{"id":144679,"date":"2022-08-23T23:23:56","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T04:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/william-macaskill-there-are-80-trillion-people-yet-to-come-they-need-us-to-start-protecting-them"},"modified":"2022-08-23T23:23:56","modified_gmt":"2022-08-24T04:23:56","slug":"william-macaskill-there-are-80-trillion-people-yet-to-come-they-need-us-to-start-protecting-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/william-macaskill-there-are-80-trillion-people-yet-to-come-they-need-us-to-start-protecting-them","title":{"rendered":"William MacAskill: \u2018There are 80 trillion people yet to come. They need us to start protecting them\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/william-macaskill-there-are-80-trillion-people-yet-to-come-they-need-us-to-start-protecting-them3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>All those numbers seem incalculably abstract but, according to the moral philosopher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/profile\/william-macaskill\">William MacAskill<\/a>, they should command our attention. He is a proponent of what\u2019s known as longtermism \u2013 the view that the deep future is something we have to address now. How long we last as a species and what kind of state of wellbeing we achieve, says MacAskill, may have a lot to do with what decisions we make and actions we take at the moment and in the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n<p>That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of his new book, <em>What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View<\/em>. The Dutch historian and writer Rutger Bregman calls the book\u2019s publication \u201ca monumental event\u201d, while the US neuroscientist Sam Harris says that \u201cno living philosopher has had a greater impact\u201d upon his ethics.<\/p>\n<p>We tend to think of moral philosophers as whiskery sages, but MacAskill is a youthful 35 and a disarmingly informal character in person, or rather on a Zoom call from San Francisco, where he is promoting the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>All those numbers seem incalculably abstract but, according to the moral philosopher William MacAskill, they should command our attention. He is a proponent of what\u2019s known as longtermism \u2013 the view that the deep future is something we have to address now. How long we last as a species and what kind of state of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}