Unapologetically optimistic and bracingly realistic, a philosopher’s guide to ‘ethical living’ for dangerous times
tells his therapist at their first session, and it’s natural to feel the same about your place in human history: that these are the twilight years. Hundreds of millennia of human activity stretch back behind us – the stone age and the bronze age and the iron age, the ancient world, the middle ages and onwards, culminating in today – whereas our mental image of our species’ future tends either to be hazy or, in the event of an extinction-level catastrophe, terrifyingly short.
“Strange as it may seem, we are the ancients,” writes the Oxford University philosopher William MacAskill. “We live at the very beginning of history, in the most distant past.” When we contemplate our moral responsibility to future generations, if we contemplate it at all, it can seem mainly like a matter of leaving the planet habitable for a few stragglers left to come. In reality, it’s an opportunity to influence the fate of almost all the humans there will probably ever be.
Startling as such reflections are, you might imagine you know exactly what’s coming next from a book called What We Owe the Future: a worthy but depressing reminder that the world is heading to hell in a handcart, informing you it’s your duty to live a life of self-denial, spurning air travel and single-use plastics and fretting over every supermarket banana, all the while trying to suppress the suspicion that your sacrifices won’t make a blind bit of difference. You’d be wrong, though.
Yet the other striking component of MacAskill’s worldview is that it isn’t merely a question of making the best of a bad job – of doing what we can to ensure that life for our successors isn’t entirely awful. We have the chance to bring about untold quantities of greater future happiness, too. Indeed, it’s our responsibility; drawing on the work of the philosopher, he argues that “preventing the existence of a happy and flourishing life is a moral loss”.
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