A new article about the importance of caring about future beings

A new article about the importance of caring about future beings

9 Mar 2018

Animal Ethics has just published a new article on the reasons to be concerned about the interests of sentient beings who will exist in the future. You can read this new piece here:

The importance of the future

Many people focus on improving the present rather than on what will happen further in time. However, the interests of future sentient beings should count as much as those of presently existing ones. In addition, many more sentient beings are likely to exist in the future. Our overall impact may be significantly higher if we focus on making the future better rather than on improving the lot of presently existing individuals.

There are significant risks of future scenarios in which there are huge amounts of suffering that we might stop from occurring if we acted correctly today. While we might make better guesses about what may happen tomorrow than about what will happen long after today, the latter may have a much higher impact given the number of individuals involved.

There are different ways we could influence the future for the good. Some of them may aim to have a broad impact while others may have more targeted ones. In order to make better decisions concerning this, we need to recognize the importance of the future and the risks of bad (or very bad) scenarios occurring in it. We hope this new article will help with that.