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Longtermism — 80,000 Hours
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3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: 80,000 Hours
An accessible introduction to longtermism from 80,000 Hours, useful for understanding the philosophical motivation behind prioritizing AI safety and existential risk work in the effective altruism and AI safety communities.
Metadata
Importance: 62/100blog posteducational
Summary
This 80,000 Hours article introduces and defends longtermism — the view that positively influencing the long-term future is among the most important moral priorities. It explains why the vast number of potential future people gives strong ethical weight to existential risk reduction and civilizational flourishing, and how this framing shapes career and cause prioritization.
Key Points
- •Longtermism holds that future generations matter morally and that their sheer number makes long-run outcomes extraordinarily important.
- •Reducing existential and catastrophic risks is prioritized because these could permanently foreclose positive futures for countless potential people.
- •The article connects longtermism to practical career and cause selection, suggesting work on AI safety, biosecurity, and governance as high-impact paths.
- •It addresses common objections to longtermism, including uncertainty about the future and concerns about neglecting present-day suffering.
- •Longtermism underpins much of 80,000 Hours' prioritization framework and explains why AI safety is considered a top cause area.
Cited by 1 page
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Longtermism: a call to protect future generations - 80,000 Hours Search for: Our new book, a ridiculously in-depth guide to a fulfilling career, is out May 2026. Preorder now
On this page:
Introduction
1 The case for longtermism 1.1 1. We should care about how the lives of future individuals go
1.2 2. The number of future individuals whose lives matter could be vast.
1.3 3. We have an opportunity to affect how the long-run future goes
1.4 Summing up the arguments
2 Objections to longtermism
3 If I don’t agree with 80,000 Hours about longtermism, can I still benefit from your advice?
4 What are the best ways to help future generations right now?
5 Learn more
6 Read next 6.1 Plus, join our newsletter and we’ll mail you a free book
Benjamin Inouye , CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons When the 19th-century amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases and exposed them to sunlight, she uncovered a curious fact. Carbon dioxide became hotter than regular air and took longer to cool down. 1
Remarkably, Foote saw what this momentous discovery meant.
“An atmosphere of that gas would give our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in 1857. 2
Though Foote could hardly have been aware at the time, the potential for global warming due to carbon dioxide would have massive implications for the generations that came after her.
If we ran history over again from that moment, we might hope that this key discovery about carbon’s role in the atmosphere would inform governments’ and industries’ choices in the coming century. They probably shouldn’t have avoided carbon emissions altogether, but they could have prioritised the development of alternatives to fossil fuels much sooner in the 20th century, and we might have prevented much of the destructive climate change that present people are already beginning to live through — which will affect future generations as well.
We believe it would’ve been much better if previous generations had acted on Foote’s discovery, especially by the 1970s, when climate models were beginning to reliably show the future course of warming global trends. 3
If this seems right, it’s because of a commonsense idea: to the extent that we are able to, we have strong reasons to consider the interests and promote the welfare of future generations.
That was true in the 1850s, it was true in the 1970s, and it’s true now.
But despite the intuitive appeal of this moral idea, its implications have been underexplored. For instance, if we care about generations 100 years in the future, it’s not clear why we should stop there.
And when we consider how many future generations there might be, and how much better the future could go if we make good decisions in the present, our descendants’ chances to flourish take on great importance. In particular, we think this idea suggests that improving
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