William MacAskill

William MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher at the University of Oxford and one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. With Toby Ord he co-founded Giving What We Can in 2009, and he also co-founded 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism. Doing Good Better (2015) argued that we should use evidence and reason to find the ways of helping others that do the most good. What We Owe the Future (2022) defends longtermism, the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.

Key ideas

• Effective altruism asks how to do the most good with our time and money, using evidence and careful reasoning.
• Future people count morally, and there may be vastly more of them than of people alive now.
• Longtermism holds that improving the long-term future is a key moral priority today.
• Values that become entrenched now, through technology or institutions, could lock in for a very long time.
• Under moral uncertainty we should act in ways that do reasonably well across the moral views we find plausible.

Major works

• What We Owe the Future (2022)
• Doing Good Better (2015)
• Moral Uncertainty (2020)

In the Book corner

• What We Owe the Future 2022 · Beginner
  The fullest popular statement of longtermism, the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.…

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