Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & Technology

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:07)
Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing William MacAskill. Will is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist Movement, and most recently, the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast.

**Will MacAskill** (0:20)
Thanks so much for having me on.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:23)
So my first question is, what is the high-level explanation for the success of the Effective Altruist Movement? Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book?

**Will MacAskill** (0:32)
Yeah, I think it probably is kind of contingent. Maybe not on the order of like, this would never have happened, but at least on the order of decades. Evidence for the reason why Effective Altruism is somewhat contingent is just that similar ideas have been promoted at many times during history and not taken on. So we can go all the way back to ancient China. The Moists defended kind of impartial view of morality and took very strategic actions to try and help all people, in particular providing defensive assistance to cities under siege.
Then of course, there were the early utilitarians. Effective Altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities.
And then even Peter Singer in the 70s, he had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor and hadn't had a lot of traction until even like early 2010, after GiveWell launched, after Giving What We Can launched. What explains the rise of it? I mean, I think it was a good idea waiting to happen at some point. I think the Internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people that weren't possible otherwise. And I think there were some particularly lucky events, like early meeting Holden, the meeting Toby, that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:49)
Now, if it's true, as you see in the book, that moral values are very contingent, then shouldn't that make us suspect that modern Western values aren't probably aren't that good? They're probably mediocre or worse, because ex ante, you would expect to end up with the median of all the values we could have had at this point. And obviously, we'd be biased in favor of whatever values we were brought up in.

**Will MacAskill** (2:09)
Absolutely. I think taking history seriously and appreciating the contingency of values, appreciating that if the Nazis had won the World War, we would all be thinking, wow, I'm so glad that moral progress happened the way it did, and we don't have Jewish people around anymore. What a huge moral progress we had then. Like, that's a terrifying thought, and I think it should make us take seriously the fact that we're very far away from the moral truth right now.
So I think one of the lessons I draw in the book is, we should not think we're at the end of moral progress, and we should not think, oh, we should lock in the kind of Western values we have now. Instead, we should think we want to ensure that we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right, so that the future is guided by the right values, rather than merely whichever happened to win out.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:56)
So that makes a lot of sense, but I guess I'm asking a slightly separate question, which is not only are there possible values that could be better than ours, but should we expect our values, I mean, we have this sense that we've made more progress, so like things are better than they were before, or better than most possible other worlds in 2100 or 2022, I mean, should we not even expect that to be the case? Like should our prior just be that, yeah, these are kind of meh values?

**Will MacAskill** (3:19)
I think our prior should be that our values are, you know, as good as what one would have expected kind of on average. And then you can make an assessment like, is the world, are the values of the world today, is that going like particularly well? You know, and there are some arguments you could make for saying no. Perhaps if the industrial revolution had happened in India, rather than in Western Europe, then perhaps we wouldn't have wide scale factory farming, which I think is like a moral atrocity.
Having said that, my all things considered view is actually to think that like we're doing better than average, like if civilization were just a regional, then things would look worse in terms of our moral beliefs and attitudes, where I think the abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, liberalism itself, democracy, these are all things that like we relatively easily could have lost and are huge kind of gains.