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

... you know, we should not think we're at the end of moral progress, and we should not think, "Oh, we should lock in the kind of Western values we have now." Instead, we should think, "We wanna s- ensure that we spend like a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right, so that the future is guided by the right values, rather than merely whichever happened to win out." Perhaps if the Industrial Revolution had happened in India rather than in, uh, Western Europe, then perhaps we wouldn't have wide-scale factory farming. And then academia, I think, has just developed a culture where you don't tackle such problems in academia. (laughs) Partly that's because they fall through cracks of different disciplines, and partly because they just seem too big, or too grand, or too speculative. The idea of long reflection is getting society into a state that before we take any drastic actions that might lock in a particular set of values, we allow this force of reason, and empathy, and debate, and good-hearted kind of moral inquiry to guide which values we end up with.

(Instrumental music) Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing William MacAskill. Will is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism movement, and most recently, the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me on.

So my first question is, what is the high-level explanation for the success of the Effective Altruism movement? Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book?

Uh, yeah, I p- think it probably is kind of contingent. Maybe not on the order of like this would never have happened, but at least on the order of decades. Uh, evidence for the reason why Effective Altruism is somewhat contingent is just that similar ideas have been promoted at many times during history, and not taken on. So we can go all the way back to ancient China, the Mohists defended kind of impartial view of morality, and took very strategic actions to try and, um, help all people, in particular, um, providing defensive, um, assistance to cities under siege. Uh, then of course there were the early utilitarians. Effective altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities. Uh, and then even Peter Singer in the '70s, he had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor, and hadn't had a lot of traction until, yeah, even like early 2010 after GiveWell launched, after Giving What We Can launched. What explains the rise of it? I mean, I think it was a good idea waiting to happen at some point. Uh, I think the internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people that weren't possible otherwise, and I think there were some particularly lucky events, like Ellie meeting Holden and me meeting Toby, that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.