Journal article
Longtermism and aggregation
- Abstract:
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Advocates of longtermism point out that interventions which focus on improving the prospects of people in the very far future will, in expectation, bring about an astronomical amount of good (or agent-neutral value). As such, longtermists claim we have compelling moral reason to engage in long-term interventions. In this paper, I show that longtermism is in conflict with plausible deontic scepticism about aggregation. I do so by demonstrating that, from both the ex-ante and ex-post perspectives, longtermist interventions generate extremely weak claims of assistance from future people.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 293.9KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1111/phpr.70007
Authors
+ Arts and Humanities Research Council
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- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/0505m1554
- Grant:
- AH/R012709/1
- Publisher:
- Wiley
- Journal:
- Philosophy and Phenomenological Research More from this journal
- Volume:
- 110
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 1137-1151
- Publication date:
- 2025-03-23
- Acceptance date:
- 2026-03-14
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1933-1592
- ISSN:
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0031-8205
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
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2110143
- Local pid:
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pubs:2110143
- Deposit date:
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2025-05-26
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Emma Curran
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © 2025 The Author(s). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LLC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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