It’s often stated now that you owe no one anything. But I think that is far from the truth: my view is that we owe both our ancestors and our descendants a great deal. This isn’t a view incompatible with history. Most great civilisations were constantly aware of their place in their ancestry, from the Romans to the Victorians there was a constant emphasis on lineage. Yet in the modern era there is far less focus on the future and our descendants.
William MacAskill, in his book What We Owe the Future, makes the case for an ethical view he calls longtermism: that positively influencing the future should be a key moral priority of our time. The core argument is neatly summarised as: “future people matter morally just as much as people alive today... there may well be more people alive in the future than there are in the present or have been in the past... and we can positively affect future people’s lives.”
Longtermism is a theory strongly rooted in the effective altruism community. Effective altruism is simply a philosophy based around finding the most effective ways to help others and maximise humanity’s wellbeing.
Effective altruism and longtermism are, at their core, politically neutral philosophies based on the concept of utilitarianism: maximising good for the greatest number. The argument would be that this is fundamentally incompatible with conservatism. Yet I would argue that Burkean conservatism has far more in common with longtermism than first assumed.
The practical application of longtermism as a moral framework is that existential risks become significantly more important. Risks such as nuclear war, pandemics, climate change and artificial intelligence have the potential to end life as we know it, but by reducing these risks we could improve the future over such a long time horizon, increasing the potential number and quality of future lives.
Longtermism is usually placed as an ethical position that is only forward-looking. But I would argue that it has its place in our historical perception too.
In Roman culture, one placed oneself within a long line of lineage, in a cultural system known as Mos Maiorum, roughly translating to ‘custom of the ancestors’. A Roman’s goal was not to innovate, but to prove they were worthy of their family name by matching the deeds of their forefathers.
In the entrance of every Roman home there would be a cabinet full of what were known as imagines maiorum, death masks: beeswax moulds created directly after the death of each ancestor. As a child, you would be expected to know every one of their faces, and who they were.
You would be expected to view yourself through the lens of obligation and family legacy, as well as the continuation of ancestral tradition. It was both forwards and backwards looking: you had to live up to the name of your ancestors, but also create a legacy for your descendants.
The key difference between the culture of Mos Maiorum and longtermism is structural versus individual. Longtermism operates as a moral philosophy about the individual’s role in thinking of the future; it relies on individuals. Mos Maiorum, by contrast, was so deeply ingrained in society that a Roman would always view themselves as custodian of both the past and the future.
This is where Burke and longtermism intersect. Edmund Burke viewed society as not just “a partnership... only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
He held that our laws, our liberty and our time serve not just the present, but the present because of the past, and the present looking towards the future. In other words, every generation must be the keeper of every other generation, without which the system collapses. Burke provides the structural link that longtermism, as an ideology, lacks. Society should be a link between the past and the future.
Predicting the future is a fool’s errand. Trying to work out how long humanity will last is about the greatest shot in the dark possible. However, Will MacAskill offers a few benchmarks. Using evolutionary data, the typical mammalian species lasts around a million years, giving Homo sapiens roughly 700,000 years left. Yet the top end of predictions dramatically outstrips this. If humanity survives near-term extinction, the numbers could run into the hundreds of millions, if not billions, should we become an interstellar civilisation.
With this picture of humanity’s future in mind, I can’t help but see the actions of today as fundamentally greedy. If we are so keen to strip the planet of its resources for today, I can’t see how we expect future generations within the next 200 years to live, let alone those in a thousand.
But on a personal level, as someone who would identify as a Burkean conservative, longtermism speaks to me. I find it quite difficult when notionally ‘right wing’ people speak to me about topics like climate change.
At the Paris Climate Accords, COP adopted a 1.5°C warming threshold over pre-industrial levels. The IPCC currently projects, with high confidence, that global warming will reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2035. However, they are also clear that whilst climate-related risks will be higher at 1.5°C than at present, they will be lower than at 2°C. This differential in risk only grows the more warming there is.
If increased warming leads to greater risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water or economic growth, then reducing that risk would both improve the lives of current humans and have a significantly multiplied effect on the lives of future humans, as the risks of climate change will last far longer than the current generation. Therefore, the ethical position under longtermism would be to prioritise limiting global warming, to ensure catastrophic levels of warming aren’t reached. Yet I would also argue this is the Burkean position.
Of course, I understand that the UK makes up very little of global emissions, and that global warming is happening regardless of our efforts. Yet the reactions are often so defeatist, or worse, purposely harmful.
Do not misunderstand me, I am not a climate loony. I will not be gluing myself to the M1 anytime soon. But the continual slide in climate policy, from scrapping Net Zero targets to pretending climate change is a fiction, is a worrying trend from the right of politics, and frankly amounts to a denial of the reality in front of us.
If, through some miracle, I was suddenly placed in front of my future descendants, I would find it hard to justify the current trajectory on climate change, much less any of the other worrying trends of recent times, such as AGI, bioengineered pandemics or the variety of hyperengineered drugs.
I fear this is a result of Burkean conservatism slipping from the political sphere. The rate at which we exploit the planet and our natural resources has dramatically increased, to a pace that far outstrips the planet’s ability to sustain it. The consequence of this will be significantly more catastrophic for future generations than predicted. Yet notionally right wing parties across the globe are still willing to trade on resources we don’t currently possess.
The objective of right wing parties should be to figure out how we recreate this Burkean partnership between the living, the dead and the yet unborn.