Will MacAskill’sWhat We Owe The Future illustrates various points with some fascinating historical and scientific trivia. I’ve collected my favourite ones here. The bold emphasis has been added by me.
Giant sloths
Consider megatherium, a giant ground sloth and one of the largest land mammals to have ever lived, rivalling the Asian elephant in size. It went extinct 12,500 years ago.
Net Negative Lives
[Researchers] asked 240 people in the United States and 240 people in India a range of questions on the quality of their life so far [and] asked for qualitative comments. […] The comments from those who gave negative answers were as dark as one might expect, such as, “My life was and is a horrible thing. I would not want to relive it again,” and “I have lived through pure hell the last 20 years of my life and I would not wish it on anyone.”
Buildering
I was reckless as a teenager and sometimes went “buildering,” also known as urban climbing. Once, coming down from the roof of a hotel in Glasgow, I put my foot on a skylight and fell through. I caught myself at waist height, but the broken glass punctured my side. Luckily, it missed all internal organs. A little deeper, though, and my guts would have popped out violently, and I could easily have died. I still have the scar: three inches long and almost half an inch thick, curved like an earthworm.
Skipping
[Researchers] asked participants to write down what activity they were doing and how long it would last, and then respond to the question, “If you could, and it had no negative consequences, would you jump forward in time to the end of what you’re currently doing?” That is, they asked participants to imagine having the option of simply not experiencing—though still doing—whatever activity they were engaged in at that moment.
[…]
It turns out that people in the survey, on average, would skip around 40 percent of their day if they could. In a second, smaller study, the same experimenters asked people to look back at the previous day and indicate which experiences they would have skipped if they could, and then asked them to compare pairs of experiences with each other to work out how good the experiences they’d have kept were and how bad the experiences they would’ve skipped were. For instance, a study subject might say that thirty minutes of an activity they’d rather skip—say, housework—was worth fifteen minutes of an enjoyable activity—say, dinner with friends. This would indicate that, for this study subject, having dinner with friends is twice as good per minute as doing housework is bad. Again, people skipped around 40 percent of their day, and on average, people were happier during the times they kept than they were unhappy during the times they skipped. Taking both duration and intensity into account, the negative experiences were only bad enough to cancel out 58 percent of people’s positive experiences.
The sorts of experiences people kept and skipped were what you might expect: people skipped 69 percent of the time they were working and only 2 percent of the time they were engaged in what the experimenters euphemistically called “intimate activities.” In the smaller of the two studies, in which intensity of experience was measured, 12 percent of people had lives where, on the day in question, negative experiences outweighed the positive. This does not necessarily mean that 12 percent of people have lives of negative wellbeing—these respondents might just have had a bad day.
Megafauna
Why is Africa home to so many more species of megafauna—large animals like elephants and giraffes—than the rest of the world?1 You might think, as I did before learning about this topic, that the answer has to do with Africa’s particular environment. But that’s not right. Fifty thousand years ago, a great variety of megafauna roamed the planet.
[…]
There is a heated debate over what caused the extinctions of megafauna. Some scientists believe that natural climate change was the main driver, some believe that humans were the culprit, and some believe it was a mix of humans and climate change. In my view, the evidence is clear that humans often played a decisive role: most of these megafauna survived over a dozen similarly sized climatic changes in the past; smaller animals did not go extinct at nearly the same rate as megafauna; and the timing of their extinction usually coincides with humans’ arrival into their habitats. Though perhaps helped by climate change, it was hunting and the disruption of natural environments caused by human activity that killed them off. Unlike megafauna on other continents, African megafauna evolved alongside humans and so were better prepared for Homo sapiens as a predator.
Swastika Night
The lock-in of some values, like Nazi or Stalinist values, would obviously have been horrific. Illustrations of some of these scenarios have been sketched in fiction. Most famous is George Orwell’s 1984, in which this bleak prospect is epitomised in the famous metaphor of “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Even more impressive, in my view, is Swastika Night, written by Katharine Burdekin. It takes seriously Hitler’s claim that he would create a thousand-year Reich: set seven hundred years in the future, it depicts a world which is entirely controlled by the Nazis and the Japanese Empire. In the German Empire, non-Germans have been subjugated, violence is glorified, and women are kept in pens and raped at will. To us, it reads like a piece of alternative history, but it was really a prophetic warning about ideological lock-in; the book was written in 1935, four years before World War II broke out, and published in 1937, twelve years before 1984, at a time when Hitler still had considerable international prestige.
Mao’s and Hitler’s Sadism
Mao gave detailed instructions when ordering the torture and murder of millions of his victims, and he took pleasure in watching acts of torture. Similarly, Hitler gave specific instructions for some of the plotters of the 1944 assassination attempt to be strangled with piano wire, and their agonizing deaths were filmed. According to Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and war production in Nazi Germany, “Hitler loved the film and had it shown over and over again.”
Hiroshima
We can consider, for example, the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. The bomb the United States dropped was 1,500 times more powerful than any previously used. The fireball at the hypocenter of the blast reached several thousand degrees Celsius within one-ten thousandth of a second before igniting all flammable material within one and a half miles. Ninety percent of the city’s buildings were at least partially incinerated or reduced to rubble. Initial estimates suggested that 70,000 died because of the bombing before the end of 1945, while more recent estimates put the figure at 140,000. The heat from the blast was so ferocious that steps, pavements, and walls were brightened, and the people incinerated in the blast left darkened shadows. One person, thought to be a woman named Mitsuno Ochi, left a shadow on the steps of the Bank of Japan, now preserved at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in an exhibit known as the Human Shadow of Death.
Before learning about Hiroshima’s subsequent history, I would have thought that, even today, it would be a nuclear wasteland, consisting of little more than smoking ruins—Mitsuno Ochi’s shadow on a citywide scale. But nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the enormous loss of life and destruction of infrastructure, power was restored to some areas within a day, to 30 percent of homes within two weeks, and to all homes not destroyed by the blast within four months. There was a limited rail service running the day after the attack, there was a streetcar service running within three days, water pumps were working again within four days, and telecommunications were restored in some areas within a month. The Bank of Japan, just 380 metres from the hypocenter of the blast, reopened within just two days. The population of Hiroshima returned to its predestruction level within a decade. Today, it is a thriving modern city of 1.2 million people.
US Constitution
More recent examples come from the United States’ Founding Fathers. The US Constitution is almost 250 years old and has mostly remained the same throughout its life. Its founding was of enormous longterm importance, and many of the Founding Fathers were well aware of this. John Adams, the second president of the United States, commented, “The institutions now made in America will not wholly wear out for thousands of years. It is of the last importance, then, that they should begin right. If they set out wrong, they will never be able to return, unless it be by accident, to the right path.”
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin had such a reputation for believing in the health and longevity of the United States that in 1784 a French mathematician wrote a friendly satire of him, suggesting that if Franklin was sincere in his beliefs, he should invest his money to pay out on social projects centuries later, getting the benefits of compound interest along the way. Franklin thought it was a great idea, and in 1790 he invested £1000 (about $135,000 in today’s money) each for the cities of Boston and Philadelphia: three-quarters of the funds would be paid out after one hundred years, and the remainder after two hundred years. By 1990, when the final funds were distributed, the donation had grown to almost $5 million for Boston and $2.3 million for Philadelphia.
Tokyo and New York get wet
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that in the medium-low- emissions scenario, which is now widely seen to be the most likely, sea level would rise by around 0.75 metres by the end of the century. But it would keep rising well past the year 2100. After ten thousand years, sea level would be ten to twenty metres higher than it is today. Hanoi, Shanghai, Kolkata, Tokyo, and New York would all be mostly below sea level.
European air pollution
Even in the European Union, which in global terms is comparatively unpolluted, air pollution from fossil fuels causes the average citizen to lose a whole year of life.
Utopia etymology
Etymologically, “utopia” means “no-place,” […] A better word would be “eutopia,” meaning “good place”.
Benjamin Lay
Here, though, I look at just one part of this narrative. Because I’m interested in whether or not abolition was contingent, I’m interested in those parts of the history that seem unexpected or difficult to explain. And, as leading historian of abolition Professor Christopher Leslie Brown puts it, “The causes of slave resistance do not seem particularly mysterious.” What is surprising, he notes, is that slavery was attacked by those who benefited from it. Moreover, enslaved people have very often throughout history powerfully resisted their oppression. So why was there a successful abolitionist campaign in Britain in the early 1800s and not in any of history’s previous slave societies?
I think that the activism of a fairly small group of Quakers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides part of the answer. Their efforts were hugely important in one of the most surprising moral about-faces in history. There were many important figures in this story, but among the early Quaker activists, the most striking was Benjamin Lay.
Lay was born in Copford, England, in 1682. He became a sailor based in London, then a shopkeeper in Barbados, before moving in 1732 to Philadelphia, which at the time was the largest city in British North America and home to the largest Quaker community. Lay was a dwarf, standing at a little over four feet tall, and hunchbacked. He referred to himself as “Little Benjamin,” likening himself to “little David” who killed Goliath.
Lay’s moral radicalism took many forms. He opposed the death penalty and consumerism. Like many of the later abolitionists, and very unusually for the time, he became a vegetarian and even refused to wear leather or wool. Later in his life, he lived in a cave just outside Philadelphia and, boycotting all goods produced by enslaved people, made all his own clothes, wore undyed fabrics, and refused to drink tea or eat sugar.
His opposition to slavery stemmed from his time as a sailor, when he learned of the pervasiveness of rape on the transatlantic slave ships, and from the two years he spent in Barbados. Early in his time there, he whipped several enslaved people who, racked by hunger, had stolen food from his shops. He was subsequently stricken with guilt and made friends with a number of enslaved people. One of these friends, a barrel maker, had a master who would whip the people he owned every Monday morning “to keep them in awe.” One Sunday evening, in order to avoid the next day’s brutality, this friend committed suicide. Experiences like these haunted Lay for the rest of his life.
Over the course of the twenty-seven years that he lived in Pennsylvania, Lay harangued the Philadelphia Quakers about the horrors of slavery at every opportunity, and he did so in dramatic style. He once stood outside a Quaker meeting in the snow in bare feet with no coat. When passersby expressed concern, he explained that enslaved people were made to work outside for the whole winter dressed as he was. During Quaker meetings, as soon as any slave owner tried to speak, it was said that Lay would rise to his feet and shout, “There’s another negro-master!”2When kicked out of one meeting for making trouble, he lay down in the mud outside the entrance of the meetinghouse so that every member of the congregation had to step
over his body as they left. When he discovered that a local family kept a young girl as a slave, he invited their six-year-old son to his cave without telling his parents so that they would briefly know the grief of losing a child.
In his most famous stunt, at the 1738 Yearly Meeting of the Quakers, he came dressed in military uniform under a large cloak, carrying a hollow book filled with fake blood. During the meeting, he allegedly rose to his feet, threw off his cloak, and exclaimed, “Oh all you Negro masters who are contentedly holding your fellow creatures in a state of slavery,... you might as well throw off the plain coat as I do. It would be as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard, if you should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book!” As he spoke, he splattered the gathering with the fake blood. John Woolman, who later became one of the most influential Quaker abolitionists, was likely in the audience that day.
Lay became well known across Pennsylvania. But he was not revered in his time for his activism. In fact, he was effectively disowned four times, by Quaker societies in London, Colchester, Philadelphia, and Abington. But he seems, ultimately, to have been influential within Quaker circles: in the late 1790s, Benjamin Rush wrote that a print of Lay was seen in “many houses in Philadelphia.” Lay was also friends with Anthony Benezet, who helped to make abolition mainstream in Britain. And Lay’s activism coincided with the time when moral sentiment among Quakers changed dramatically. In the period of 1681 to 1705, an estimated 70 percent of the leaders of the Quaker’s Yearly Meeting owned people; for the period 1754 to 1780 that figure was only 10 percent. In the 1758 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, it was decided that Quakers who traded people would be disciplined and then disowned (though it would be another eighteen years before owning people was also banned). When Lay was told, he reportedly shouted, “Thanksgiving and praise be rendered unto the Lord God.... I can now die in peace.” He passed away one year later.
Hazda
In his study of the Hadza from Tanzania, one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies in the world, the anthropologist Frank Marlowe noted,
The Hadza sing often, and everyone can sing very well. When several Hadza get in my Land Rover to go somewhere, they almost invariably begin singing. They use a melody they all know but make up lyrics on the spot. These lyrics may go something like “Here we go riding in Frankie’s car, riding here and there in the car. When Frankie comes, we go riding in the car.” They take different parts in a three-part harmony, never missing a beat, all seemingly receiving the improvised lyrics telepathically.
They also love to dance and do so in various distinct styles.... This dancing is unique and full of soul—the most sensual dancing I’ve ever seen.
Confuscism
In the sixth century BC in China, the collapse of the Zhou dynasty brought about a long period of conflict now known as the Warring States era. But this collapse also led to a vibrant era of philosophical and cultural experimentation—a golden age of Chinese philosophy later known as the Hundred Schools of Thought.
During the Hundred Schools of Thought, philosophers would travel from state to state, developing their ideas and trying to persuade the political elite of their theories, moral commitments, and policy proposals.2 Of the “hundred” schools, there were four leading philosophies.3 Best known to us now is the philosophy of Kǒng Fūzǐ, or “Master Kǒng,” better known in the West as Confucius.
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Finally, there were the Mohists: followers of the fifth century BC philosopher Mòzǐ, or “Master Mò.” Even though they are little known today, they were the main rival of the Confucians. They were so influential that their Confucian contemporary Mengzi said their teachings seemed to “fill the world.”
The Mohists argued that we should care about others just as much as we care for ourselves and that we should pursue whatever policies will produce the most benefit for all people. They were the first consequentialists, endorsing the view that we should take whatever actions produce the best outcomes. Their philosophy has many similarities to that of the British utilitarians John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham; the Mohists just got there two thousand years earlier.
Putting their radical ideas into practice, they argued that, to avoid wasting resources, people shouldn’t own luxuries or consume too much. They condemned the widespread nepotism of the time and advocated meritocracy instead. Being particularly distressed by war, some Mohists formed paramilitary groups devoted to protecting weaker cities. One commentator likened them to Jedi knights.
[…]
A combination of luck and skilful politicking meant that Confucianism [...] emerged as the orthodox ideology of the Chinese Empire.