The “Long Reflection” is a proposal by futurist philosophers about how humanity could chart a moral path forward. Toby Ord, philosopher at the University of Oxford and cofounder of Effective Altruism, explains it this way in his 2020 book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity:
If we achieve existential security, we will have room to breathe. With humanity’s longterm potential secured, we will be past the Precipice, free to contemplate the range of futures that lie open before us. And we will be able to take our time to reflect upon what we truly desire; upon which of these visions for humanity would be the best realization of our potential. We shall call this the Long Reflection.
The “Precipice” in Ord’s book title and quote refers to the phase of history that humans are currently in, in which we’re highly vulnerable to extinction. Once we escape this phase, by technologically and institutionally mitigating extinction-level threats, the Long Reflection of centuries, millennia, or more can commence. If we already had near-complete and near-infallible knowledge of moral truth, we would not need a Long Reflection, but we probably lack anything of the kind.
As I have explained at length in a recent article “Heinlein’s Wager” at Human Progress, I think the Long Reflection is an indispensable part of humanity’s moral path forward. You can read the article to learn the details, but the bottom line is this: Humanity has thus far probably only scratched the surface of the moral truth that exists to be discovered, to the extent that any exists. Humanity is consequently obliged to pursue future moral discovery, not just adherence to what little moral truth has already been learned. Only in this manner can we hope to maximize our all-time adherence to true moral principles. Something like Effective Altruism’s “Long Reflection” is therefore in order.
But the Long Reflection is often described as part of a series of consecutive phases that doesn’t make much sense.
Ord writes in The Precipice:
I think that at the highest level we should adopt a strategy proceeding in three phases:
Reaching Existential Security
The Long Reflection
Achieving Our Potential
This gives the impression that, if all goes according to plan, the Long Reflection will eventually conclude and humanity’s achievements will be maximized, its full potential having been reached. Moreover, Ord writes:
The ultimate aim of the Long Reflection would be to achieve a final answer to the question of which is the best kind of future for humanity. … It may be that even convergence is impossible, with some disputes or uncertainties that are beyond the power of reason to resolve. If so, our aim would be to find the future that gave the best possible conciliation between the remaining perspectives.
We would not need to fully complete this process before moving forward.
This idea of a “final answer” or even “the best possible conciliation” of anything is a mischaracterization of what the Long Reflection should aim to do. As Karl Popper and David Deutsch have explained, the idea that the “final truth” will ever be attained is a misunderstanding of the character of knowledge. Instead of ever reaching some necessary endpoint, the Long Reflection should aim to continue unboundedly, resulting in potentially infinite improvement to moral understanding and achievement.
In his 1994 book The Myth of the Framework, the brilliant and influential philosopher of science Karl Popper explains that the growth of knowledge need not ever end. To the contrary, new knowledge leads to new questions and expands the scope of our potential future inquiry. “If the progress that has been made is great, then the new problems will be of a character undreamt-of before,” he writes. “There will be deeper problems, and there will be more of them. The further we progress in knowledge, the more clearly we can discern the vastness of our ignorance.”
The renowned University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch argues in his 2011 New York Times bestselling book The Beginning of Infinity that final answers must always remain out of reach:
Nor will we ever run out of problems. The deeper an explanation is, the more new problems it creates. That must be so, if only because there can be no such thing as an ultimate explanation… so any other purported foundation of all explanations must be bad too. It must be easily variable because it cannot answer the question: why that foundation and not another? Nothing can be explained only in terms of itself.
So, humanity will never complete the Long Reflection by reaching the “Achieve Our Potential” phase that Ord suggests. We will either eternally improve our understanding of whatever truths exist to be known (an infinitely Long Reflection), or, more likely, die out having only achieved an infinitesimal fraction of our unbounded potential. But we should not expect to learn the “final answer” to morality or anything else. Better and better tentative answers, yes, but no final answers.
And not only should the Long Reflection continue as long as creatures such as us exist to do the reflecting, it should also not be seen as a second phase of a three-phase plan. Ord’s description of the Long Reflection as the second phase in a plan, with us currently still working on the first phase, deemphasizes the important fact that the Long Reflection has already begun, well before humans have completed the first phase by “Reaching Existential Security.”
Indeed, the fact that we have already begun the Long Reflection can aid us in working toward existential security, because insights gained through the reflection process may advance technological and institutional developments that protect against extinction-level threats.
Ord treats reflection as something that can substantially precede achievement, but reflection and achievement must proceed together, because action itself generates the problems, criticism, and knowledge upon which further moral reflection depends.
The Long Reflection is a good idea, but it is not merely one phase of civilizational development. It is (hopefully) an unbounded process of continuous improvement on which humanity is already embarked.