[A Sip of a Book] We Are Using the Future in Advance

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This is a new book published after seven years by William MacAskill, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, who advocated 'effective altruism'?a concept that points out the risks of altruistic acts based solely on passion and argues that before doing good deeds, one should rationally consider how many people and what benefits will be delivered. The book explores what issues we should focus on and what immediate actions we should take through the philosophy of 'longtermism,' which goes a step beyond effective altruism. Here, longtermism is a value judgment that giving positive impact to the future is morally the most important. It means that the fate of the world can be changed by today's choices; for example, opinions such as temporarily halting the development of ChatGPT due to the risk of human hostility fall under this. This book contains reflections on such value judgments.

If all future lives are to be lived, what do you want the present us to do? How much carbon dioxide do we want to emit into the air? How much do we want to invest in research or education? How cautious do we want to be about new technologies that could ruin or permanently derail the future? How much attention do we want to pay to the long-term effects of today's actions?_p.20

Longtermism is the idea that giving positive impact to the long-term future should be the moral priority of our era. Longtermism seriously acknowledges how vast the future could be and how many risks are involved in determining its direction. (...) What we do now affects countless future people in ways words cannot fully express. We need to act wisely._pp.20-21

Future people matter. But we rarely value them. They cannot vote, lobby, or run for public office. Future people cannot negotiate or trade with us. Future people cannot directly express their views. They cannot post tweets, write newspaper articles, or march in the streets. Future people are completely deprived of all rights. (p.27)

We must keep an open mind to the astonishing idea that the abolition of slavery was a contingent event. (...) What brought about the end of slavery were the actions of thinkers, writers, politicians, activists who were former slaves, and slave rebels. (...) The abolition of slavery was not a predetermined fate, and if history had gone differently, we might now be living in a world where widespread slavery is legally permitted._pp.110-111

We Are Using Up the Future | Written by William MacAskill | Gimm-Young Publishers | 480 pages | 22,000 KRW

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