Questions NOV 12

 MacA Part I-The Long View. McK thru Jack Turner

• William MacAskill, What Do We Owe the Future? (MacA) Part I-The Long View - Aidan Haines
• McK thru Jack Turner - Gray Fogo

McK

1. Abandoned houses tell us what, says Linda Horgan? 812
2. What does David Abram want us to honor and value? 815
3.  What renders a healer worthless? 820 What do western anthropologists overlook in the shaman's craft? 821
4. What is magic in its most primordial sense? 822 What experience led Abrams to rethink his conception of "spirits"? 826
5. What emerging ecological perspective is similar to the animism of traditional cultures? 829 What power or presence did Abrams learn to perceive? What form of wisdom did he  begin to appreciate? 833-4
6. What's another translation of the Japanese word for Enlightenment? 838
7. What do we fail to appreciate about our descriptions and explanations of human behavior? 846

MacA

1. What is MacAskill's book's worldview, and what is his preferred definition of it? ix What does he want us to be? xiii
2. What was MacAskill's initial response to longtermism? What metaphors illustrate his current view? 5-6 What tyranny does he say we should abandon? 9 What is his aim in this book? 21-2
3. COMMENT?" Do you see a connection between l'ism and John Dewey's continuous human community? (*below) Or Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation?
4. COMMENT:? "A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain." --William James
5. COMMENT:? "Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present." --Albert Camus
6. How is humanity like a teenager? 19 What reckless behavior did MacAskill indulge in, as a teen? 34, 39
7. Climate change highlights what? How is decarbonization a win-win-win...? 24-5 What's our outsized opportunity? 28
8. What killed off the megafauna? 30
9. What do Frank Capra and Bill McKibben have in common? What lesson about "plasticity" did McKibben learn? 42-3

 

Longtermism

https://www.williammacaskill.com/longtermism

Longtermism is the view that we should be doing much more to protect future generations.

Longtermism is based on the ideas that future people have moral worth, there could be very large numbers of future people, and that what we do today can affect how well or poorly their lives go. Let’s take these points one at a time. 

First, future people have moral worth. Just because people are born in the future does not make their experiences any less real or important. To illustrate this, we can put ourselves in our ancestors’ shoes and ask whether they would have been right to consider people today morally irrelevant by mere fact of not having yet been born. Another way to look at this is through considering our ability to harm future people. For instance, consider how we store nuclear waste. We do not simply set it out in the desert without further precautions, because it will start to leak in several centuries. Instead, we carefully store it and mark it for future generations, because we recognize that it would be wrong to cause future people foreseeable harm.

Second, there could be very large numbers of future people. Humanity might last for a very long time. If we last as long as the typical mammalian species, it would mean there are hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. If history were a novel, we may be living on its very first page. Barring catastrophe, the vast majority of people who will ever live have not been born yet. These people could have stunningly good lives, or incredibly bad ones. 

Third, what we do today can affect the lives of future people in the long run. Some might argue that it is hard or impossible to predict the future, so that even if future people are morally important and even if there will be many of them, we cannot predictably benefit them beyond a hundred years time. However, while it is difficult to foresee the long-run effects of many actions, there are some things that we can predict. For example, if humanity suffered some catastrophe that caused it to go extinct we can predict how that would affect future people: there wouldn’t be any. This is why a particular focus of longtermism has been on existential risks: risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential. Risks that have been highlighted by longtermist researchers include those from advanced artificial intelligence, engineered pathogens, nuclear war, extreme climate change, and global totalitarianism. Besides mitigating existential risks, we can also predictably shape the longterm future by changing the trajectory of humanity in a persistent way, like through changing what it values. 

William has a book on longtermism called What We Owe The Future which was published in August and September 2022.

Learn more about longtermism in an excerpt of What We Owe The Future in The New York Times, an introductory article in BBC, and a long-form piece in Foreign Affairs. The links below are also helpful:

• https://longtermism.com/

• https://80000hours.org/articles/future-generations/

• https://www.forethought.org/longtermism

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/longtermism

==

The Case for Longtermism

By William MacAskill

A professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of “What We Owe the Future,” from which this essay has been adapted

Imagine living the life of every human being who has ever existed — in order of birth.

Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time to be reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first, then the third-ever person, and so on.

One hundred billion (or so) lives later, you are the youngest person alive today. Your life has lasted somewhere in the ballpark of four trillion years. You have spent approximately 10 percent of it as a hunter-gatherer and 60 percent as a farmer, a full 20 percent raising children, and over 1 percent suffering from malaria or smallpox. You spent 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth.

That’s your life so far — from the birth of Homo sapiens until the present.

But now imagine that you live all future lives, too. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammal species (about one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you. On the scale of a typical human life, you in the present would be just a few months old. The future is big.

I offer this thought experiment because morality, at its core, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own. When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future — where almost everyone lives and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies — comes to the fore...  (continues)

==

* "The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of humanity. It remains to make it explicit and militant." —From A Common Faith by John Dewey