Why We Exist

“What’s in it for me? Why we should do our best to create a better future. 

The following comes from Blinkist’s summary of “What We Owe the Future” by William MacAskill https://www.blinkist.com/en/nc/reader/what-we-owe-the-future-en

You are hiking through a beautiful forest when you drop a glass bottle and it shatters. Suppose that if you leave the glass there, a child will at some point cut themselves badly on it. You need to decide whether to clean it up. When making the decision, does it matter when exactly the child will injure herself? If it’s a week, a decade, or even a century from now, does your mind change? Of course not. A hurt child is a hurt child, no matter when she’s hurt.

As this simple thought experiment shows, future people count. They’re people –⁠ people who will have pain, joy, and dreams, just like the rest of us. The only difference is that they don’t exist yet.

This is one of the ideas behind longtermism: the idea that future people deserve our consideration and our effort.

What would you do if you knew that you were going to have to live through the full lives of every person in the future, from their birth to their death, no matter how good or bad? Would you want us, in the present, to reduce carbon emissions to increase the quality of your life? Would you want us to pay attention to how our actions today impact conditions tomorrow?

Your answer to all of these questions is probably “yes.” Of course, you’d want us to do our best to create a good future for you. 

After all, there could be a lot of future people. And according to longtermism, we have both the obligation and the ability to improve their lives. 

The amount of future people is relevant for a simple reason. If you were faced with saving one person or ten people from a burning building, all else being equal, you should save ten. 

​In the case of humanity, our species’ lifespan could be dizzyingly long. If we survive until Earth ceases to be habitable, in hundreds of millions of years, there could be a million future people living for every one person alive today.

All of those lives could be either flourishing or wretched –⁠ and we have influence over the outcome. Collectively, as the past two hundred years of history have shown, we have the power to improve life expectancy, reduce poverty, increase literacy, and influence all sorts of other positive trends. On the other hand, we can also create very bad outcomes.