Abstract:
What are the prospects for the longtermist project in light of the problem of moral alienation? Longtermism is the normative view that a moral priority of our time ought to be that our actions positively influence the long-term future. The argument for it depends upon temporal neutrality, according to which the intrinsic value of good things and the disvalue of bad things remain constant regardless of when they occur. Within Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future (OUP 2025), Stefan Riedener argues that while none of the existing objections to temporal neutrality are compelling, longtermism nonetheless fails on two accounts: authenticity and meaning, rendering it an alienating moral view. Riedener admits from the off, however, that it seems readily available for the longtermist to reject his argument by calling into question either of his assumed premises: (i) the objective list theory of welfare and (ii) the assumption of unknown differences. In this paper, we aim to further develop Riedener’s critique from alienation so that it is more robust in the face of longtermist responses. We argue specifically that the real alienation problem for longtermism is that the principle of temporal neutrality requires us to trade in subjective experience – a constituent of moral life – wholesale for universality. As a result, relating to one’s reasons as it recommends would mean one was estranged from a crucial source of their moral reasons, making it unclear what longtermism has to do with us or why it is normatively authoritative in the first place.
1. Introduction
According to longtermism, we ought to choose the actions which we can reasonably expect to positively influence the long-term future, and this should be a moral priority of our time.2 One of the premises of longtermism is temporal neutrality, according to which the intrinsic value of good things and disvalue of bad things remain constant regardless of when they occur. If this is the case, it seems untenable to discount the value of good and bad things on the basis of their existence being in the future. Therefore, from an impartial perspective, we have a moral duty to make the far-future go best. The argument for longtermism is thus as follows:
P1: The long-term future potentially concerns an astronomically large amount of time and beings who are morally considerable. Thus, the far-future has the potential to involve a lot of value or disvalue.
P2: Similar to spatial distance, the intrinsic value of good things and the disvalue of bad things remain constant regardless of when they occur. If this is the case, far-future people should matter just as much as our contemporaries do.
P3: Actions in the present have a significant chance of making the existence and quality of life of far-future people go better.
P4: We ought to help others when we can do so with little to no cost to ourselves. If we can meaningfully and positively affect the lives of far-future people, we simply ought to.
C: We ought to take actions which we can reasonably expect to make the long-term future go best.
1.1 Riedener’s argument
Within “Authenticity, Meaning, and Alienation: Reasons to Care Less About Far-Future People”, Stefan Riedener argues against the longtermist premise that we ought to have equal consideration for far-future people as we do our contemporaries, and he does so on the basis of considerations of authenticity and meaning. Riedener’s objection to longtermism is therefore in response to premise two, and he offers us a defence of our unequal concern for far-future people. He begins by analysing currently existing arguments for the moral relevance of temporal distance. According to these views, in choosing between promoting a good which occurs at t1 or t2, we ought to choose the one which occurs at t1 because time itself is morally relevant, whether it be due to pure time preference or special relationships. He concludes, however, that none of these are compelling enough and proceeds with his case against equal concern for our contemporaries and far-future people. He begins with two assumptions – namely, the objective list theory of welfare and the assumption of unknown differences, both of which we will return to in greater detail later. According to the objective list theory of welfare, what is good for individuals is not simply what is pleasurable for them or what satisfies their desires but, rather, a plurality of objective goods (friendship, achievement, virtue, and so forth) that are, to an extent, good independent of one’s attitudes towards them. Moreover, according to the assumption of unknown differences, far-future lives will be radically different from ours. We are essentially in the dark about the kinds of relationships, projects, and values far-future people will have. From the conjunction of these two premises, he claims that we cannot really a) know what the objective values of far-future people would be and b) even if we did, it isn’t obvious we would actually share such values.
In light of this, caring about far-future welfare (which for Riedener is objective goods) would be inevitably inauthentic insofar as we could not really appreciate far-future values.3 Moreover, Riedener argues that conferring benefits upon our contemporaries would be far more meaningful for us than trying to do so for far future people. He proposes that life is meaningful when it promotes objective values which express one’s own identity. However, insofar as the constituents of long-term lives and well-being are entirely unknown to us, they cannot manifest our identity and therefore be meaningful for us. By analogy, Reidener points out how it would be absurd to think that the lives of our long extinct sibling hominid species had meaning in significant part due to our contemporary enjoyment of “classical music or display of environmentalist virtues”. Thus, prudentially it seems that longtermist reasoning and busying oneself with worries about people in the far future is a poor way of achieving a meaningful life, and the meaningfulness of our actions gives us justifiable reason to preferentially do so.
Before proceeding to the longtermist response, it would be helpful to clarify the logical relationship between his assumptions and his argument. For Riedener, well-being consists of particular objective goods (relationships, knowledge, virtue, etc.), which are nonetheless socially and culturally embedded. What makes a life go well for someone are objective goods, which are context sensitive but nevertheless objective insofar as they are good for someone independent of their attitudes towards them. However, in light of the assumption of unknown differences, it’s unlikely that we will know what the objective goods of far-future beings are. We simply do not have epistemic access to the kinds of technology, psychologies, or forms of life which will exist in the far future and, consequently, what their objective goods are or how to promote them. Thus, the worry from alienation: it seems we cannot authentically or meaningfully care or deliberate about far-future individuals.
Notice that the objective list theory of welfare is more susceptible to this worry than simple hedonistic or desire-satisfaction views. Take hedonism, for instance. We do not need to know what far-future people will find pleasure in, but rather that pleasure is valuable. Similarly, with desire-satisfaction, we do not need to know what far-future people will desire – just that the fulfilment of their desires is valuable. On the other hand, the objective list theorist has more serious epistemic demands. They need to be able to say what exactly is valuable for individuals in a particular context. It is not only the contents of far-future lives which will be different but what is good for them altogether. Because of this, it is more vulnerable to the objection from alienation and less compatible with longtermist or aggregative moral frameworks. It is unclear how to reduce the long-term future to one transitive welfare scale and maximise expected value across radically different contexts if what is good varies across different contexts. Riedener’s point is thus that it would be inauthentic for us to make a claim about the good for future people.
Moreover, according to his argument from meaning, longtermism is a poor way of achieving a meaningful life, and this gives us a justifiable reason to benefit our contemporaries instead of far-future people preferentially. On the one hand, part of the basis for Riedener’s contention that we cannot meaningfully benefit people in the distant future is his supposition that it will be a place radically unlike our present context, where they will value things about which we cannot know. So, we cannot derive meaning in the present from trying to help far future people in the way that we can from benefiting those around us, who we know we can help. On the other hand, this idea also depends upon the objective list theory of welfare to the extent that we do not have epistemic access to what will be objectively prudentially valuable for far-future people, whereas we do for our contemporaries. And because doing good effectively (which often requires the knowledge of what is good for individuals) is integral to the meaning that we feel, this justifies our preferential treatment of the people of our contemporaries.
1.2 Longtermist Responses
It seems here the longtermist could make one of two moves. The first is that longtermists could simply reject the objective list theory of welfare and assume hedonism or desire preference satisfaction, which indeed many do. Alternatively, they could accept the objective list theory of welfare but reject his assumption of unknown differences. It thus seems readily available for the longtermist to reject either of Riedener's initial premises, for which he admits he does not argue extensively yet upon which his case depends.
Let’s begin with his assumption of unknown differences. It seems plausible for the longtermist to push back here even if conceding the objective list theory of welfare. Say we grant that the far-future does consist of unknowable forms of technology, psychologies, means of socialising, and so forth. Could it nonetheless be the case that the objective, non-attitude-dependent prudential goods remain the same for these far-future individuals? For instance, even if the long-term future will be unknowably different and perhaps strange from our perspective, presumably far-future individuals will not go on to develop interests in being vulnerable, impoverished, or alienated from others. If this is the case, it seems there is only a minimal amount we even need to know about far-future life.
Reconsider Riedener’s example about how today we relate axiologically to humans from the distant past. Regardless of the myriad ways the social norms of ancient, extinct species of hominid diverge from those of contemporary, modern humans, they nonetheless had practices and norms for bonding to one another interpersonally and collectively. Today, some of us do a large proportion of our socialising virtually through video game platforms or at least through video calls. While this would no doubt seem strange from the perspective of ancient hominids, so strange indeed that they surely could not have predicted it or have had any way of conceptualising it, this isn’t to say that the objective prudential value or interest itself in social bonds or connection no longer exists. It simply represents another way of configuring its value. Similarly, people in the far distant future will likely have ways of socialising which are entirely foreign to ours. Admittedly, however, this claim does not provide us with specificity – it is very wide in scope. Thus, it seems fair to say that common between far-future societies and ours, in the most general terms, is a mutable and amorphous interest in something like sociality, along with other general interests like safety and sustenance. Put simply, even radical historical or contextual changes do not imply fundamental changes in prudential or axiological value. If this is the case, then Reidener's claims about authenticity and meaning, which depend upon this, become tenuous.
Riedener might respond here that this minimal account of prudential value does not provide the longtermist what they need in order to make their normative project viable. As explained with his example of early hominids relating to the aesthetic goods of modernity, he claims it would be bizarre to connect these different time periods and unimaginable values. Our point, however, is merely that basic needs and interests take different forms in different epochs, and it seems reasonable to suppose that we can deliberate authentically and meaningfully, in Riedener’s terms at least, about objective prudential values in contrasting periods. For instance, our contemporary aesthetic pursuits are perhaps instantiations of the impulse to create, which led early hominids to engage in elaborate cave and rock art. Nevertheless, perhaps Riedener could insist that this way of seeing things is too threadbare in terms of substantive normative upshots to be helpful for the longtermist project, especially in light of his objective list assumption.
Things become much worse for Riedner, however, when we consider rejecting this very assumption – that what is good for individuals depends upon a plurality of objective goods which are valuable regardless of one’s attitude towards them. Riedener himself points out that if hedonism is correct, then we could, in principle, authentically care about people in the far future, and doing so would be meaningful because we could understand how our actions could secure them a more or less likely chance of conditions for experiencing pleasure. For instance, the axiological connection between ourselves, humans in the distant past, and future hypothetical cyborg people would be achieving pleasure and avoiding pain. If the longtermist rejects the objective list account in favour of hedonism, they do not need to know exactly what far-future people will find pleasure in. It is enough that we know that pleasure is valuable. Hedonism provides longtermism with a clean, quantifiable way of aggregating welfare across far-future individuals and even extending its scope to include nonhuman animals’ or artificial systems’ welfare concerns, too. Similarly, under desire-satisfaction views, we do not need to know exactly what far-future people will desire, only that the fulfilment of their desires is valuable. Thus, other prominent approaches to welfare would be better equipped to deal with the indeterminacy of ancient hominid or future cyborg prudential value.
Thus, proponents of longtermism can readily reject the objective list theory and assume hedonism or desire-satisfaction, rendering Reidener’s critique from alienation indefensible. Nevertheless, we maintain that Reidener is right to worry about the viability of longtermism viz. a viz. normative alienation. While Reidener targets the kind of moral alienation which results from one’s deliberations, it would be much more difficult for a longtermist to respond to a challenge which targets their basic methodology – namely, their rejection of subjectivity in favour of universality. What we aim to do in the following section, then, is rehabilitate the critique from alienation in a way which is more wholesale but stable in the face of longtermist response.
Our suggestion is that the threat of alienation points toward a need to centre the agent in ethical theory. In our discussion, we will take the term ‘moral alienation’ to refer to the way in which the moral agent relates to their moral reasons running counter to the nature of moral agency. We highlight that the nature of moral agency is in part subjective, and, as such, it must be clear what moral propositions have to do with us. The agent must have a particular kind of relationship to moral propositions, one which is not merely based in passive receptivity but instead one which obviates why the proposition is authoritative or normative for us in the first place.4 Therefore, any non-alienating normative view will need to be sensitive to context and moral life in a way which is hard to imagine for longtermism or at least the strongest versions of it.
2. The Real Alienation Problem for Longtermism
In what follows, we will argue that that the real alienation problem for longtermism is that its premise of temporal neutrality requires us to trade in subjective experience – a constituent of moral life – wholesale, in exchange for obtaining an objective universalism about moral evaluations. As a result, accepting temporal neutrality and relating to one’s reasons as it recommends would mean one was estranged from a crucial source of their moral reasons, making it unclear what longtermism has to do with us or why it is normatively authoritative in the first place.
2.1 Universality and a view from nowhere
The longtermist premise of temporal neutrality assumes that moral agents can and should adopt an ahistorical vantage point to make choices which benefit far-future individuals. It states that we ought to grant equal concern to far-future individuals as we do our contemporaries. Backgrounding this premise is perhaps the idea of adopting the “point of view of the Universe,”5 according to which, “the good of any one individual is of no more importance than the good of any other.” Thus, no morally relevant differences hang upon spatiality or temporality. Building on this thinking, longtermism argues that when a person happens to live should not be a morally relevant factor either. Provided our actions can impact them, we should care as much about the welfare of people a million years into the future as we do for those around us. For instance, the longtermist thesis is that it would be appropriate and indeed morally required of us to factor the interests of far future cyborgs equivalently to those of our own contemporaries and even loved ones. No matter when a welfare interest is at stake, it counts the same. However, this begins to strain credulity when one imagines explaining to your own family that their interests matter to you merely as much as do the interests of those in the far future.
Even though it seems reasonable to examine one’s biases for possibly erroneous assumptions, the idea that you are morally confused unless you only value your family’s interests as much as you value the interests of cyborgs millions of years in the future sounds strange indeed. The longtermist picture of moral agency is, therefore, one abstracted away from contextual commitments and lived moral relationships with concrete others. Instead, it recommends “stepping back” and adopting an ahistorical, universal point of view completely detached from subjective moral experience.
The seeming advantage of this is avoiding the worries of parochialism, partiality, and falling into simple subjectivism. It is important to note, however, that objective value can nevertheless emerge in virtue of what we subjectively take to be good, having seemingly universal scope. ‘The moral’ is distinguished from other forms of evaluation through its universal purported scope, so although we make our normative judgements from somewhere, they depend upon their universal prescription. What we value is constituted by the interplay of subjectivity and objectivity, and cultivating the right relationship between the subjective and perspectival basis of moral evaluations with their necessary detached, universal reach.6
For instance, consider the more natural, quotidian way of talking about the relative interests of far-future people versus one’s family or contemporaries more generally. Ordinarily, one would say that while the interests of future people ought to be considered when making decisions which might affect them, what matters most is the welfare of those around us. While longtermists are right that this is a biased evaluation based upon one’s circumstantial point of view, these subjective preferences are constitutive of the normative landscape in the first place. The risk that the longtermists thus face is that when we sacrifice our subjective evaluative starting point entirely, we end up purging moral life of the partial, circumstantial sentiment which gives our moral evaluations their meaning in the first place, and this incurs significant theoretical costs – namely, obscuration and alienation.
2.2 Identifiability, authority, and motivation
If a moral theory is to be successful, it ought to be able to identify what we have reason to do and explain why such reasons are motivating and authoritative for us.7 As we go on to argue, in rejecting the subjective starting point for moral theorising, the longtermist neglects these explanatory desiderata. Firstly, it seems likely that the longtermist project risks worries about identifiability. In adopting the “point of view of the Universe” spatially and temporally, it seems plausible that the moral agent becomes vulnerable to a sort of moral paralysis, in which there exists an overwhelming surplus of ways in which one could do good or maximise good outcomes. As longtermism itself emphasises, the future has the potential to involve enormous amounts of value or disvalue and beings for whom things can go better or worse. Yet, in light of this claim and in conjunction with the supposed universal point of view, it becomes obscure what one then has most reason to do.
In the face of an excess or overabundance of reasons, it would simply be psychologically infeasible to perform every morally right action ad infinitum. This worry is reminiscent of the demandingness objection to consequentialist views because of its emphasis on psychological infeasibility. However, even the demandingness objection does not call into question whether we can know what the right action is. In the case of longtermism and the problem of identifiability, what one even ought to do becomes unclear. We appear morally paralysed insofar as the longtermist project recommends a perspective which completely overloads what could reasonably be expected from an individual’s point of view.
But let’s suppose for the sake of the argument that the longtermist is able to identify what we have most reason to do. It turns out that benefiting a far-future cyborg at t1, securing their safety at t2, and ensuring their ability to connect with other cyborgs at t3 are the morally right actions to take. Prima facie, it does not seem like the longtermist has anything to offer us about why such prescriptions are normatively authoritative or motivating in the first place. For moral facts to be authoritative, it must be clear what they have to do with us. Our relationship to normative facts cannot be merely like that of scientific facts. The moral agent should not relate to the proposition “X is the right action to take” just as they relate to the fact that “water is H2O.” For things like scientific facts, we expect that they are not fundamentally about us. Normative facts, on the other hand, are precisely that kind – they should bind on and speak to us in our deepest identity. Otherwise, we risk an explanatory gap between normative facts and the moral agents for whom they are allegedly normative. 8 The relationship between the normative agent and fact for whom it is normative must explain why the purported moral fact really is one for the given agent in the first place. The agent and the moral fact cannot relate through passive receptivity alone, as they would to water being H2O. Through its insensitivity to how the agent and the purported moral facts relate, longtermism runs the risk of alienating the two.
Similarly, even if the longtermist can identify what we ought to do, we should also ask what they have to offer us about why we should bother doing the right thing. Longtermism tries to explain away the very emotional, interpersonal, and contextual sentiments which one’s moral norms typically track. Consider a contemporary person who, in principle, agrees with longtermists’ rationale about temporal neutrality but who struggles to see past the obligations and duties they find in their contingent everyday life. The only motivational tools the longtermist can offer here are the very impersonal, rationalistic principles which said individual struggles to be motivated by. This is exactly the problem faced by universalising normative systems more generally. For instance, Kantianism faces the objection that it is an empty formalism, bereft of substantive content. A successful normative view must, to an extent, account for the subjectivity of values; otherwise, it will be unable to answer the ‘why should I bother?’ question, sometimes referred to as normative regress.9
In sum, we argue that the problem of alienation for longtermism is more fundamental than Riedener recognises. Riedener argued that it would be inauthentic to make choices on behalf of far-future people whose prudential values will be unbeknownst to us. While Riedener’s claims here could be easily rejected by the longtermist, we suggest that the more fundamental alienation problem for longtermism is that it struggles to explain how its moral prescriptions can be identifiable. It fails to explain how a contemporary individual’s circumstantial beliefs are relevant at all to working out what they ought to do in the first place. In other words, how does longtermism actually help us identify what we have good reason to do? Even if it does, how does it bind us to it authoritatively? While Riedener argued that we cannot derive meaning from helping far future people, but we can through assisting contemporaries, and that this prudential reality justifies treating contemporaries preferentially, we argue that the real problem on this point for longtermists is that their view seems to have little chance of explaining how the individual ought to be motivated to act as it prescribes. All of the ordinary sources of moral motivation, which lie in our relationships with concrete others and wider normative contexts, are off the menu for longtermists.
2.3 Limitations, scope, and conclusion
Perhaps the longtermist bites the bullet here and says “sure, longtermism is alienating and is not obviously motivating, but these considerations are irrelevant to it being morally right”. Maybe the truth about what is “right” morally just flies in the face of our moral intuitions, thereby being alienating. Nonetheless, how people feel about the truth is merely a descriptive claim. Our argument here is not to say that the problem of alienation renders longtermism wrong, morally speaking. The scope of this paper is to further develop one particular reason against it. Ceteris paribus, if action x would be less alienating than action y, then you have greater reason to choose action x. Action y might not be morally wrong, but its alienation provides reason against it. But, of course, reasons against a view does not necessarily make it, on the whole, wrong.
That being said, it would be one thing if longtermism simply involved an impoverished picture of moral agency which neglects normative authority and motivation, but it is another thing to claim that it depends on it. We think the latter is true. If this is the case, the longtermist needs to make it clear that they are accepting a perspectivally distorted view of morality which fails to be authoritative and motivating for us and, further, give us reason why we should accept this picture of moral agency. We suspect that the strength of our argument depends on one’s intuitions about the importance of moral psychology in the first place, and presumably those drawn to impartial views are anyways less attracted to accounting for things moral psychology, motivation, and authority. Maybe even what meta-ethical theory we presuppose influences whether we think normative facts even need to be authoritative or related to us in a particular kind of way. For instance, if we are ‘realist’ in a mind-independent sense, then presumably we would be less interested in moral facts having to do with us. An anti-realist, on the other hand, would think this matters very much so. Perhaps this dispute elucidates the importance of rival metaethical conceptions for first-order moral theorising. In any case, I take it that whatever meta-ethical sympathies one has, they ought to be able to say something about the relationship between subjective moral life and the objective good, and even if one was a realist in the traditional sense, perhaps it would be mistaken to view moral language as solely descriptive rather than having any motivational or practical role.
An additional concern the longtermist may raise for us is that our critique does not uniquely target longtermism. Instead, any moral theory which adopts a universal point of view is vulnerable to our objection. Admittedly, our points regarding moral alienation and the advantages of agent-centred normative theories apply more widely than to longtermism exclusively. We nonetheless believe that longtermism is a particularly useful case study for highlighting the problems that abstract, rationalistic normative views encounter. While Reidener’s argument was able to target longtermism more directly, he did so at the cost of assuming contentious premises which ultimately limited his case. Without these assumptions, we have engaged with longtermism in a somewhat more general sense but hope to have raised more stable, fundamental worries.
We began this paper outlining the longtermist thesis and Stefan Riedener’s critique from alienation within his “Authenticity, Meaning, and Alienation: Reasons to Care Less About Far-Future People.” Here, Riedener argues that the longtermist premise of temporal neutrality fails on two accounts: authenticity and meaning, rendering it an alienating moral view. We demonstrated that it seems readily available for the longtermist to reject his argument by calling into question either of his assumed premises: (i) the objective list theory of welfare and (ii) the assumption of unknown differences. Nevertheless, we argued that the problem of alienation is a salient worry for the longtermist project – specifically, that the real alienation problem for longtermism is that the principle of temporal neutrality requires us to trade in subjective experience – a constituent of moral life – wholesale for universality. We explained how because relating to one’s reasons as longtermism recommends would mean one was estranged from one’s evaluative subjectivity, longtermism faces problems of identifying what we have good reason to do and that such reasons are authoritative or motivating for us.
References:
Riedener, Stefan, 'Authenticity, Meaning, and Alienation: Reasons to Care Less about Far-Future People', in Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad (eds), Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future.
MacAskill, William. What We Owe The Future: The Sunday Times Bestseller. Simon and Schuster, 2022.
Samuel, Jack. "Alienation and the Metaphysics of Normativity: On the Quality of our Relations with the World." J. Ethics & Soc. Phil. 26 (2023): 158.
Nagel, Thomas. The view from nowhere. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Korsgaard, Christine M. The sources of normativity. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Street, Sharon. "What is constructivism in ethics and metaethics?." Philosophy Compass 5, no. 5 (2010): 363-384.