Book Review: What We Owe the Future

By Ethan Edwards.

For two thousand years, Christians have prepared themselves for the end of the world. St. Paul warns that “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (I Thessalonians 5:2) and every generation of Christians since has had to shape their lives based on the idea they too might be living in the end times.

William MacAskill’s recent book What We Owe the Future presents a secular moral case for thinking about the end of the world. But MacAskill reverses the urgency of St. Paul: we must be watchful not because the end is nigh, but because it might be very far away. Normally a comforting thought, MacAskill lays out the case that if one accepts that future people have value and that the future holds far more people than the present, then we are obligated to think seriously about how our actions might affect the longterm future. If humanity will live another hundred thousand, billion, or possibly trillions of years into the future, any small actions that can make the future better have the potential to compound and improve orders of magnitude more lives than we normally consider. If we lived in the last days, we would only have to worry about those around us, but a long future involves far more considerations leading into the book’s case for longtermism.

Through many well-researched and fascinating chapters, MacAskill presents much to worry about as well as many neglected opportunities to do good. He argues for greater attention to existential risks such as engineered pandemics and uncontrollable AI, as well as informed approaches to nuclear war and catastrophic climate change, which may not be as existential as we feared. MacAskill’s sober and grounded takes on such oft-sensationalized scenarios are incredibly welcome.

One of the best chapters of the book features a long discussion of the modern abolition of slavery spearheaded by elements of British society, a case study of how good moral values can change history even when bad values have seemingly been deeply embedded in society. Slavery was a monstrous evil accepted as part of life for centuries, but it gradually faded away with legal bans in the European world throughout the 19th century. While many accounts attribute this change to economic transformations away from agrarian mass labor, there is a convincing historical case that slavery’s end came about as the result of a moral reevaluation of how best to do good.

MacAskill traces much of the original action to the devout Quaker activist Benjamin Lay. Lay was an odd 18th century character who broke social norms and was extremely outspoken about his beliefs. Lay witnessed first-hand the cruelty of the plantation system in Barbados and channeled his deep religious beliefs into a fanatical commitment to abolition. He spent the following decades writing pamphlets and making speeches for his fellow Quakers urging the abolition of slavery. While resisted at first, Lay’s case eventually won out. The Quakers stopped accepting slave traders at their meetings, then stopped accepting slave owners, and gradually began to spread their moral outrage to the rest of English-speaking society. The British government had taken up the cause by the early 19th century and made moral decisions against the self-interest of the empire to force an end to slave-trading even among other nations.

Benjamin Lay’s moral vision alone was surely not sufficient to abolish slavery, but MacAskill makes persuasive arguments that such activists may have been necessary to put the cause over the edge. Which should worry us, because Lay’s success was highly contingent. It might have been that Lay would never have taken up the cause had he not spent time in Barbados, or that his ship would have sunk on its way to Philadelphia and his activism would never have occurred. Were it not for coincidence, slavery might have lasted far longer. While slavery was overcome by good values, MacAskill urges us to be concerned with the dangerous potential to “lock-in” bad values. We need to ensure that good morals will last for the long term.

Christians should be proud that activists such as Lay were directly inspired by the moral teachings of their religion to do good in the world. But moreso, they should be ashamed and worried that so few Christians came to Lay’s commitments on their own. Christian opposition to slavery has been important and even widespread throughout the history of the church, but it was not sufficient to stop the centuries of early-modern slavery of Africans and Indigenous Americans. The transatlantic slave traders and most of the slave-owners scattered throughout Europe and its colonies were Christians who saw no moral issue with their practices until marginal sects like the Quakers pointed out their folly. It seems from our own history that it is very easy for bad values to pass unnoticed into consensus. Christians should be concerned with the potential of bad values to be accepted as Christian and ought to study how best to provide moral education for future Benjamin Lays.

While MacAskill does not make too many concrete suggestions for how organizations and communities can avoid value-drift towards the bad, his arguments for longtermism make clear the need to address these issues. The Christian church was originally founded by those who expected the imminent return of Jesus. Throughout the centuries, Christian institutions have not necessarily been designed with longterm concerns in mind. 

Christians reflecting on the project have several questions to ask: Are there any deeply immoral practices like slavery that we are failing to regard as such? MacAskill and many others have suggested that the factory farming of animals might qualify. How did Christians get such issues so wrong, and what steps can we take to make sure the same mistakes are not made again? One approach MacAskill favors in responding to crises is allowing for a diversity of responses and methods, to ensure at least some are saved. There is an argument here for pluralism and dialogue, something Christians have not always excelled in.

While there is much Christians can learn from the book, it is ultimately written from a secular viewpoint mostly coming out of utilitarianism which leads to some interesting tensions. MacAskill considers a few scenarios where extinction is preferable to a future of certain suffering according to utility calculations, which go against Christian intuitions. It has long been believed that great suffering will precede the ultimate and inevitable happiness of the Kingdom of Heaven. Even in situations where suffering seems inescapable, Christians hold dear the value of hope. 

Amid serious worry of x-risks as well as critiques of whether the longterm future is knowable enough to ground action, it can be difficult to build ethical momentum for longtermism with reason alone. To be longtermist might require more than just a sober look at the future, it might require hope. St. Thomas describes the ultimate object of hope as something which is possible, yet very arduous to reach. After reading What We Owe the Future, I have a better sense that a shining future is possible, that it will be difficult to attain, and that it is worth trying to realize.