Longtermism

Most of my work is ultimately about trying to make the long-term future go well -- a project often associated with "longtermism" (see Ord (2020) and MacAskill (2022) for introductions). I've written a number of essays on why I think this is important.

• "Actually possible: thoughts on Utopia" describes just how profoundly good life in the future could be -- something that I think often goes underestimated.
• "On future people, looking back on 21st century longtermism" offers an intuition pump for a certain kind of "holy shit" reaction to our place in history, and to the stakes of our choices.
• "Against neutrality about creating happy lives" argues, pace some philosophers, that creating new happy lives is good -- a claim that matters for longtermism because the future may be a source of an astronomic number of new happy lives.

I'm hoping to write more in future about different strands of longtermism, about the notion of a "long reflection," and the pitfalls of some common ontologies people use for thinking about the values that guide the future.