Ethical Longtermism and Reliably Predicting the Future

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/f4752j17z

Abstract

Ethical longtermism is the idea that improving the long-term future is a top priority. The prospect of making lasting improvements to the lives of the vast number of people yet to be born is enticing. However, for longtermism to make sense, we have to be able to reliably affect the future, and thus be able to reliably predict the future. This paper develops a model to estimate how accurate predictions of the future would have to be for it to be worthwhile to spend scarce resources on benefiting the long-term future at the cost of making more predictable impacts on people alive today or in the near future. It also considers whether the available estimates of key parameters support the plausibility of longtermism. These parameters seem to suggest that unpredictability about the impacts of longtermist interventions poses a serious barrier to the worthiness of spending resources on a longtermist intervention instead of an equally costly intervention aimed at improving the present. In light of the considerable uncertainty involved with those estimates, this paper argues that longtermists ought to reduce this uncertainty before diverting significant resources to efforts aimed at improving the long-term future.

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