William Macaskill
Published by One World 2022 Rrp $26.25
For the past twelve months I’ve been doing Pilates with an instructor who always pushes me a bit harder each time, with the result that at the conclusion of each session I feel physically stretched and a bit wacked. However, I always leave the studio with a sense of achievement.
Reading this book was like undertaking several strenuous sessions of Pilates for the brain and after I finished it, I felt that I had achieved something, although I’m not sure if it left me feeling more or less positive about the future.
This is the first book that I’ve read for some time where I kept saying to myself: ‘Gee I hadn’t thought of that before’ and ‘not sure that I agree with that.’ What We Owe the Future is not an easy read, and some concepts are difficult to immediately grasp, but it is a book that really does stretch the mind and will challenge many of the reader’s preconceptions.
Macaskill is a young Oxford University philosopher who is one of the founders of the ‘effective altruism’ movement and he raises many philosophical issues, some of which many readers might find difficult to immediately get their heads around. One example is in chapter 8 where he considers the idea of whether ‘the prevented existence of a happy life is a moral loss.’ Complex stuff indeed.
The introduction begins by asking the reader to ‘imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived.’ It then goes on:
Your first life begins about three hundred thousand years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first. Once that second person dies, you are reincarnated as the third, then the fourth, and so on. One hundred billion lives later, you become the youngest person alive today.
Living all these lives takes almost four trillion years in total and includes drinking 44 trillion cups of coffee and 1.5 billion years having sex. Although you experience many good things you also undergo much cruelty and for 10% of the time you are a slave.
Macaskill then asks the reader to go even further to imagine experiencing, not only all the past human lives, but every life that will ever be lived and then poses the question:
If you knew you were going to live all these future lives, what would you hope to do in the present? How much carbon dioxide would you want us to emit into the atmosphere? How much would you want to invest in research and education? How careful would you want us to be with new technologies that could destroy or permanently derail your future? How much attention would you want us to give to the impact of today’s actions on the long term?
This scene setting, Macaskill suggests, is because morality is about ‘putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own.’
The main point of the book is found in the first line of chapter 1 which says:
Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.
Many of us tend to think that in some way we are perhaps at the tail end of humanity’s journey but Macaskill suggests otherwise asserting that while there have been about 110 billion humans who have already lived on earth but there might well be another eighty trillion people yet to come. 99.5% of all human experience might yet to be lived.
In putting his argument for what he calls ‘longtermism’, the thought that ‘the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time’, Macaskill looks at the main threats facing humanity such as climate change, engineered pathogens, great power war, takeover or value lock-in by artificial intelligence. One point that I found particularly interesting is that he is not overly pessimistic when it comes to climate change although there is certainly no place for complacency.
The book argues that we have a moral obligation to do whatever we can to improve the lives of all the humans yet to be born and that our present generation is uniquely placed to do positive things because we live in an era of rapid change that is unlikely to persist.
As I read the book, I became concerned that, in terms of moral obligation, Macaskill was focussing almost entirely of the future welfare of humans and ignoring the position of other animals. However, in chapter 9 he finally does deal with the welfare of nonhuman animals, both farmed and wild. He says:
The question of what weight to give to human interests and to nonhuman interests is difficult.
The argument is then put that in considering the differences in capacity between humans and nonhuman animals we should look at the number of neurons that each has. I must admit that I found this argument unconvincing and, having regard to our present biodiversity crisis, I found his conclusions relating to the human caused loss of wildlife to be startling and unfortunate when he says:
How you evaluate this depends on your view on wild animal wellbeing. It’s very natural and intuitive to think of humans’ impact on wild animal life as a great moral loss. But if we assess the lives of wild animals as being worse than nothing on average, which I think is plausible (though uncertain), then we arrive at the dizzying conclusion that from the perspective of wild animals themselves, the enormous growth and expansion of Homo Sapiens has been a good thing.
Macaskill looks at the things that governments and corporations can and should do relating to issues such as climate change, artificial intelligence, and pandemics but when it comes to the role of the individual, he asserts that making donations to appropriate organisations, political activism and having children is more impactful than changing personal consumption decisions, such as vegetarianism, flying and driving less and not using plastic bags.
It is difficult not to agree with the books basic proposition that we should act in a way that makes life better for future generations, but there will no doubt be disagreements and debates about the meaning of a ‘better life’ and how it might to be achieved.
This is a challenging book in many ways and one which will no doubt lead to some fiery debates, but it deserves to be read.
John Watts
Retired Barrister, Gloucester resident, and author of ‘Nine Lives for Our Planet. Personal stories of nine inspiring women who cherish Earth.’ and of ‘The Town That Said NO to AGL. How Gloucester Was Saved from Coal Seam Gas’. John is also the president of the Gloucester Environment Group and a member of the committee of Energise Gloucester.