We cannot justifably believe that any currently available actions will have a non-negligible positive influence a billion or more years in the future. I offer three arguments for this thesis. According to the Infinite Washout Argument, given the non-zero chance that your actions will produce infinitely many effects, any finite effects will wash out in expectation. According to the Cluelessness Argument, we cannot justifiably guess what actions are likely to have positive effects in a billion-plus years. We cannot be justified, for example, in thinking that nuclear war or human extinction would be more likely to have bad than good consequences that far into the future. According to the Negligibility Argument, even if we could justifiably guess that some particular action is likelier to have good than bad consequences that far in the future, the odds of good consequences would be negligible due to the compounding of probabilities over time.

Longtermists such as William MacAskill maintain that if we are concerned about human well-being and the longterm future, we should embrace continued technological advancement and development, and that, indeed, one of the most significant threats to longterm human well-being and the well-being of other sentient creatures is technological stagnation – remaining at roughly the present technological level. This paper argues that we should be much more skeptical regarding claims that link continued technological development with positive contributions to well-being. We should take seriously that even if technological development has contributed significantly to improvements in well-being in the past, that we may reach or have already reached a point at which future technological development no longer does so, and that, in that event, thinking about longterm ethical concerns actually recommends developing the capability to slow down, stop, or even roll back (some) technological development.

Many claim that there is an important relationship between consciousness and welfare. Call this general view phenomenalism. One way of fleshing out phenomenalism is to hold that consciousness is what makes one the type of entity that can be noninstrumentally better or worse off in the first place. Consciousness is at least a necessary condition on welfare subjecthood. A different account holds that even if consciousness is not necessary for welfare subjecthood, conscious welfare subjects have a greater welfare capacity. We argue that the most likely source of support for either version of phenomenalism – hedonism about welfare goods and bads – provides no support at all. Along the way, we discuss an alternative view of welfare subjectivity and welfare capacity that does not appeal to consciousness but only to mentality, a view we call mentalism.

Egalitarianism and prioritarianism are competing views about the ethics of distribution. Both views have wide scopes of concern. But, writing in this journal, Michael Otsuka has discovered a case that seems to show an interesting asymmetry between the limits of egalitarian and prioritarian concern. In that case, intuitively one outcome is better than another (in a respect relevant to the ethics of distribution); prioritarianism can recover that intuitive judgment; but egalitarianism seems unable to recover it. I show, however, that egalitarianism can recover the intuitive judgment in question on a well-motivated basis. That result is of interest because it shows the possibility and prima facie plausibility of a version of egalitarianism with a surprisingly wide scope of concern – one according to which it matters that some are worse off than those who (merely) could have existed.

In this paper, I argue that Taurek’s positive view, namely that we ought to show equal respect and concern to those affected by our actions, commits him to saving the bigger number in some cases. This leads to an adjustment of his negative claim, namely that numbers don’t count. Numbers don’t count in the sense he was interested in, i.e., sums of harms or benefits (across different people) lack moral significance. Numbers do count, however, when considering how to act fairly which is what equal respect demands. This adjustment supports Taurek’s general view on how to think about moral matters.