Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Effective Altruism, History, & Technology

MacAskill argues that if history had gone differently—e.g., Nazis winning WWII or the Industrial Revolution occurring elsewhere—our moral views would feel just as self‑evident to us, suggesting we are still far from moral truth and should resist permanently entrenching today’s norms.

His “long reflection” proposal is to create a long, relatively safe period where humanity deliberately reasons, debates, and experiments morally before any technology or governance setup can permanently fix a single value system for the future.

Given how easily “represent the future” institutions can be gamed, MacAskill currently favors narrower but robust reforms—like liability structures for dangerous bio labs or better catastrophe/war risk indices—over grand future-representation bodies.

Where most technological advances would likely have happened within decades anyway, shifts driven by religious leaders, political philosophers, and moral activists (e.g., Jesus, Muhammad, Marx, abolitionists) can alter value trajectories for centuries or longer.

MacAskill thinks modern high‑change environments require more first‑principles thinking than traditional deference to custom, but he also notes that effective altruists underweight history and should study it more to avoid past mistakes (e.g., Mill’s coal worries).