What We Owe the Future
Metadata
- Author: William MacAskill
Highlights
impartially considered, future people should count for no less, morally, than the present generation; that there may be a huge number of future people; that life, for them, could be extraordinarily good or inordinately bad;
Even if we should care about the longterm future, what can we do? But as I learned more about the potentially history-shaping events that could occur in the near future, I took more seriously the idea that we might soon be approaching a critical juncture in the human story. Technological development is creating new threats
A position of seeing ourselves nkt at the leader edge of humanity, butb really thebstarting point. Like in scifi we might be abe to lool t nkw nd say “this is where itnwas all defined”.
we could create a flourishing and long-lasting society, where everyone’s lives are better than the very best lives today. Or the future could be terrible, falling to authoritarians who use surveillance and AI to lock in their ideology for all time, or even to AI systems that seek to gain power rather than promote a thriving society.
Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University, and the Forethought Foundation.
Though we cannot give genuine political power to future people, we can at least give consideration to them. By abandoning the tyranny of the present over the future, we can act as trustees—helping to create a flourishing world for generations to come.
The pain and death at stake are worthy of concern regardless. The same
Indeed. But immediately the question kf economics arises; after all, shkuld we live entirely for the future? At the risk of bekng callous, what is the cost of lrevention?
In many cases, we don’t draw clear lines between our concerns for the present and the future—both are in play.
This to me seems like an esentjial bridge to move foreward.
This matters, because the number of future people could be huge.
Itself an srgument for population growth cntrol?
Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved around three hundred thousand years ago. Agriculture started just twelve thousand years ago, the first cities formed only six thousand years ago, the industrial era began around 250 years ago, and all the changes that have happened since then—transitioning from horse-drawn carts to space travel, leeches to heart transplants, mechanical calculators to supercomputers—occurred over the course of just three human lifetimes.
this ibduces vertigo. Truly tonsee what eveb kur grabdfatgers didnt understabd is staggering.
Looking to the past, though there are not many examples of people deliberately aiming at long-run impacts, they do exist,
As in chapter: write and creste within the context bkt of a human lkfespan, but humanity’s
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,
V cute that it worked, but hkw many kthers have figured the same and wnded jn faklure?
Humanity might last for millions or even billions of years to come. But the rate of change of the modern world can only continue for thousands of years.
The CUkture serires lresents thjs llateau lf chabge wkth a wide existebce kf gnersly ewhal settlements.
If you need £1000 to pay for a life-saving operation, then the difference in value for you between getting nothing and getting £1000 is much greater than the difference in value between getting £1000 and getting £2000. The value that we assign to outcomes should be based on whatever it is we ultimately care about, such as people’s wellbeing.
Is this why s we infkate our lives a sinular cash value becomes less and less imlortant in itself; see growth econkmies and the need flr mkre
The enslaved were typically forced to work on plantations—most often those growing sugar cane, tobacco, cotton, or coffee—and sometimes to mine silver or gold.11 Work days were regularly ten hours long,
Lol 14 hours. Admittedly mch mlre comfkrtable.
The first US state to legalize gay marriage was Massachusetts, in 2004. Just eleven years later, a Supreme Court decision legalized it nationwide.
Note that value changes can regress via same mechanism
For the first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence, global growth was close to 0 percent per year; in the agricultural era that increased to around 0.1 percent, and it accelerated from there after the Industrial Revolution. It’s only in the last hundred years that the world economy has grown at a rate above 2 percent per year. Putting this another way: from 10,000 BC onwards, it took many hundreds of years for the world economy to double in size. The most recent doubling took just nineteen years.52
In the future, if we spread to the stars, we will again be separated. The galaxy is like an archipelago, vast expanses of emptiness dotted with tiny pinpricks of warmth.
Few people who ever live will have as much power to positively influence the future as we do. Such rapid technological, social, and environmental change means that we have more opportunity to affect when and how the most important of these changes occur, including by managing technologies that could lock in bad values or imperil our survival.
Significance is the average value added by bringing about a certain state of affairs. How much worse is the world, at any one time, because the glyptodonts are extinct? In assessing this, we would want to attend to all relevant aspects of the glyptodonts’ extinction: the intrinsic loss of a species on the planet, the loss to humans who could have used their shells or eaten their meat, and the impact on the ecosystems the glyptodonts inhabited.
Does this rewuire humans for value? is therr significance without ojr existence? If we use this frsmework we must first accept our own necessity.
The persistence of a state of affairs is how long that state of affairs lasts, once it has been brought about. The nonexistence of the glyptodonts may be exceptionally persistent, starting 12,000 years ago and lasting until the end of the universe.
have had to promote a norm that the glyptodonts
What about all the other species that didnt go extinct bht were also hunted? are therr aby?
Contingency represents the extent to which a state of affairs depends on a small number of specific actions. If something is very contingent, then that change would not have otherwise occurred for a very long time, or ever. The existence of the novel Jane Eyre is very contingent: if Charlotte Brontë had not written it, that precise novel would never have been written
Though it’s hard to be confident, my guess is that the extinction of the glyptodonts was not very contingent. Even if the hunters who killed off the last of them had not done so, then probably some other group of hunters, at some later time, would have.
The contingency of biological evolution can be high if there are multiple equilibria. But even if there is only one equilibrium, expected contingency can be high if it simply takes a long time for that equilibrium to be reached—if evolution is slow at climbing the fitness landscape. For
Cultural evolution can be described by the same three principles that govern Darwinian evolution:
Can it? See article.on poor fit of darwinkan analogies for anything not strictly.biological.
some of these cultural attitudes will be better adapted to a given environment than others; those attitudes that are better adapted are more likely to be passed on to peers and to the next generation. In models of cultural evolution, one can get cultural competition between individuals and between groups.64
The effect of thiks is unbridled capitalism, is it nkt? Our current environment rewards calitalist thinkin and this point of view suggest that only.alitalism aill.succeed.
Though these different equilibria might be equally good from the perspective of cultural fitness, they can be much better or worse from a moral perspective. If you think that eating meat is morally wrong, then the fact that Hinduism and Buddhism converged on vegetarianism to show moral integrity is a very good thing.
whether slavery’s abolition was primarily the result of economic changes or changes in moral attitudes (though, of course, both were relevant). People often think that slavery’s abolition was primarily an economic matter:
suggests that abolition was at least made very likely by a general tide of thought towards liberalism and free-market ideology in northwestern Europe. This is a position held by historian David Eltis.108 In this view, once the idea took hold that people had equal rights, including the right to noncoercion by the state, logical consistency put pressure in favour of antislavery and abolitionist sentiment.
there are many ways in which modern moral views have tolerated inconsistency for long periods of time. For example, tobacco and alcohol are legal and more or less socially acceptable in most countries around the world, whereas other drugs are illegal and their use is stigmatised. The abuse of dogs and cats can spark public outrage, while every year billions of animals suffer and are killed in factory farms.114 Corporal punishment is considered a human rights violation, but ask yourself whether you would prefer to spend several years of your life behind bars or be flogged.115
Suggesting tjat liberal thouhht get rkds of inconsistebcies is obvjously itself inconsisten t.
in each case you can give explanations to dissolve the seeming tension between these views and practices.
Is this bkt exactly what slave owners wohkd have done?
In his book Moral Capital, he claims that “antislavery organizing was odd rather than inevitable, a peculiar institution rather than the inevitable outcome of moral and cultural progress.… In key respects the British antislavery movement was a historical accident, a contingent event that just as easily might never have occurred.”
focused on promoting self-cultivation and moral refinement. They thought that, if you made a lifelong commitment to self-improvement, you could transform spiritually into a sage.4 They likened cultivating your character to craftsmanship: cutting bone, carving a piece of horn, or polishing a piece of jade.5 Among other things, spiritual nobility involved the mastery of a range of social norms and cultural rituals advocated by the Confucians, as well as the careful refinement of your emotions.6 Confucians encouraged obedience to authority, respect for your parents, and partiality to your family, rulers, and state. Rather than punishing wrong actions, Confucian legal principles punished wrong relationships: a son beating a father was a serious crime; a father beating a son was not.
Confucianism
Somewhat similar to Machiavellianism, Legalism took a dim view of human nature, regarding people as innately wicked and selfish. It emphasised the necessity of heavy punishments to prevent wrongdoing and the political importance of a wealthy government and a powerful military.
Legalism
Daoists believed that the Confucian attempt to control the world by promoting a rigid and unchanging set of social norms was foolhardy. They instead advocated spontaneous, noncoercive action that anticipates and responds to the ebb and flow of the world.
Seems like a philosohy that shoul lst longer and be mlre applicable, thkiguhn kfteb rigit structures seem to be more.lervasive
Putting their radical ideas into practice, they argued that, to avoid wasting resources, people shouldn’t own luxuries or consume too much.11 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.
“Confucian heritage” countries is undeniable. Even today, people from Confucian-heritage countries have distinctively Confucian views on what they think is important in life, how they expect their children to behave, and what their hopes are for the future.
Is thjsba skurce for the familial deference exhiviyrd by eastern cultures?