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This is: A full syllabus on longtermism, published by jtm on the effective altruism forum.
What this is
A syllabus of readings relating to ‘longtermist’ philosophy. I’m posting it here because I hope it might inform syllabi for university courses, reading groups or EA fellowships, and because I would love to see people share suggestions for other works to include.
As this list was designed to include roughly a semester’s worth of material it is, needless to say, not an exhaustive resource. Indeed, each of the dozen topics could have a syllabus of their own and I am not myself very familiar with the relevant literature – suggestions are very welcome!
Some background
Like many other student groups, my previous university EA community would often invite faculty speakers to join dinner discussions and fellowship meetings. In our group, the ethics professor Shelly Kagan has been generous enough to regularly attend group discussions. While he initially joined for conversations on Peter Singer’s arguments on charity, we started a few years ago to instead focus on questions regarding intergenerational ethics.
After a few very successful group discussions, I suggested that Kagan could teach a course on the topic and, a few years later, that course is now being taught as an undergraduate seminar.
While Kagan was preparing the course, I offered to make a draft syllabus for it, and although I believe Kagan’s actual syllabus looks quite different from the list I produced, I figured that it might nevertheless be worthwhile to share here on the forum. I should stress that this syllabus is independent of the course and professor and that any errors thus are entirely my own.
Why I think this might be valuable
I think we got quite lucky to find a university professor who was sufficiently interested in – and sympathetic to – longtermism that they would teach a course on it, and I’m not sure that this is something that could happen at every school with an EA group. But conditional on finding such a professor, I hope this syllabus could increase the likelihood of them teaching a course like this, which seems really valuable. Of course, I also hope that this could prove useful for reading groups, fellowships, and the like!
Crucially, I do not see this as a resource for “convincing people that longtermism is true.” (Edit: For some compelling arguments as to why our community should be careful about seeking 'value-alignment', see this great post by CarlaZoeC.) Rather, I hope that the readings can inspire and inform robust conversations about the strengths and weaknesses of longtermism – a philosophy that, in the scheme of things, remains very new and unexplored. Indeed, several of the readings included here pose serious challenges to various aspects of longtermism that are worth carefully considering.
Some considerations that went into making this syllabus
Intergenerational ethics ≠ longtermism
The course this syllabus was made for is called “Ethics and the Future,” which underscores the fact that, as I see it, ‘intergenerational ethics’ (a philosophical topic or field) is not equivalent to ‘longtermism’ (a philosophical position and research agenda within that field). So while longtermism is heavily featured, it’s not the only thing you’ll find on the syllabus.
Formalism and accessibility
In addition to the usual dose of jargon, many of the papers on this subject – especially on the topics of discounting and population ethics – include a lot of mathematical expressions that may pose a barrier to some readers. I tried to keep accessibility in mind when making the syllabus and excluded a few potential readings on those grounds, but I still suspect that some of the readings might be challenging to many students without a lot of formal training (myself included). Ultimately, however, this is just a dra...
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