know that a lot of young people are naively idealistic and want very much to do good, even if they are clueless as to how to do good — is to take a high-flying professional position in order to earn more money so that one can give more to charity. This kind of advice is obviously aimed at people who have real prospects in life (I can imagine the elite cohort at top universities nodding along to EA), and not at your average working-class lumpenproletariat, so it is an upscale philosophical perspective (one could even call it a luxury belief) from its inception. Money plays a central role in the idea of EA, and that is going to attract money, the successful, and the grifters who prey upon the naïvely well-to-do. Never underestimate the attraction of rubbing shoulders with celebrities and the wealthy; this alone has corrupted many more than we care to acknowledge.
MacAskill repeats some of this EA material at the end of What We Owe The Future, but that isn’t the focus of the book. Longtermism is the focus of the book. He opens with a discussion of contingency (a crucial idea for our relationship to the future), and his discussion is straight-forward and gratifyingly clarifying. Many philosophers of history talk about contingency, but they rarely do it justice. MacAskill’s treatment is among the best I have encountered, and I also liked the way he kept in view the distinction between the plasticity of the present and what he calls “value lock-in,” the latter being a society that no longer has the plasticity to make significant changes in its values. Throughout the book he warns about value lock-in, but again naïveté is a problem. He seems unable to apply the concept of value lock-in to the present or his own presuppositions. Now, I will acknowledge that value lock-in is almost certainly a matter of degree, and that means that a given society, viewed from one perspective, could still retain significant plasticity, while the same society, viewed from another perspective, could already be seen to have experienced value lock-in to a significant degree. There is room for disagreement here depending upon one’s point of view.
The book seems to me already to have most of its values locked in. Before the end of the first chapter, the author has invoked every imaginable WEF talking point, and the rest of the book goes on and on about familiar glittering generalities like democracy. I can’t take any of that seriously, though I know that a lot of people do. But if you can’t question the ultimate goals of democracy and egalitarianism, both frequently invoked by MacAskill, then your values are locked-in. Maybe you think of these values as being like freedom, which for some philosophers is not an end in itself, but a good only because it allows the individual to choose the ends they choose, and, without it, other values cannot be realized. Similarly, one might think of democracy and egalitarianism as playing an enabling role and being a necessary foundation of other values. I don’t think so, but that is another argument for another time.
In this connection I should note that the critics of EA, who presumably overlap with the critics of longtermism (I didn’t take the trouble to look up who has chosen to take longtermism to task) largely criticize EA from this same set of presumptively democratic and egalitarian values that MacAskill defends; reading the Wikipedia article on EA and skimming the section on its critics, made me much more sympathetic to EA. Indeed, if I were the author’s age I would probably be quite enthusiastic about EA and longtermism, as these ideas have a certain feel of naturalness to me, and I would like to be able to take them at face value. Experience has taught me otherwise. Near the beginning of the book MacAskill characterizes himself as a reluctant convert to longtermism, and perhaps I am only reluctant at present and will come about in good time. I have made that switch on other issues.
When I was listening to What We Owe The Future I kept thinking about John Rawls, though MacAskill doesn’t mention Rawls in the book. Why was this? I had to think about it for a while to figure out what connection my mind was making between the two, and what I eventually realized is that it seems to me that with MacAskill discussing the good of the long term future and Rawls discussing the good of some ideal society constructed from behind a veil of ignorance, both argue as though they have seen the answers in the back of the book and already know how things are going to turn out. When Rawls says that the prospective member of a society, judging that society from behind a veil of ignorance, has at his or her disposal a complete political science and a complete economics (or something like that, I am taking this from memory), this idea plays no further role in his argument. He just puts it out there, as though to have it on display. He doesn’t refer back and say, “Some future developments in political science or economics may show us that this idea of constructing a society from behind a veil of ignorance is not always going to favor (what I call) fairness.” The claim that the individual participating in the “original position” thought experiment will have full knowledge of politics and economics plays no further role after it is introduced. It just lies there, inert. And this is because Rawls already knew what kind of society he would construct if he had no idea of where he would find himself if “born into” this society — he wants justice defined as fairness — and he never seriously considers the alternatives. To put it in the terms of William James, alternatives to justice as fairness were never live options for Rawls.
Analogously, the good of the long term future in longtermism is not framed in terms of any valuational revolution or even any scientific, technological, or conceptual revolution that might significantly change our conception of the future and what it ought to be. And this is the same, familiar problem that has haunted modernity at least since the French Revolution, and which was famously criticized by Burke: erecting abstract conceptions of the good with no relationship to tradition or to moral psychology. And, as the Enlightenment has developed since the French Revolution, we see that it is not content merely to neglect or defame tradition, eventually the Enlightenment becomes openly hostile to tradition, seeing it as an obstacle to the utopia (or, if you prefer, eutopia) that is to be realized, and therefore it becomes necessary to actively seek the extirpation tradition so that it can no longer be a drag on the happy progress we making toward utopia, or fairness, or the long term.
That the revolution eventually turned to the guillotine to realize its ends should have been a lesson burned into the minds of everyone, but, as we know, even horrors fade in time, and the cognitive bias known as the “just world hypothesis” not only looks forward, into the future, but it also looks backward, into the past, justifying what came before as the price of that which is to come later. Revolutionaries, whether sans-culottes or Marxists, usually end up justifying their horrors by the crudest teleology of the-ends-justify-the-means. And while I don’t want to compare longtermists to the Reign of Terror or Stalinist purges, the same spectre of teleology hovers in the background of longtermism and cannot be banished. MacAskill takes this point up explicitly a few times in the book, but teleology is never a major theme, nor does it receive a definitive dismissal. If we do characterize longtermism as a form of teleology, how exactly should we distinguish this kind of teleology from all the other kinds of teleology? G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica is a distinctive work of moral philosophy, with its own arguments to make, but it has been assimilated to teleology through the label of “ideal utilitarianism,” though it’s not really anything like the utilitarianism of Bentham or Mill. Should we call longtermism “future utilitarianism”? “Long Term Utilitarianism”? Something else? I don’t have any good ideas at the moment.
I should mention that I really enjoyed chapter 6 on civilizational collapse. Here he discusses Dartnell’s book The Knowledge, and makes a number of good points. Much of chapter 8 is about Derek Parfit, population ethics, and the repugnant conclusion. I also enjoyed this a great deal. This discussion of Derek Parfit gave me an idea: Parfit’s celebrated trichotomy among: 1. peace, 2. a nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population, and 3. a nuclear war that kills 100 per cent, could be used to answer Phil Torres’ existential risk argument against spacefaring expansion if it could be shown that spacefaring expansion represents the second of the three, while remaining on Earth represents the third. While we know that remaining on Earth means eventual extinction, it is not so easy to demonstrate that a grand spacefaring future represents the second. However, I think it could be shown that it is at least more likely for the future to fall somewhere between the first and second possibilities than it would be to demonstrate that it definitely issues in the third.
