Is Legal Longtermism Common Sense?

Eric Martínez, Fachinformationsdienst Für Internationale Und Interdisziplinäre Rechtsforschung
2022 Verfassungsblog: On Matters Constitutional  
The past decade has seen a growing interest in protecting future generations from risks associated with climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and other potential threats. Philosophical theories have developed in parallel, and those associated with the view that one should be particularly concerned with ensuring that the long-run future goes well have been referred to as longtermism (MacAskill, 2022) . In the context of law, these theories form the basis for legal longtermism, the
more » ... et of views associated with the claim that law and legal institutions ought to protect the far future (see Martinez & Winter, 2021a;). An implicit assumption surrounding this work has been that the principles underlying longtermism are not intuitive or widely accepted and, by extension, that one of the principal tasks for legal longtermists is to convince people, and particularly policymakers, of the validity of these principles. However, recent empirical work appears to support the idea that, at least on an abstract level, people do buy into the principles of legal longtermism. In this post, we will briefly present and discuss the implications of three findings in support of this claim, showing that:
doi:10.17176/20220809-181618-0 fatcat:l6ccfkh6v5bhrp25jrxo53hh7e