On What We Owe the Future, Part 2 (some polemic)

This is the second post on MacAskill’s book. (The first one is here; it lists some qualities about the book that I admire.)

Two ground-rules about what follows:

1. I ignore all the good non-longtermist, effective altruism (EA) has done. It’s mostly wonderful stuff, and no cynicism about it is warranted.
2. I ignore MacAskill’s association with SBF/FTX. I have said what I want to say about it (here), although if any longtermists associated with the EA movement come to comment here, I hope they remember that the EA community directly benefitted from fraud (and that there is an interesting question to what degree it was facilitated by the relentless mutual backscratching of the intellectual side of the EA community and SBF); and perhaps focus on helping the victims of SBF.

• Perhaps, for some consequentialists (1) and (2) cancel each other out?

A full account of abolition would require a book in its own right and would cover the countless acts of resistance, subversion, and bravery by enslaved people throughout history. It would also cover efforts from formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman in the United States and Luís Gama in Brazil, who shed light on the horrors of slavery, fostered public opposition, and pushed for legislative action.
Here, though, I look at just one part of this narrative. Because I’m interested in whether or not abolition was contingent, I’m interested in those parts of the history that seem unexpected or difficult to explain. And, as leading historian of abolition Professor Christopher Leslie Brown puts it, “The causes of slave resistance do not seem particularly mysterious.” What is surprising, he notes, is that slavery was attacked by those who benefited from it. Moreover, enslaved people have very often throughout history powerfully resisted their oppression. So why was there a successful abolitionist campaign in Britain in the early 1800s and not in any of history’s previous slave societies?

I think that the activism of a fairly small group of Quakers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides part of the answer. Their efforts were hugely important in one of the most surprising moral about-faces in history. There were many important figures in this story, but among the early Quaker activists, the most striking was Benjamin Lay….

The abolitionists demonstrate the importance of making moral change, but we can look to them as inspiration for how to make moral change, too. Earlier, I mentioned that in the late eighteenth century, abolitionist Quakers would keep a print of Benjamin Lay in their house as a source of continued moral inspiration. I have followed their lead; a print of Lay sits next to my monitor, and he watches me as I write this book.
Lay was the paradigm of a moral entrepreneur: someone who thought deeply about morality, took it very seriously, was utterly willing to act in accordance with his convictions, and was regarded as an eccentric, a weirdo, for that reason. We should aspire to be weirdos like him. Others may mock you for being concerned about people who live on the other side of the planet, or about pigs and chickens, or about people who will be born in thousands of years’ time. But many at the time mocked the abolitionists. We are very far from creating the perfect society, and until then, in order to drive forward moral progress, we need morally motivated heretics who are able to endure ridicule from those who wish to preserve the status quo.—William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, “Chapter 3: Moral Change,” pp. 49 & 71-72

Once you have read What We Owe The Future, it is no surprise that MacAskill singles out Lay and does not even mention Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, John Brown, or Lincoln. (Equiano, Cugoano, and Wilberforce receive a passing comment each.) MacAskill prefers to think about moral entrepreneurs, who generate moral change, not about political violence or politicians. In MacAskill’s narrative moral change ended slavery not revolution, war, or the buying off of slaveowners. In his account, the significance of slave revolt is primarily to trigger moral change, or prevent it. (277 n. 17; p. 69) The Haitian revolution gets mentioned (especially in the endnotes), but if you don’t know what it’s about MacAskill doesn’t inform you. I don’t recall seeing the US Civil War mentioned at all. As he puts it in a slogan (in the context of praising the admirable, Leah Garcés, and Mercy for Animals), “Revolutionary beliefs; cooperative behaviour.” (73)

Because MacAskill relies heavily on Christopher Leslie Brown’s Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, who is relatively dismissive of Baxter and not very interested in Tryon (who was greatly admired by Lay), he also ends up systematically downplaying the significance of non Quaker and non utilitarian British abolitionist ideas pre-Lay, and, subsequently, ignoring influential philosophers like Beattie, Priestley, and Adam Smith (who almost certainly influenced Wilberforce). In fact, while some endnotes exhibit much more nuance, in the main body of the text MacAskill promotes a rather one-sided narrative about the historical ubiquity of slavery to imply that moral progress is something distinctly late modern, and the effect of moral entrepreneurship working on/in a small movement (with the Quakers as model). He shows no interest in the ancient cynics (who clearly influenced Lay’s behavior and provided a model for him through the writings of the historian of philosophy, Thomas Stanley), the early Stoics (who arguably were anti-slavery), or — as Graeber and Wengrow explore in The Dawn of Everything — the many cultures that did without slavery. (Catholic anti-slavery is shunted to an endnote.)

As I noted in my first post on his book, MacAskill has remarkably little theoretical interest in social institutions and the role of violence in them, and ending them when necessary. If I were a Marxist, I would accuse him of the bad, right-Hegelian idealism. Even when he promotes “political experimentalism,” he cashes this out in terms of “increasing cultural and intellectual diversity.” (p. 99) The one political experiment he mentions approvingly is local: Deng Xioping’s charter cities in China. (p. 100; the massacre at Tianamen Square is passed over.)

It’s not that political violence is absent in the book (Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and Pope Innocent III [of the Albigensian crusade] are all mentioned), but uniformly it is represented as something negative. Of course, I don’t mean to deny that the world needs peace-loving (Schumpeterian) moral entrepreneurs, who are disruptive of existing social norms. But it doesn’t only need them. MacAskill explicitly cites J.S. Mill approvingly (but no nod to Thoreau, Dewey or Elizabeth Anderson)  to suggest that political and social experimentation can be a source for good (p. 99). He also falsely (recall this post and follow the citation to Jill Gordon 1997) goes on to attribute to Mill the idea “of a marketplace of ideas, where different ideas can compete and the best ideas win.” (p. 99)

In fact, his concern over the effects of moral homogeneity leads him to be rather critical of the possibility of “world government.” (158)+ Now, I share his suspicion that a world government might suppress certain valuable practices, but it is odd that MacAskill does not confront the tension in his own argument. For, in the context of criticizing the possibility of world government, he praises military rivalry for its innovative technological side-effects (p. 158) in one chapter, but only two chapters earlier he worried that great power war — another foreseeable effect of such military rivalry — might lead to human extinction (pp. 114-116). Again, while one should never be cynical about moral change MacAskill exhibits, as also I noted in my first post, a cavalier attitude toward thinking about social theory and social institutions; his near total disregard of the significance of political even violent contestation reflects a kind of infantilization of philosophy.

And while like him, I would welcome more social experimentation, I was a bit taken aback when he noted that “homogeneity in the global response to Covid-19…was responsible for millions of deaths.” (p. 97) Strikingly, in a book with about 800 official endnotes, this claim is offered ex cathedra. MacAskill is a big fan of human challenge trials and selling vaccines, and so I followed the only citation in the previous paragraph to the end-note and then the website in order to realize it was a citation to a 2020 Blog post by the well-known economist John Cochrane. But even Cochrane doesn’t make this point (about millions of deaths), or even advocates for challenge trials in it. (Cochrane does think vaccines should be sold “to the highest bidder.”) Neither MacAskill nor Cochrane addresses the obvious objection that not all purported vaccines offered to the public will work (and so somehow these don’t enter the deaths/cost ledger). I am not against all challenge trials in all contexts, but the idea that they are unproblematic is dangerous, too. Maybe he is right that the global response to Covid-19 was responsible for millions of deaths, but like I intimated in my first post, when I observed the frequently opaque nature and sources of the probabilities mentioned by MacAskill, some of the data he mentions seems to materialize out of thin air.

Let me close with a final thought. One person’s moral entrepreneurship is another person’s dude with a savior complex on steroids. And while this may seem harsh in light of MacAskill’s non trivial contributions to helping actual others, it is notable that MacAskill insists repeatedly that our age is special: “At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes.” (6, emphasis added.) And he regularly returns to this point, especially in the context of technological and moral stagnation, suggesting that “the glass is cooling, and at some point, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, it might set. Whether it sets into a sculpture that is beautiful and crystalline or mangled and misshapen is, in significant part, up to us.” (p. 102) Even if this were true (and I’ll return to his arguments in a future post), he never explains what gives him (and here he echoes (recall) his much more socially cautious hero, Parfit), and his fellow self-elect, the authority to act as the philosophical legislators of much of the future.*

To be continued.

• This post was originally published at D&I (with minor modifications).

+In fact, running through his argument one might well detect a strain of anti-Americanism that his American reviewers have been too polite to mention or, perhaps missed, because MacAskill phrases his argument in terms of “cultural convergence,” “homogeneity” (p.96) and the effects of “modern secular culture” or a “single global culture.” (158)

*It is undeniable that his intentions are noble, but that’s irrelevant in a consequentialist framework like his.