What We Owe The Future

A Million-Year View

by

352 pages

English language

Published Aug. 31, 2022 by Oneworld Publications.

ISBN:
978-0-86154-250-5
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3 stars (1 review)

What We Owe the Future is a 2022 book by the Scottish philosopher and ethicist William MacAskill, an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford. It argues for effective altruism and the philosophy of longtermism, which MacAskill defines as "the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time."

2 editions

reviewed What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill

EA 2.0, it’s (kind of) in the game

3 stars

I liked a lot of the tenants of the early effective altruists; the data driven approach to doing the most good is naturally appealing. But if this is where it leads, I think I want to get off.

The author (compellingly) makes the case that the future has the potential to be vast, which essentially means that any quantitative approach, especially around extinction, is going to fall into the trap of the Tyranny of Survival. It reminds me a lot of my days in high school debate, where every round involved nuclear war scenarios, and “a millionth of infinity is still infinity”. I rejected the premise then, and I reject it now.

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