Prioritizing x-risks may require caring about future people

Abstract

Several recent popular posts have made the case that existential risks (x-risks) should be introduced without appealing to longtermism or the idea that future people have moral value. They tend to argue or imply that x-risks would still be justified as a priority without caring about future people. I felt intuitively skeptical of this claim and decided to stress-test it. In this post, I argue that prioritizing x-risks over near-term interventions and global catastrophic risks may require caring about future people; disambiguate connotations of “longtermism”, and suggest a strategy for introducing the priority of existential risks; and review and respond to previous articles which mostly argued that longtermism wasn’t necessary for prioritizing existential risks.