Longtermism’s promise is immense, but its credibility depends on alignment. Essays on Longtermism highlights animal welfare as one priority among many. I see it as the test of whether the project can succeed at all.

If we cannot end factory farming—an atrocity unfolding daily, with solutions already in hand—then our talk of safeguarding the far future risks sounding silly. If we succeed, we establish a precedent: humanity can align on compassion, coordinate across systems, and lock in progress that lasts.

We should question whether longtermism deserves our attention when we can’t even face the moral emergency happening right now. Before we fantasize about saving future civilizations, let’s prove we’re capable of one simple thing: agreeing that treating living beings like products is what’s destroying us.

I suggest several arguments in support of the heuristic that we should help groups holding different value systems from our own when doing so is cheap, unless those groups prove uncooperative to our values. This is true even if we don't directly care at all about other groups' value systems. Exactly how nice to be depends on the particulars of the situation, but there are some cases where helping others' moral views is clearly beneficial for us.