207 | William MacAskill on Maximizing Good in the Present and Future

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2022

⏱️ 102 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s always a little humbling to think about what affects your words and actions might have on other people, not only right now but potentially well into the future. Now take that humble feeling and promote it to all of humanity, and arbitrarily far in time. How do our actions as a society affect all the potential generations to come? William MacAskill is best known as a founder of the Effective Altruism movement, and is now the author of What We Owe the Future. In this new book he makes the case for longtermism: the idea that we should put substantial effort into positively influencing the long-term future. We talk about the pros and cons of that view, including the underlying philosophical presuppositions.

Mindscape listeners can get 50% off What We Owe the Future, thanks to a partnership between the Forethought Foundation and Bookshop.org. Just click here and use code MINDSCAPE50 at checkout.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

William (Will) MacAskill received his D.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He is currently an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford, as well as a research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, director of the Forefront Foundation for Global Priorities Research, President of the Centre for Effective Altruism, and co-founder of 80,000 hours and Giving What We Can.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. I don't know about you,
0:04.6	but sometimes it's enough to just get through the day, right? There's a lot of things going on
0:10.6	in our individual lives, in the wider world. Just staying afloat is a bit of an effort, but we
0:16.8	would like to do more than that. We would like to take a step back and really think about how should
0:22.3	we behave as good, moral, rational, nice people here in the world. Of course, if you've been
0:28.8	listening to the podcast at all, you know that even asking this question is not enough, because
0:34.2	the possible answers about how we should behave, what it means to be a good person, to be moral,
0:39.5	to be ethical, not clear. We have not only disagreements about meta-ethics, about how we should justify
0:46.4	our ethical beliefs, but about what the actual ethical beliefs are. So today's guest, William
0:51.3	McCaskill, who goes by Will, is someone who is really leading the push for a very specific
0:56.8	way of thinking about how we should act, how we should be a good person. It's within the tradition
1:03.1	of utilitarianism, consequentialism, okay? The idea that whatever we do, we should judge
1:09.6	its moral worth by what consequences it has, what effects it has on the world. And that's not
1:14.7	obviously true. I mean, it's plausibly true. It's a very reasonable thing to do, but it's not the
1:18.8	only way to go. There's alternatives about deontological views, where it's a matter of following
1:24.9	the right rules, whatever the consequences might be. Virtue ethics positions, which say that
1:31.1	it's about cultivating your virtues, not precisely about how you act and everything, but certainly
1:36.1	utilitarianism is a big player in this game. And Will has been one of the most influential in really
1:42.1	turning utilitarianism into a philosophy of action and thinking about how it should apply to
1:48.9	real world problems, especially sort of big picture problems. He's a leader of the effective
1:54.9	altruism movement. We've had other interviews with people like Josh Green talking about the best
2:01.6	ways we can be charitable, but then also we've had supporters of the Minescape podcast,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Sean Carroll | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.