Focused on the Future or Preoccupied by the Present? Longtermism, Moral Concern for Future Generations, and Afterlife Beliefs

In an era of polycrisis, the philosophy of longtermism posits that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority. This study investigates psychological factors predicting moral concern for future generations, focusing on the established constructs of intergenerational concern (IC) and impartial intergenerational beneficence (IIB) and, as a novel contribution, the role of afterlife beliefs. Using a representative U.S. sample (N = 1100), we tested a series of preregistered hypotheses via linear regression, hierarchical regression and ANOVA. The study had two primary findings. First, we successfully replicated previous research, confirming that intergenerational concern is a significant and robust predictor of moral expansiveness toward future generations. Second, contrary to our hypothesis, afterlife beliefs (whether God-centred, cosmic-spiritual, or secular) demonstrated no significant predictive power for future moral concern. However, further analyses revealed that the relationship between intergenerational concern and future moral concern was significantly weaker when framed as a zero-sum trade-off against concern for the present. These findings suggest that while intergenerational concern is a valid psychological construct, its conflation with the philosophical movement of longtermism is questionable given the movement’s emphasis on placing the interests of future generations above those of the present. We conclude that moral concern for the future is largely independent of religious eschatological belief and that the propensity to care for future generations does not necessarily imply a willingness to prioritise them at the expense of the present.