William MacAskill

William David MacAskill (; born 24 March 1987) is a Scottish philosopher and author, as well as one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford, and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research. MacAskill is also the co-founder of Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours. He is the author of the 2015 book ''Doing Good Better'', the 2022 book ''What We Owe the Future'', and co-author of the 2020 book ''Moral Uncertainty.''

Early life and education

MacAskill was born William Crouch in 1987, and grew up in Glasgow. MacAskill was educated at Hutchesons' Grammar School in Glasgow. At the age of 15, after learning about how many people were dying as a result of AIDS, he made the decision to work towards becoming wealthy and giving away half of his money. At the age of 18, MacAskill read Peter Singer's 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which later became a guiding principle for his life.

MacAskill earned a BA in philosophy at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 2008 followed by a BPhil at St Edmund Hall, Oxford in 2010. He went on be awarded a DPhil at St Anne's College, Oxford in 2014 (spending a year as a visiting student at Princeton University), supervised by John Broome and Krister Bykvist. He then took up a junior research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before taking an associate professorship at Lincoln College, Oxford.

Career

In 2009, MacAskill, along with Toby Ord, co-founded the organisation Giving What We Can to encourage people to pledge to donate 10% of their income to effective charities. He co-founded the Centre for Effective Altruism in 2011 as an umbrella organisation of Giving What We Can and 80,000 hours, which he co-founded with Benjamin Todd, to provide advice on how to use your career to do the most good in the world.

MacAskill is Chair of the Advisor Board at the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research. He is an advisor to Longview Philanthropy.

MacAskill was named in the team list of the ''FTX Future Fund'' that committed around $160 million in grants. However, following the bankruptcy of FTX, MacAskill and the rest of the team resigned from the FTX Future Fund.

Research

One of the main focuses of MacAskill's research has been the issue of how one ought to make decisions under normative uncertainty; this was the topic of his dissertation for his DPhil. MacAskill has published on this issue in ''Ethics'', ''Mind'', and ''The Journal of Philosophy''. He was named as external investigator on a December 2017 grant to the Center for Election Science from Open Philanthropy.

Books

''Doing Good Better''

MacAskill's first book, ''Doing Good Better'', was published in 2015. In the book, MacAskill argues that many of the ways people think about doing good achieve very little, but that by applying data and scientific reasoning to the normally sentimental world of doing good, opportunities to have a much larger positive impact can be found. The book goes on to propose that fair trade does very little to help the poorest farmers, how boycotting sweatshops makes things worse for the global poor, and why people who pursue high-income careers could do more good than charity workers by donating large portions of their wealth to effective charities i.e. earning to give. In the same year the book was published, MacAskill deemphasised earning to give saying "only a small proportion of people should earn to give long term".

''What We Owe the Future''

MacAskill's second book, ''What We Owe the Future'', makes the case for longtermism. His argument for longtermism has three parts: first, future people count morally as much as the people alive today; second, the future is immensely big since humanity may survive for a very long time; and third, the future could be very good or very bad, and our actions may affect what it will be. The book also discusses how bad the end of humanity would be, which depends on whether the future will be good or bad and whether it is morally good for happy people to be born—a key question in population ethics. He concludes that the future will likely be positive on balance.

''What We Owe the Future'' received coverage in ''The New Yorker'', ''Time'', and ''The Bookseller''. Adaptations of the book's central thesis have been published by MacAskill in '' Foreign Affairs,'' ''The New York Times'','''' and the BBC
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