ويليام ماكسكيل

الموقف

MacAskill is a leading figure of effective altruism, the project of using evidence and careful reasoning to find the ways of helping others that do the most good, and of acting on them. “Doing Good Better” argues that charities differ enormously in impact, so that choosing well matters as much as giving at all, and asks how many people are helped and by how much, whether a cause is neglected and what would have happened otherwise. His academic work on moral uncertainty asks how we should act when we are unsure which moral theory is true; roughly, he argues, we should maximise expected “choiceworthiness” across the theories in which we have some confidence. “What We Owe the Future” defends longtermism: future people count morally as much as present ones, there may be vastly more of them, and we can affect their lives, so positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time – above all by reducing the risk of extinction and of the permanent entrenchment of bad values. Critics, among them Amia Srinivasan and Alice Crary, object that effective altruism neglects structural and political change and relies too heavily on quantification, and that longtermism can divert attention from present injustice; the FTX affair also prompted debate about the movement’s culture and governance.

الحياة والسياق

William MacAskill (born William Crouch in 1987 in Glasgow) studied philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, where he took his doctorate on normative uncertainty in 2014; he and his then wife both adopted the surname MacAskill when they married in 2013. As a graduate student he co-founded Giving What We Can with Toby Ord in 2009, whose members pledge to give at least ten per cent of their income to effective charities, followed by 80,000 Hours and the Centre for Effective Altruism. He was associate professor of philosophy at Oxford from 2015 to 2024 and is now a senior research fellow at Forethought, which studies how to prepare for advanced AI. He had been close to the crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried and advised his FTX Future Fund; when FTX collapsed in November 2022 the fund’s team, MacAskill included, resigned, and he said he had been deceived. Bankman-Fried was later convicted of fraud.

الأعمال الرئيسة

• Doing Good Better (2015)
• Moral Uncertainty (with Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord, 2020)
• What We Owe the Future (2022)

يرد في

• نقاش «فعل أكبر قدر من الخير؟ الإيثار الفعّال ونزعة المدى البعيد»