Pro-life? Let me tell you about longtermism.
The pro-life to longtermist pipeline
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A short virtue signal disclaimer, so you don’t think I’m pro-life and prejudicially assume I’m a creep so you know where I’m coming from.
I used to be pro-life. Hella pro-life. Though I’ve swapped teams now, I’d say I actively prefer pro-lifers to pro-choicers. These days, by and large, the pro-life view isn’t arrived at emotionally or by cultural osmosis — if you’re pro-life, you were probably made that way by an argument. You kept an open mind, and had the courage to say ‘yep… abortion is murder’, even in spite of the immense social pressure to continue mouthing conformist bromides (emphasis on bro) like ‘it’s a choice’ and ‘who cares, it’s a ball of cells’.
Pro-choicers — in my country at least — are almost never convinced by arguments. Pro-lifers are weird, the male ones are creeps, and that’s all there is to discuss.
In general, there’s zero social cost to being pro-choice. Slagging off the Supreme Court takes less moral courage than yawning. By contrast, being openly pro-life does take courage, so when people tell me they’re pro-life, my respect automatically goes up.
All that’s to say: if you’re reading this and oppose abortion, I’m not trying to sell you longtermism in a spirit of ‘here’s what you should really believe’ mansplainery. Well, it is what you should believe, but I’m coming from a place of sincere respect. And since I respect you, I want your views to be as consistent as they possibly can be!
What the bumbaclart is longtermism?
According to William MacAskill — author of What We Owe The Future — “Longtermism is the view that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.”
(Strong longtermists — the based analogue of pro-lifers who eschew rape and incest exceptions — think the longterm future is the key moral priority of our time. Very strong longtermists — the mega-based analogue of pro-lifers like
, who eschews even the life-of-the-mother exception — think the longterm future is of overwhelming moral importance, swamping all present day concerns in priority.)
Here’s the big idea: the interests of future people matter morally — potentially just as much as the interests of people alive right now. (Intuition pump: suppose I smash a bunch of bottles on a mountain path knowing — somehow — that a hundred years in the future a small child will accidentally tread on the shards with bare feet. Smashing the bottles anyway would be wrong, no? Even though she hasn’t been conceived yet, the future child’s interests seem to matter for how I should act in the present.)
If future people matter, then — it seems — that should have serious implications for what we do now. Maybe you’re pessimistic about the future survival of humanity, but plausibly there’s some chance of us surviving a long time. If so, it’s likely the future will contain a truly ridiculous number of people. To quote MacAskill:
[T]here could be very large numbers of future people. Humanity might last for a very long time. If we last as long as the typical mammalian species, it would mean there are hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. If history were a novel, we may be living on its very first page. Barring catastrophe, the vast majority of people who will ever live have not been born yet. These people could have stunningly good lives, or incredibly bad ones.
Currently, we’re heavily biased towards considering only the interests of present people, us. But if future people matter — matter as much as we do, even — then this bias should be rethought.
In particular, it might be that we should be funnelling much more time and energy into forecasting and preventing apocalyptic risks to future people — misaligned AI, nuclear brinkmanship, biowarfare, new pandemics, climate change — than we’re currently inclined to. The idea that we should: that’s longtermism.
Nee-naw-nee-naw-nee-naw.
The pro-life police are here, coming to arrest me. ‘You’re going to draw a parallel between pro-lifers and longtermists’, they say as they clap me in irons, ‘but it’s going to be predicated on a distortion of our view, and we’re bringing you in. Longtermists care about future people, and while that’s cool and all, we don’t think foetuses are mere future people — we think they’re already persons, with the same basic value as adults.’
If you thought about arresting me, I understand why. But you should know: here at Going Awol, we don’t engage in dummkopf ‘I have a bridge to sell you’ Glenn Beckness — each post is an academic decathlon. I will never do you dirty, or distort the pro-life view. Ever.
I understand, fully, that (most) pro-lifers view foetuses as actual persons, not mere future ones. The point I was actually going to make is this: pro-lifers — pretty much across the board — care about pursuing anti-abortion measures that will only kick in in the future.
Example: following Roe v. Wade, US-based (haha, based) pro-lifers sunk a breath-taking amount of energy into pursuing long-term pro-life goals. (For two great books on this, check out Zeigler’s Abortion and the Law in America and Holland’s Tiny You [if you read only one, read Zeigler’s]). In terms of priorities, appointing anti-Roe Supreme Court justices ranked, well, supreme.
Now, notice something: if you were a pro-lifer campaigning for Reagan in 1980 or Trump in 2016, you knew full well that a 1980 Reagan victory or Trump win in 2016 was not, by itself, going to save any babies who were currently in the womb. Your moral concern was directed at babies of the future, babies not yet conceived. Why did you care about these presently non-existent babies? Because those babies would exist eventually, and future people matter a lot.
If you’re a pro-lifer who cares about pushing legislation that will only kick in over 10 months from now, then I have good news: you, my friend, are a type of longtermist!
Notice further how your pro-life convictions entail automatically rejecting two of the biggest objections to longtermism: according to the first objection, harms against future people don’t matter at all — and shouldn’t guide our actions in the present — because future people don’t exist, and only existing interests matter morally.
It’s easy to see why, if you’re a pro-lifer who cares about long-term political strategy, you’re automatically committed to denying this. After all, if only the interests of existing people mattered, then why would you fight for pro-life laws that will only kick in in the future?
According to the second objection — this one a little more sophisticated — you aren’t obligated to pursue a policy affecting future people if pursuing that policy would affect the identities of the future people being conceived.
Suppose you attended a March for Life rally in 1980, hoping to fight for a post-Roe future. Over the next few years, the ripple effect caused by 100,000 people travelling to and congregating in Washington D.C., for a highly-publicized protest will have been enormous. Given how contingent the conception of any particular individual is — a particular man has to meet a particular woman, they have to have sex at a particular time in a particular way, and a particular sperm has to meet a particular egg — a rally like that will have had ripple effects that spread wider and wider as time went on, ensuring that, today, no particular baby conceived after the repeal of Roe would have existed had it not been for that Washington rally in 1980.
According to some critics of longtermism, this fact meant you never had any moral reason to march for life in 1980.
To illustrate: suppose, on your way to the protest, you thought to yourself: ‘Marching today is the right thing to do. As a result of my activism, there will be a particular future baby — call him Steve — who’ll be saved as a result of my activism, and would have been aborted if I hadn’t marched.’
In light of how sensitive reproduction is to the ripple effect, that thought would be mistaken. If you hadn’t flown to Washington and marched, Steve would never have been conceived, and so would never have been aborted. Some other baby would have, but not Steve in particular.
According to these critics of longtermism, this fact means that your activism wasn’t morally important. After all, it didn’t make any particular future foetus better off than they otherwise would have been. Some future foetuses won’t be killed as a result of your long-term activism, but those foetus wouldn’t have existed in the first place if you’d stayed home that day.
If you find this a bit confusing, btw, check out this short video on the non-identity problem — the problem this objection is based on:
With longtermists, of course, you’ll scoff at this non-identity reasoning. It doesn’t matter if I didn’t save Steve in particular, you’ll think to yourself. My activism was still morally important, since it reduced the overall number of future foetuses getting aborted, whoever those foetuses turned out to be!
Thus, if you’re a pro-lifer who pushes for laws that will only take effect in the future, the two main moral objections to longtermism are already off the table for you (Join ussssssss, join usssssssss!)
I don’t think longtermists automatically have to be pro-life. Even if they think more babies = good, they might think women’s bodily rights rule out strict abortion bans, even if those bans would increase the number of future people.
That said, it seems pretty clear to me that pro-lifers should be longtermists (at least in principle). Maybe there are epistemic reasons against trying to be longtermists in practice — i.e., ‘We HaVe AbSoLuTeLy No IdEa WhAt LoNgTeRm EfFeCtS oUr AcTiOnS wIlL hAvE oN fUtUrE gEnErAtIoNs’ — but insofar as one thinks that’s obvious cope, pro-lifers should take the plunge and support longtermism!
I note that the same arguments apply equally to people concerned about the effects of climate change on future generations, or appeals to concern about future generations in relation to the national debt. Generally speaking politics is full of commitments to the not yet existent.
> These days, by and large, the pro-life view isn’t arrived at emotionally or by cultural osmosis — if you’re pro-life, you were probably made that way by an argument. You kept an open mind, and had the courage to say ‘yep… abortion is murder’, even in spite of the immense social pressure to continue mouthing conformist bromides (emphasis on bro) like ‘it’s a choice’ and ‘who cares, it’s a ball of cells’.
I can imagine this to be locally true for you in the UK, but keep in mind they're are hundreds of millions of Evangelicals in the world and billions of Catholics and Muslims that are committed to pro lifeism. I myself grew up in the infamously progressive Netherlands but still my family is very pro life and that's the milieu I grew up in.