Values changes are significant because they have major impacts on the lives of people and other beings. But from a longtermist perspective, they are particularly significant compared to other sorts of changes we might make because their effects are unusually predictable.

If you promote a particular means of achieving your goals, like a particular policy, you run the risk that the policy might not be very good at achieving your goal in the future, especially if the world in the future is very different from today, with a very different political, cultural, and technological environment. You might also lose out on the knowledge that we will gain in the future, which might change whether we even think that this policy is a good idea. In contrast, if you can ensure that people in the future adopt a particular goal, then you can trust them to pursue whatever strategies make the most sense, in whatever environment they are in and with whatever additional information they have. You can therefore be fairly confident that you have made the achievement of that goal more likely, even if you have no idea at all what the world will be like when those future people act.

For these reasons changing values has particularly great significance from a longterm perspective. Looking to the past, we see that such changes have had an enormous impact on the lives of billions of people. Looking to the future, if we can improve the values that guide the behaviour of generations to come, we can be pretty confident that they will take better actions, even if they’re living in a world very different from our own, the nature of which we cannot predict.

This suggests that, as longtermists, when trying to improve society’s values, we should focus on promoting more abstract or general moral principles or, when promoting particular moral actions, tie them into a more general worldview. This helps ensure that these moral changes stay relevant and robustly positive into the future.

In this chapter I discuss value lock-in: an event that causes a single value system, or set of value systems, to persist for an extremely long time. Value lock-in would end or severely curtail the moral diversity and upheaval that we are used to. If value lock-in occurred globally, then how well or poorly the future goes would be determined in significant part by the nature of those locked-in values. Some changes in values might still occur, but the broad moral contours of society would have been set, and the world would enact one of only a small number of futures compared to all those that were possible.

When we look at history, we see that the predominant culture in a society tends to entrench itself, eliminate the competition, and take steps to replicate itself over time. Indeed, many moral views regard their own lock-in as desirable.