Last night I saw Prof. William MacAskill speak at NYU. He's a young Oxford professor of philosophy a

Last night I saw Prof. William MacAskill speak at NYU. He's a young Oxford professor of philosophy and one of the early proponents of the Effective Altruism movement. He spoke on taking a long term view, one that values future people the same as people who are currenly alive. He argued that future people have moral value and that we are really largely neglecting any serious evaluation of the impact of present decisions on future people.

I thought it was interesting, but maybe a little crazy when he went so far as to argue that we should think on a billion year time horizon. I think he was really being somewhat provocative in arguing that, but I didn't find it at all hard to get behind the idea that we ought to index the lives of future people much more highly.

What surprised me though was that in the Q&A and in one conversation I had afterward, some folks found this idea really upsetting. It seemed that they took the idea of valuing future people highly meant devaluing present people. I guess there would be some truth for that. For example, in one of MacAskill's examples, if we taxed the use of fossil fuel in a way that took a long time horizon, we'd need to tax it much more highly.

But I guess to me it was just hard to connect with people who actually became emotionally disturbed by this position. I can understand having some give and take over the time horizon (I personally think a one hundred to two hundred year view would be more than enough). But to be upset by it?

I think it comes down to this: folks feel bad for some people in the present and anything that takes attention away from present suffering feels hurtful. But that's efffectively doing with time, now, the same as what we did with land for so long. It's very recent that we began to morally value all humans. It used to be you just worried about your own countrymen or even your own village or tribe. It may be that one day doing the same thing temporally will be viewed just as barbaric.

John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run we're all dead, but it may be that unless we index for the long run we really will all be dead.