Promoting Positive Values for a Better Long-Term Future

Choices about values do not only affect what we do today; they shape which actions, institutions, and technologies future generations will see as acceptable or unacceptable. Working to spread positive moral values and norms is therefore a promising way to make the long-term future safer, more just, and more compassionate.

Why Values Matter for the Far Future

Large-scale harms often arise not only from ignorance or technical mistakes, but from value systems that tolerate cruelty, exploitation, or reckless risk-taking. By helping better values gain influence, we may:

• Reduce the chance that powerful actors deliberately cause catastrophic harm.
• Encourage more cooperative approaches to global problems and shared risks.
• Increase concern for currently neglected groups, such as people in poor countries, animals, or future generations.
• Guide how transformative technologies are used and what constraints society places on them.

Because values and institutions can persist for long periods, improving them may have compounding effects over centuries or longer, a key consideration for longtermist thinking.

Which Values Are Especially Important?

There is wide moral disagreement, but several value clusters are especially relevant when we care about the long-term future across many ethical views.

1. Compassion and Moral Circle Expansion

Moral circle expansion is the process by which people extend moral concern to a wider range of beings: different races and genders, foreigners, animals, and future generations. Historians have documented past expansions, such as the abolition of slavery and rising concerns about animal welfare.

• Near term: More compassionate attitudes typically support policies that reduce extreme poverty, improve public health, and protect vulnerable groups.
• Long term: Societies that care about distant strangers are more likely to handle global risks cooperatively and to avoid locking in oppressive or cruel institutions.

2. Truth-Seeking and Epistemic Humility

Values around honesty, scientific inquiry, and critical thinking influence how well societies understand the world and respond to new evidence. Stronger truth-seeking norms support:

• Better identification of emerging risks, such as pandemics or unsafe uses of AI.
• More reliable public information and less susceptibility to propaganda and misinformation.
• Institutions that can update policies when the evidence changes.

3. Cooperation and Fairness

Complex global challenges require large-scale cooperation between countries, companies, and communities that do not always trust one another. Values that emphasize fairness, reciprocity, and non-aggression can make high-stakes cooperation easier by:

• Increasing willingness to share information and resources on global health, climate, and security.
• Supporting norms against the use of weapons or technologies that threaten civilization as a whole.
• Encouraging institutions that protect minority rights and reduce incentives for violent conflict.

4. Concern for Future Generations

Policies about climate change, biodiversity, and advanced technologies all involve trade-offs between short-term interests and long-run consequences. A stronger ethic of responsibility to future people can:

• Motivate investments in preparedness for pandemics, natural disasters, and technological risks.
• Support safeguards against the misuse of powerful tools, such as synthetic biology or advanced artificial intelligence.
• Encourage reforms that strengthen institutions over decades instead of election cycles.

How Value Change Has Shaped History

Historical cases show that durable changes in widely held values can transform politics and everyday life:

• Human rights movements: Shifts in public attitudes around equality and dignity contributed to decolonization, civil rights, and greater protections for marginalized groups.
• Public health norms: Greater concern for preventing disease and protecting community health laid the foundation for sanitation systems, vaccination programs, and international health treaties.
• Environmentalism: Increased moral concern for non-human nature led to national parks, air and water quality regulation, and international agreements on pollutants and climate.

These cases illustrate how value change can make certain harmful actions socially unacceptable or legally prohibited, sometimes quite rapidly once a tipping point is reached.

Main Pathways for Promoting Positive Values

Different routes to value change operate on different timescales and reach different audiences. Some promising pathways include:

Educational and Cultural Work

Formal education, media, and cultural products are powerful channels for shaping how people see the world.

• Integrating ethical reflection and critical thinking into curricula.
• Creating books, films, and games that depict empathy, cooperation, and moral reflection as admirable.
• Supporting journalism that highlights global interdependence and the lives of distant or marginalized groups.

Movement and Community Building

Voluntary communities focused on ideas and action can help people develop and live out better values.

• Fostering communities that encourage open discussion, altruism, and evidence-based compassion.
• Providing mentorship, events, and resources that make it easier for members to take impactful, values-driven actions.
• Connecting people across disciplines and countries to build broader, more inclusive perspectives.

Institutional Reform and Policy

Values can be reinforced or eroded by how institutions actually operate.

• Embedding transparency and accountability mechanisms that reward honesty and discourage corruption.
• Designing international agreements that reflect fairness between rich and poor countries.
• Establishing ethical review processes for high-risk technologies, with attention to global and future impacts.

Research on Moral Psychology and Social Change

Understanding how people form and revise moral views can make efforts to promote positive values more effective.

• Studying which messages influence moral concern without causing backlash or polarization.
• Identifying strategies that encourage perspective-taking across cultural and political divides.
• Analyzing historical movements to see which tactics produced lasting, not just superficial, shifts in norms.

Comparing Value Promotion to Other Global Priorities

Promoting positive values is one among several major strategies for improving the long-term future. The table below offers a simplified comparison with two other broad approaches.

Benefits and Uncertainties of Working on Values

As a cause area, promoting positive values is both promising and highly uncertain.

Reasons It Could Be Extremely Impactful

• Leverage over many decisions: If you help shift a widely held value (for example, the importance of future generations), you indirectly influence many future policies and technologies.
• Longevity of influence: Norms embedded in education, law, and culture can last for generations, especially if they are self-reinforcing.
• Complementarity: Better values make technical and institutional fixes more likely to be adopted and maintained.

Key Sources of Uncertainty

• Measurement difficulties: It is hard to rigorously quantify how much a particular intervention shifted values, and even harder to connect that to specific long-term outcomes.
• Risk of unintended consequences: Well-intentioned campaigns can sometimes polarize debates or entrench opposition if designed poorly.
• Value pluralism: Reasonable people disagree on which values should be promoted, and some strategies might privilege particular worldviews.

Practical Ways Individuals Can Contribute

Many people can meaningfully support positive value change, either directly through their work or indirectly through donations and advocacy.

Career Paths

Careers that may have especially high leverage for promoting better values include:

• Research and academia: Studying moral psychology, global priorities, social movements, or the ethics of emerging technologies.
• Education and curriculum design: Helping integrate global citizenship, critical thinking, and ethical reflection into formal education.
• Media, communications, and storytelling: Shaping narratives in journalism, film, interactive media, or publishing that highlight empathy and long-term thinking.
• Policy and international organizations: Embedding concern for future generations and global fairness into treaties, regulations, and governance frameworks.
• Community-building roles: Strengthening communities that encourage open, rigorous, and altruistic engagement with big questions.

Donations and Philanthropy

Philanthropists can support organizations that:

• Run programs on global citizenship, peace education, or ethical reasoning.
• Promote research into long-term global risks and ethics.
• Build communities dedicated to evidence-based altruism and long-term responsibility.

Everyday Actions

Even outside of specialized roles, individuals can contribute to healthier norms by:

• Modeling honest, evidence-based discussion in personal and online conversations.
• Supporting media and institutions that take global and future-oriented perspectives seriously.
• Practicing and encouraging empathy for those who are distant in space, time, or culture.

How to Think Strategically About Value Promotion

Because this is a complex and uncertain area, strategic care is essential.

• Clarify goals: Be explicit about which values you aim to promote (for example, impartial concern for all people) and why.
• Seek evidence: Draw on social science, history, and field experience to avoid repeating failed approaches.
• Maintain humility: Recognize moral uncertainty and the possibility that some values you hold strongly may be mistaken.
• Prioritize robustness: Favor interventions that seem beneficial under a wide range of plausible moral and empirical views.
• Monitor and adapt: Collect feedback, watch for negative side effects, and be prepared to change course.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1: How is promoting positive values different from political advocacy?

Promoting positive values usually focuses on broad, cross-cutting principles like compassion, honesty, and concern for future generations, rather than specific partisan positions or short-term policy debates. Political advocacy can sometimes be part of value promotion, but value work often aims to influence the background assumptions that shape policy across many issues and over long timescales.

Q2: Can value change really affect existential risks?

Yes, at least indirectly. For example, norms that emphasize international cooperation and caution about high-impact technologies can make it more likely that states adopt safety standards, share information about emerging threats, and avoid arms races in dangerous technologies. While technical safety work is still crucial, improved values can increase the chances that such work is prioritized and used responsibly.

Q3: Isn’t it paternalistic to try to change others’ values?

There is a real risk of paternalism, especially if efforts ignore local perspectives or rely on manipulation. More defensible approaches emphasize open dialogue, transparency about aims, respect for disagreement, and methods that help people reason better rather than simply pushing them toward a predetermined conclusion. Focusing on procedural values like honesty and critical thinking can also reduce paternalistic elements.

Q4: How can we tell if a value-promotion project is working?

Measurement is challenging, but partial indicators include surveys of attitudes, changes in behavior, engagement with educational materials, and institutional reforms that reflect the targeted values. Because many effects are long-term, combining quantitative metrics with qualitative case studies and theory-driven reasoning is often necessary.

Q5: Is this cause only relevant if I care about the very long-term future?

No. Stronger norms of compassion, honesty, and cooperation are likely to benefit people alive today as well, for example by improving public health responses, reducing corruption, and supporting more inclusive institutions. The additional argument from longtermism is that these benefits may continue to matter for a very long time.

Written by

Medha Deb

Medha Deb is an editor with a master's degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hyderabad. She believes that her qualification has helped her develop a deep understanding of language and its application in various contexts. Medha specializes in the areas of beauty, health, sports, and wellness and is committed to ensuring that the content on the website is…