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Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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It'S quite tough doing good, even if you just focus on the interests of people who are alive today.
The calculations of what we should do get much more complicated if you include the interests of everyone who might come into existence in the future.
There could be trillions of them before humans go extinct.
Should we really worry about all of them?
Wilma Kaskill, a prominent defender of the movement known as long termism, thinks we should.
According to him, future people count just as much as those alive today.
William McCaskill, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thanks so much for having me on.
We're going to talk today about long termism.
Short termism is a well known concept.
What's long termism?
Long termism is the view that positively impacting the long term future should be a key moral priority of our time.
So it's about taking concern for future generations seriously and appreciating just how much is at stake with the things that might happen in our lifetime that could positively or negatively impact the lives of future generations.
Now, in historical terms, planet Earth currently has a lot of people.