Written by: A.S.
Current moral principles often work well in most cases, but fall short in edge cases. For example:
“Treat others how you want to be treated”: overall a great rule, but if the other person is directly harming or abusing you, then being kind to them may not make them stop. If you literally apply this rule, you’d abolish the police and the army, and that just doesn’t work. People might say “sure, you also need basic reasonableness” but reasonableness is entirely subjective. The political left and right think entirely differently about reasonableness. A whole lot of complex questions just can’t be answered by this rule.
“If a person commits this kind of crime, throw them in prison for that many years”: obviously this sort of works and it lets society run, but sometimes people are let out and then commit the same crime again. Sometimes prison makes people worse. Sometimes people genuinely repent yet spend their life rotting away in prison anyway.
“Do what it is that people want, make people happy”: obviously there’s something good there, but this can lead to short-termism and of things that are hard. It lets people damage the common good for their own comfort. It implies that if you manipulate people then immoral behavior becomes okay. Etc.
“We must focus on this left-wing principle (e.g. taking care of people) or this right-wing principle (e.g. freedom)”: obviously those principles are important and should be part of society, but society is complex enough that you can’t just solve everything by focusing on one or two values. If you do, other things will stop working that you’re currently taking for granted.
So, let’s look at another moral lens: “what’s most moral is whatever is best for the next 30 years.”
So it’s more or less the “seven generations principle” (i.e. consider the wellbeing of people seven generations into the future), but it’s a bit more realistic for the modern world.
Realistically speaking, if you tell people to plan for the next 140 years (7 generations x 20 years), then they’ll say “beautiful principle” and proceed to engage in short-termism anyway. Why? Because people 140 years in the future are just too abstract.
It’s too easy to think “we’ll do this short-term thing I like now, and we’ll think about the year 2166 some time later.”
Or people today continue to ram through their favorite political ideology because “obviously my political ideology is best long-term, so it is what’ll lead to the best society in 2166.”
Conversely, if you consider the next 30 years, you actually have to consider how your favorite political ideology will actually transform society in a span of time you can picture and plan for.
“Consider what’s best for the next 30 years” is more concrete and easier to visualize than just the general idea of “think long-term.” Depending on people’s age, it might be “the senior years of your life”, or “that time your children are in the middle of their adulthood.” That’s tangible.
At the same time, it’s farther-sighted than the standard 4-year presidential term.
“Consider the next 30 years” principle isn’t really a hard moral rule to run a society on, because it’s too subjective and it’s too hard to predict the next 30 years. It can be abused and it can become paternalistic. It’s not the absolute truth. It’s not the only or the best moral principle.
It’s just one more perspective you can use that’s sometimes useful. It’s one more tool for your toolbox. It’s one more rule of thumb that’s sometimes useful.
Now yes, it’s very likely that 30 years from now society will look dramatically different: gray hats have intervened, galactics have landed, AI or new technologies made life easier, etc. Still, when (some of) those things happen, that just means applying the “consider the next 30 years” lens to a different context. Earth humans can’t simply stop planning because the future is uncertain.
Let’s run through some scenarios and consider the next 30 years:
– Someone is abusing someone else: stop the abuse; give help to the victim; ensure that the abuser doesn’t abuse again in whatever way is best (if a long prison sentence is the only way, do that; if that’s not necessary, give some punishment but not a long prison sentence; in either case focus on reform). That way, 30 years from now, the victim is probably doing okay and the abuser hasn’t abused more people.
– How about truth, and love, and forgiveness, and protection of nature? Absolutely you need those in order to make a society viable and worth living in long-term.
– Should we make tough but productive choices today? Yes to an extent, even if people don’t like them, if they’re necessary for the next 30 years. That said, if you go too far in this direction, you create another type of unlivable society, so you need a balance here. And when making tough choices, consider second and third order effects.
– Should you promote your favorite ideology? Maybe, but if you honestly think about what it’ll do to society during the next 30 years (including second and third order effects), you’ll probably see that you need to moderate some points somewhat. Don’t just assume “obviously things will be great”; really think about what society will look like, including the areas of society that aren’t foremost on your mind.
– Competence, hard work, doing unglamorous jobs etc are important and noble, because society falls apart without them. If people stop doing unglamorous jobs, if everyone including the spiritual community thinks “someone else should do those”, then we don’t get justice and prosperity. Instead the rich will be fine, the poor will suffer, and many things you take for granted will stop working. This is why some spiritual and religious traditions make normal work part of their practice.
– At the same time, society has become such that people are basically doing everything they can to avoid having to work normal jobs. That’s not sustainable long-term, so it’s time to look at societal circumstances. In the short term you can try to get people to work normal jobs by squeezing and shaming them, but long term that doesn’t work. At the same time, if everyone “boycotts normal jobs”, then it’s the poor who’ll suffer from that, not the rich. That’s indeed not fair, but if you think about the next 30 years, it is reality.
So, in conclusion: as one useful lens, consider the next 30 years.