This is Will MacAskill:
He’s a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, co-founder of three non-profits, and the ringleader of the Effective Altruism movement. I think of him as being orange because of the striking design of a book he wrote called Doing Good Better.
This is not a review of that book. This is a review of Will’s new book: What We Owe The Future.
Unfortunately, WWOTF is much longer than Doing Good Better and therefore not as good. But I will be generous and review it anyway.
I’m going to split this review into several posts because I have a lot to say and that’s the only way I can keep up with my daily posting schedule.
Here is the plan:
Part 3: Where I draw the illustrations that the introduction needed
Part 6: In which I complain that the book is too long and boring
Part 7: All the best bits from the previous parts glued together.
If you only read one, read Part 7. It’s much lower garbage density than the others.
But first:
What We Owe The Future is a book about longtermism - a philosophical school which says that the effect we have on the long term future is of overriding moral significance. That is, what effect your actions have on the people you will interact with over your life time are inconsequential compared to the downstream effects your actions have hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years from now.
There are three assumptions you need to make this work:
Future people matter morally
There could potentially be a lot of future people
We can influence the existence of these future people in a predictable way
The first assumption is probably the strongest. MacAskill justifies it in the first chapter thus:
To see how intuitive this is, suppose that, while hiking, I drop a glass bottle on the trail and it shatters. And suppose that if I don’t clean it up, later a child will cut herself badly on the shards. In deciding whether to clean it up, does it matter when the child will cut herself? Should I care whether it’s a week, or a decade, or a century from now? No. Harm is harm, whenever it occurs.
One of ACX’s commenters pointed out that
The sharp edges of glass erode very quickly, and glass quickly becomes pretty much harmless to barefoot runners
Of course, this is a mere technicality and misses the broader philosophical issue: why would you take a glass bottle on a hike anyway? They’re heavy and bulky and everyone knows that if you want a cheeky bit of wine on the trail then you pour it into a plastic bottle before you leave.
Stay tuned for part 2.