William Macaskill’s WHAT WE OWE THE FUTURE encourages humans to start thinking long term, appropriately called longtermism. Let’s not think about a decade from now or even the end of this century. Let’s thinks about what earth will be like in a million years. Promoted as a ‘A guide for making the future better’, Macaskill’s last sentence is “There’s no better time for a movement that will stand up for all those who are yet to come”. Who could disagree?
How does he suggest we do this? We should prioritise our actions, join activist groups, educate ourselves, do no harm, and we should ‘do conceptual and empirical research on core longtermism topics’. He does his research as if he’s going down a rabbit hole, ferreting out pieces of history that support each particular topic he’s writing about. There are 246 pages of dense information you could easily get lost in. Keeping track of the point he’s trying to make is difficult.
There are 68 pages of footnotes to reassure us the author must be right about all his facts and figures. Not so. For example, page 141 he says “Carbon can also be captured from the ambient air in a process known as negative emissions.” There is no footnote or reference here, no further explanation, and no comment that this existing process is highly inefficient and expensive. He is mentioning negative emissions in a lengthy discussion about how we must stop using coal and gas because, should civilisation collapse, those left on earth will need fossil fuels to re-build. Macaskill says Australia and New Zealand will most likely come out less scathed than the rest of the world should there be a collapse, because we have the food and fuel to re-build. That is reassuring in the midst of all his predictions of civilisation collapse or extinction.
The promotional quotes rave over the book. Rutger Bregman, a fellow philosopher and author of Utopia for Realists, says ‘Macaskill is one of the most important philosophers alive’. Sam Harris, another philosopher and author of ‘Spirituality’, says ‘No other philosopher has had a greater impact on my ethics’.
Others of this genre are Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind. Macaskill, Pinker and Harari are all university academics. All are somewhat optimistic about the future and encourage us to take the long term view of the current prospects for the collapse of civilisation or extinction through climate change, nuclear disaster, and in Macaskill’s book, also an asteroid strike. Macaskill believes the earth won’t come to the end of its natural life for millions of years yet. He gives the probabilities of civilisation collapsing soon due to nuclear war, climate change, and asteroids BUT still, if we’re longtermists, we should have millions of years left to plan for now. And plan we must – which means protecting the environment, behaving morally and living wisely.
This 28 year old Associate Professor at Oxford does not tell us if he has joined Extinction Rebellion or marched in the streets. He does tell us in detail that he’s a vegetarian. These earnest philosophers say all the right things but WHAT WE OWE THE FUTURE does not give us a realistic way out of shorttermism.
What We Owe The Future by William Macaskill
Published by One World, a Bloomsbury imprint
ISBN: 978 0 86154 250 5
RRP $33
Review by Carol Dance
