Summary of Andreas Mogensen, 'Staking our future: deontic long-termism and the non-identity problem'

Abstract

In “The case for strong longtermism”, Greaves and MacAskill (2021) argue that potential far-future effects are the most important determinant of the value of our options. This is “axiological strong longtermism”. On some views, we can achieve astronomical value by making the future population of worthwhile lives much greater than it would otherwise have been. The question of whether it is intrinsically good to add lives worth living to the population is controversial, however. Greaves and MacAskill argue that the case for strong longtermism can also be made by focusing on the possibility of improving expected future well-being conditional on the existence of a large and roughly fixed-sized future population, that is, by focusing on prospects for generating large amounts of expected value by improvements to the average well-being of future people. In this form, the argument is said to be robust across plausible variations in population-ethical assumptions.