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Philosopher William MacAskill is out to revolutionise how we live. The secret, he believes, is to do good not just for today but for generations to come. By Danyl McLauchlan.
Its original meaning may have
Hugo, who penned such classics as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, died nearly 140 years ago, but his famous phrase lives on. And although it has been applied to many concepts over the years, it seems particularly apt for a growing movement that started only a decade or so ago.
According to Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, the term “Effective Altruism” (EA) was coined in 2011 by a group of like-minded individuals involved in academia and the charity sector. But it’s only in the past few months that the idea has gone mainstream, largely thanks to a new book published by MacAskill, which could yet earn him the title as one of the most influential thinkers of the 21st century.
It was MacAskill’s first book, Doing Good Better, that helped transform effective altruists from a handful of philosophy students to a movement with thousands of adherents, including billionaires such as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and cryptocurrency trader Sam Bankman-Fried. A New Zealand branch was set up in 2015.
According to the Economist, last year alone, effective altruists are estimated to have distributed more than $1 billion to philanthropic causes.
MacAskill’s new book, What We Owe the Future, has turbocharged the trend. Time magazine recently featured what has become known as the “EA movement” on its cover, noting that its aim is to “improve the world today – and for generations to come”. The Guardian has described the book as a “thrilling prescription for humanity”, while the Economist has a 10-podcast series explaining the concept, and an online guide to EA.
According to the New York Times, the book contains three sentences “that could change the world – and your life”. For the record, they are: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives go better.”
MacAskill may be a reluctant prophet, but at the age of 35, he appears to have hit a deep seam of concern that runs through many younger people today: they want to do as much good as possible with their lives.
Most effective altruists are under 40, and many hold advanced degrees from prestigious universities. They often discharge their moral obligations via regular donations to a metacharity, which are organisations that rank charities by effectiveness. (Through the New Zealand branch of Effective Altruism, you can donate to the metacharity GiveWell.)
Others use their jobs to help people. The organisation 80,000 Hours, co-founded by MacAskill, helps people find careers that do optimal good. The movement’s most-funded “cause areas” are global health and poverty, followed by animal welfare.
But because effective altruism is obsessed with rationality and uncertainty, its leading thinkers are constantly asking themselves: Are these the best causes? Could we be doing even more good? What if we’re like pro-slavery people during the 17th century – perpetuating misery we just can’t see?
Increasingly, they worry that by helping people who are alive today, we’re harming the people of the future.
This is the subject of MacAskill’s new book. And, as is usually the case with effective altruism, it quickly takes you somewhere strange.
MacAskill grew up in Glasgow in an upper-middle-class family and attended a private school. It was assumed he’d study medicine, but he was drawn to philosophy and won a scholarship to Oxford.
At university, he drifted around left-wing organisations, where he encountered “a lot of talking and a lot of guilt” but very little action. Then he read a famous 1972 essay by Australian philosopher Peter Singer called Famine, Affluence and Morality. Singer noted that children in the developing world were dying of preventable diseases while people in the affluent West spent money on trivialities. Weren’t we morally responsible for those deaths?
The essay inspired MacAskill to transform his life. He adopted an ascetic existence – drinking water at the pub instead of beer, and living off home-baked bread. He pledged to donate most of his modest student stipend, which he supplemented by posing nude for drawing classes, to effective charities.
In 2009, at the age of 22, he co-founded Giving What We Can, an organisation encouraging people to donate 10 per cent of their income to alleviate world poverty. A couple of years later, it helped to coin the name “Effective Altruism”, and the movement took off. A few years after that, MacAskill became the world’s youngest associate professor of philosophy when he took a position at Oxford’s Lincoln College.
The idea behind effective altruism is that it’s not enough to have good intentions. As the name suggests, if you really want to help people, you have to do so effectively. MacAskill illustrates this with the PlayPump. In the 1990s, an engineer developed a dual-use children’s roundabout and manually operated water pump. The thinking was that children in poor villages could pump fresh water as they played. Thousands of PlayPumps were distributed across Africa.
They were a disaster. Rotating the PlayPump was hard work and children didn’t like it. So women still had to pump water, but with a humiliating toy instead of a device designed for the purpose. To MacAskill, PlayPumps are a metaphor for many Western interventions in the developing world: well-intentioned, but so misguided they can do more harm than good. Effective altruists believe the solution is a relentlessly statistical approach, employing metrics, data and randomised trials to determine the most impactful interventions.
When choosing a cause, effective altruists prize “neglectedness”. If a group’s interests are ignored by economic or political power structures, working to help them can have a transformational effect. Contrast that with an issue such as climate change. Lots of smart, powerful people worry about climate change, so it’s harder to have any significant impact.
Popular EA charities include the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes bed nets treated with insecticide, and which it estimates saves one life for every US$3000 ($5247) donated. Another is the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which treats infection by parasitic worms, a chronic problem among the world’s billion poorest people. Or Helen Keller International, which provides vitamin supplements for children in extreme poverty, about 200,000 of whom die of vitamin A deficiency every year. None are as much fun or as interesting as PlayPumps or many causes hyped by politicians and celebrities. But they make a measurable, and meaningful, difference.
Over the past decade, MacAskill began to think seriously about how he could best help not just humans of today, but those who will live in the future. He wants us to consider that we might be living at the beginning of human history, not near the end.
After all, modern humans have been around for about 300,000 years, but the average mammalian species lasts about a million years. If we follow suit, most humans who will ever live have not yet been born. Perhaps our technological mastery could allow us to inhabit the Earth for hundreds of millions of years.
Humanity has obviously demonstrated the capacity to terminate the possibility of those lives, via nuclear war, human-made climate change or a bioengineered pandemic. So, MacAskill asks, what are our moral obligations towards that vast number of potential future humans? Shouldn’t we be doing everything possible to ensure their existence?
Philosophers who prioritise the moral value of future lives call themselves longtermists. When MacAskill first heard their arguments, he was sceptical. Two major longtermist preoccupations are artificial intelligence and pandemics, which he didn’t rate highly when he encountered them in the 2010s. Since then, these problems have moved to the centre of our lives, and MacAskill has become a longtermism evangelist.
The current pandemic only intensified longtermists’ fears about deadly viruses, because it exposed how unprepared we are for a virus that isn’t an existential risk. Covid-19 is unlikely to kill everyone who is currently alive, and therefore everyone in the future. But the next virus might.
And they fear the next one could be engineered to be more deadly. “Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power – something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles?” MacAskill writes. He is concerned about the increasing sophistication of gene-editing technologies that biologists use to modify existing organisms or customise new ones.
You can already buy CRISPR Cas9 kits online and modify bacterial DNA in your kitchen. It requires more skill and better equipment to manufacture a deadly viral agent, but it would take only one malevolent or careless person to unleash a designer pathogen on the planet. MacAskill’s Oxford colleague, Australian philosopher Toby Ord, puts the risk of human extinction this century from engineered pandemics at around 3 per cent.
Effective altruists prefer problems that are “tractable”, by which they mean solvable. The good news is that they consider deadly pandemics a very tractable problem.
Many countries use wastewater testing to detect Covid. Why not have a global system of wastewater testing for new pathogens? Then we could detect outbreaks before they become uncontainable.
They’re also enthusiastic about new vaccine technologies and methods to speed up clinical trials and therapeutic drugs. And they want better systems of oversight for gene-editing, before someone accidentally kills everyone.
Artificial intelligence (AI) once divided effective altruists. Does it threaten humanity, or are some people just watching too much sci-fi? But rapid advances in machine learning have convinced most leading EA thinkers, MacAskill included, that AI is an existential risk.
Most of us interact with weak forms of AI. Google’s search algorithm ranks web pages; Netflix’s algorithm recommends shows; trading algorithms perform most financial transactions.
There are far more sophisticated models, such as AlphaZero, the DeepMind AI that learnt to play chess at superhuman levels within 24 hours. What happens when there’s an AlphaZero for something scarier than chess?
That suggests some kind of Terminator scenario, but longtermists are far more worried about the paperclip maximiser. This is a superintelligent AI programmed to make a consumer product – such as paperclips – as quickly and cheaply as possible.
First, it creates millions of copies of itself and takes over the world’s industrial infrastructure, because that is an efficient way to produce paperclips. It prevents itself from being disabled, because if it is switched off it cannot make paperclips. It then transforms everything on the planet, including us, into paperclips – not because it has turned against us or even understands that humans exist, but because we’re made of atoms that can be turned into paperclips, which is what it’s been instructed to do.
How do you create agents of greater-than-human intelligence while keeping their goals compatible with those of their creators? When longtermists warned about these problems 10 years ago, no one took them seriously. Now it’s a rapidly expanding area of machine-learning research.
Most of us, of course, don’t have time to worry about being turned into paperclips. Our concerns are more immediate. Climate. War. The cost of living. The mortgage. And this cuts to a tension at the heart of Effective Altruism. Its emphasis on “neglectedness” encourages an obsession with novelty. But as its causes get more abstract, it risks becoming less likely to inspire people to orient their lives around giving.
Effective altruists know their ideas sound weird. They see this as a good thing: people once thought slavery opponent Benjamin Lay sounded weird, too (see ‘A timely heretic’ below).
“We need morally motivated heretics who are able to endure ridicule from those who wish to preserve the status quo,” MacAskill writes.
Weirdness helps explain why climate change isn’t a major focus for effective altruists. There are some effective climate charities, and they’re as counterintuitive and data-focused as you’d expect. They’re buying equatorial rainforest to prevent logging and placing the land in trust for indigenous inhabitants; or providing fuel-efficient cookstoves in sub-Saharan Africa; or investing in carbon capture and synthetic meat technologies. But effective altruists pore over Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports the way ordinary people read airport thrillers, and they’ve concluded the likelihood of an extinction-level scenario is very low.
Which is one reason MacAskill wants you to have children. As a teenager in Glasgow, he used to go “buildering”: clambering over urban buildings. One night, he fell through a skylight. By pure chance, the glass that punctured his side missed all his internal organs.
“Dying that evening would have prevented all the rest of that life I would have lived,” he writes. He thinks humanity today is like a teenager, dramatically discounting the value of lives to come.
MacAskill doesn’t plan on having children himself and doesn’t think society should scold those who make that choice. But the logic of longtermism holds that human life is an innate good if people’s happiness outweighs their suffering.
“With a sufficiently good upbringing, having a chance to experience this world is a benefit to those that get it”, he writes in the book. And so on, hopefully, for trillions of lives.
It’s an optimistic vision haunted by the possibility of apocalypse. On a planet of eight billion people, our lives might not seem terribly meaningful, but MacAskill believes the values we adopt and the choices we make will prove to be of cosmic significance.
William MacAskill believes the abolition of slavery is one of the best things to happen in human history – but also one of the weirdest. Until the 18th century, the practice of trading human beings was commonplace. By 1700, almost three-quarters of the world’s population consisted of enslaved people. And while slaves regarded their condition as evil, and the occasional moralist objected, most religions and political systems supported slavery. It was “good for society”, part of the natural order of things.
Then, in the mid-18th century, with the North Atlantic slave trade at its height, a Philadelphia Quaker named Benjamin Lay started taking hollowed-out Bibles filled with red dye into his church. He would stab the Bibles and splatter his fellow congregants with “the blood of slavery”. Lay was a hunchback, standing just over four feet (1.2 metres), with arms as long as his legs. He lay down in the mud outside the church door, forcing people to step on him as he screamed up at them about the agony of the enslaved. Over time, Lay convinced many Quakers that slavery was un-Christian. Abolition became a political movement in the UK and then a global endeavour.
Although the practice of slavery continues in pockets around the world, the ownership of another human is now illegal everywhere. Abolition is sometimes credited to the rise of capitalism, or liberal ideology, or Christian values. But many capitalists, Christians and liberal thinkers supported slavery.
MacAskill thinks abolition was a random accident of history, brought about by the right individuals in the right place at the right time. If you ran the past few centuries over and over again with minor changes, he argues, most versions of the 21st century would still have legal and widespread slavery, and most people would find this good and normal.
The next logical step is to accept that we probably hold moral values today that subsequent generations will regard as abhorrent – the same way we judge those who tolerated slavery.
Kiwi tennis star Marcus Daniell took the ideas of Effective Altruism into the world of international sport.
Most effective altruists have a conversion story – a revelatory moment when they stumble across the holy texts of well-known philosophers such as William MacAskill or Peter Singer and see the light. Masterton-born tennis player Daniell’s came in 2014, “the first year I actually made money from playing tennis”.
Tennis, he explains, is quite an expensive sport, even at the lower levels, given that it involves lots of travel and accommodation costs, and coaches don’t come cheap. “The prizemoney at the lower levels is a bit ridiculous, so you’re just struggling to make ends meet; 2014 was the first year where I actually finished the year in the black. It was the first time I ever felt a sense of financial security,” says Daniell, a doubles specialist who reached a career highlight when he won a bronze medal at the 2020 Olympic Games.
Despite his years of struggling, he felt a strong urge to “balance the scales” once his efforts began to pay off. “Because sport is a very selfish endeavour. Necessarily so – it’s all about pushing yourself ahead of the people around you. And that never sat perfectly with who I wanted to be off the tennis court.”
He began by pledging to give 1 per cent of his income to charity. But when Covid hit in 2020, he found himself re-examining his priorities.
“I had more time to think about the legacy I wanted to leave or the impact I wanted to have on the world. And I realised that if I truly wanted to make the most impact that I could, then I had to use this tool of having a small platform and a voice.”
The result is High Impact Athletes, a charity with a mission to promote effective giving among professional sports players, and from there to fans. As founder and executive director, Daniell remains heavily involved, although Black Sticks hockey player Hugo Inglis, a triple Olympian, now runs the charity as its managing director.
Daniell’s wife Caroline, a lawyer who is currently pursuing her PhD, and his brother Josh, a tech entrepreneur, are also listed as advisers (along with the family dog, Charley, who is “chief enthusiasm officer”). High-profile donors include Stefanos Tsitsipas, frequently ranked in the world’s top five male tennis players, and former World Boxing Organisation heavyweight champion Joseph Parker.
In two years, they’ve raised about $630,000, which goes directly to charities heavily scrutinised to ensure they are maximising their impact. Most are focused on global health and poverty, climate change and animal welfare, although the organisation is also considering adding mental health. “It’s been requested by a lot of athletes,” says Daniell, who notes that depression is also a huge problem in populations living in extreme poverty.
He admits he started out by googling “how to give back best”, which led him to MacAskill’s organisation, 80,000 Hours.
The number 80,000 has an almost mythical significance in EA circles – it’s the approximate amount of time most of us will dedicate to our careers. Effective altruists want to make those hours count.
“It was like a light bulb went off in my head,” says Daniell. “Two of the four pillars that they suggested on how to make an impact were directly applicable to me: earning to give, and advocacy.
“If I became better at tennis, I could earn more money and give more. And if I became better at tennis, I would get a bit more of a profile and I could leverage that to speak a bit more about these ideas of giving effectively to more people.”
Heavily influenced by Singer, who is also on his advisory board, Daniell directs the bulk of his personal donations to animal suffering. And these days, he has upped his giving to 10 per cent of his income.
In 2021, he received the Arthur Ashe award, an international prize for humanitarianism in sports, previously won by such tennis greats as Andre Agassi, Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
In his new book, MacAskill points to Daniell as an example of how people who aren’t philosophers or billionaires can leverage their unique opportunities to benefit others.
However, Daniell says he does have reservations about the movement’s turn towards longtermism.
“I’m definitely not drawn to it in the same way I am to present-day problems.”
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