Will MacAskill on Longtermism and What We Owe the Future

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2022

⏱️ 76 minutes

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Summary

Philosopher William MacAskill of the University of Oxford and a founder of the effective altruism movement talks about his book What We Owe the Future with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. MacAskill advocates "longtermism," giving great attention to the billions of people who will live on into the future long after we are gone. Topics discussed include the importance of moral entrepreneurs, why it's moral to have children, and the importance of trying to steer the future for better outcomes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics
0:07.0	and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:13.0	Institution.
0:14.0	Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down
0:18.6	the information related to today's conversation.
0:21.6	You'll also find our archives, but every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.8	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.3	We'd love to hear from you.
0:37.8	Today is August 11, 2022, and my guest is philosopher Will McCaskill of Oxford University.
0:44.1	He was first here on econtalk in 2015, talking about effective altruism and his book, Doing
0:50.0	Good Better.
0:51.6	His latest book, and our topic for today, is What We O The Future.
0:56.3	So welcome back to econtalk.
0:57.3	It's great to be back.
0:58.3	Your book opens with a rather fascinating thought experiment that you took from Georgia
1:06.3	Ray's The Funnel of Human Experience, and it goes, I'm going to read this on the opening
1:13.0	of your book, Goes Like This.
1:15.1	Imagine living in order birth through the life of every human being who was ever lived.
1:19.7	Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa.
1:23.6	You're living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the
1:27.0	second ever person born slightly later than the first.
	...

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