What We Owe the Futureby William MacAskillBasic Books, 2022; 333 pp.
William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford and a leading light of the effective altruism movement, has recently been in the news owing to the frenzied and fraudulent finance of his protégé Sam Bankman-Fried, who now awaits trial. The “effective altruists” took seriously the implications Peter Singer drew from his famous thought experiment: Suppose you come across a small child who is drowning in a pond. You can easily rescue the child, but if you do so, you will ruin the expensive pair of shoes you are wearing. If you refuse to save the child, wouldn’t this show you are a heartless brute? But, Singer says, nothing in the moral point of the example depends on your close physical proximity to the child. If you had
2022-12-30