William MacAskill: Effective Altruism - Global Priorities Institute

In the final pages of On What Matters, Volume II, Derek Parfit comments: ‘We live during the hinge of history… If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period… What now matters most is that we avoid ending human history.’ This passage echoes Parfit’s comment, in Reasons and Persons, that ‘the next few centuries will be the most important in human history’. … Consider longtermism: the view that the morally best options available to us, in many important practical decisions, are those that provide the greatest improvements in the (ex ante) value of the far future. Many who accept longtermism do so because they accept an impartial, aggregative theory of moral betterness in conjunction with expected value theory. But such a combination of views implies absurdity if the (impartial, aggregated) value of humanity’s future is undefined… Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, bot

saved by

• Lore Mertens