William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford and a leading light of the effective altruism movement, has recently been in the news owing to the frenzied and fraudulent finance of his protégé Sam Bankman-Fried, who now awaits trial. The “effective altruists” took seriously the implications Peter Singer drew from his famous thought experiment: Suppose you come across a small child who is drowning in a pond. You can easily rescue the child, but if you do so, you will ruin the expensive pair of shoes you are wearing. If you refuse to save the child, wouldn’t this show you are a heartless brute? But, Singer says, nothing in the moral point of the example depends on your close physical proximity to the child. If you had given the cost of the shoes to charity, you could have saved a child living in the third world from death. Singer, relying on a utilitarian framework, next argues that you are morally obliged to give all your income above subsistence to charity, though he recognizes that few will be willing to do so. Further, in order to maximize the effect of your donations, you should investigate which charities are most effective, a prescription the effective altruists enthusiastically embrace. But they have done Singer one better. In order to maximize our charitable donations, we need to make as much money as possible, and that will often require us to seek employment in high-paying jobs and then give as much as we can to charity. Following this advice led Bankman-Fried to his career in investments. It would be unfair to blame MacAskill for Bankman-Fried’s peculations, as there is no indication of MacAskill’s involvement in them, but his ethical manifesto merits attention in its own right. As its title suggests, it is a radical extension of effective altruism that emphasizes the future. To be “up-front” about it, What We Owe the Future takes a view of ethics detached from our common human lives and, in its endeavor to assume what Henry Sidgwick called “the point of view of the universe,” is utterly bizarre, much more in its theory than in its rather banal practical recommendations.
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