Every generation believes it has discovered the moral equation that will finally explain how humanity should behave. Effective Altruism and its more ambitious offspring, Longtermism, promise precisely that: use reason, evidence and mathematics to maximise the greatest possible good, even if that means diverting resources from today's suffering towards preventing hypothetical catastrophes that could erase humanity's distant future. It is an elegant theory. It is also a profoundly unsettling one.
The attraction is obvious. If humanity survives for millions of years, trillions upon trillions of people may yet exist. In that arithmetic, preventing an existential disaster today could outweigh almost any present-day concern. Saving one child from malaria suddenly competes against safeguarding entire future civilisations from artificial intelligence gone rogue, engineered pandemics or asteroid impacts. Numbers become so enormous that ordinary compassion starts looking almost irrational.
Yet morality is not an accountant's ledger. The danger begins when hypothetical people acquire greater ethical status than living ones. There is something deeply uncomfortable about telling a hungry child, a refugee fleeing war or a family without medicine that their suffering must wait because someone, somewhere, has calculated a tiny probability of saving quadrillions of unborn descendants centuries from now. Such reasoning risks transforming ethics into an exercise detached from the very people ethics was invented to protect.
Longtermists often insist this is a false dilemma. They argue that society can both relieve present suffering and invest in reducing existential risks. In principle, that is perfectly reasonable. In practice, however, budgets are finite, political attention is limited and philanthropic money follows priorities. Every pound directed towards speculative future scenarios is a pound unavailable for hospitals, famine relief, vaccination campaigns or disaster recovery. Choices matter because scarcity remains stubbornly real.
There is also a remarkable confidence embedded within Longtermism that deserves far greater scepticism. Predicting next year's economic outlook is notoriously difficult. Predicting technological civilisation thousands or millions of years ahead borders on science fiction. Human history is littered with experts who confidently forecast futures that never arrived. Building moral priorities upon such uncertain foundations requires extraordinary faith disguised as rational calculation.
Ironically, many existential threats become less threatening when today's humanitarian crises are addressed. Stable societies invest more in science, education and resilient institutions. Healthier populations are better equipped to confront pandemics. Democracies with functioning public services are less likely to descend into conflicts that increase global instability. Helping people now is not merely charity; it strengthens humanity's capacity to survive tomorrow.
There is another philosophical flaw. Effective Altruism often seeks to eliminate emotion from ethical decision-making, treating empathy as a cognitive bias rather than a moral compass. But civilisation itself has been built upon the instinct to help those standing directly before us. Compassion is not a bug in human reasoning. It is one of its finest achievements.
None of this means existential risks should be ignored. Artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons and biotechnology deserve serious attention precisely because their consequences could be catastrophic. Prudence demands preparation. What it does not demand is elevating speculative futures above visible suffering.
A civilisation reveals its character not through the lives it imagines but through the lives it touches. If the pursuit of saving tomorrow requires looking away from those dying today, then the future being protected may not be morally worth inheriting.
No comments:
Post a Comment