Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.

This is the case for longtermism in a nutshell. The premises are simple, and I don’t think they’re particularly controversial. Yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolution—one with far-reaching implications for how activists, researchers, policy makers, and indeed all of us should think and act.

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.

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.

Maintaining a diversity of cultures and political systems leaves open more potential trajectories for civilisation; the same is true, to an even greater degree, for ensuring that civilisation doesn’t end altogether.

As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has pointed out, we do not talk about waterism, essential though running water is to our personal and commercial lives. Or power-ism, although the new availability of first steam and then electric power may have been a more important contributor to the modernity of economic life than any change in the availability of capital. If the managers of a modern business do not want to succumb to the demands of their capital supplier, they can buy their capital services elsewhere. In fact, it is often rather easier for them to exercise that choice than it is to change their water or electricity provider. That these points seem novel, even disturbing, is a measure of the extent to which outdated rhetoric developed to describe the Carron Works and the plant at the River Rouge continues to frame our thought.