We cannot be justified in believing that any actions currently available to us 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 bad and good effects, any finite effects will be washed out in expectation. According to the Cluelessness Argument, we cannot justifiably guess what actions are relatively more or less likely to have positive effects a billion or more years from now. 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 a billion or more years in the future, the odds of good consequences would be negligible due to the compounding of probabilities over time.

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