‘Effective altruism’ author speaks in Cambridge
by Stephen Hewitt | Published 16 October 2017
At the Cambridge Union on the evening of Friday 13 October 2017 William MacAskill, Associate Professor in Philosophy at Oxford University, and author of a book Doing Good Better, gave a public talk under the same title with audience questions afterwards.
MacAskill was introduced by Seb of the Effective Altruism Society in Cambridge. The talk was billed by the society on Facebook as “an introduction to the global movement of Effective Altruism” and covered similar topics to MacAskill's book.
MacAskill said that effective altruism was “primarily an intellectual movement and then a social movement”.
In 2009 he set up Giving What We Can, which aims to encourage people to give 10% of their income, or more. He said that he himself gives everything over £25,000 after tax. This charity now has 3,100 members.
It is easier to do good, said MacAskill, “if you find yourself part of a community doing similar stuff.”
One audience question was about whether a violent revolution against capitalism would be justified. Amongst other things MacAskill said that talking about abolishing global capitalism was “way too abstract and vague” and went on to say that where we've tried to put socialist governments in poor countries, “it's got a pretty bad track record”.
Perhaps his assertion about socialist governments was controversial, I suggested to him afterwards, and I asked him whether he had any examples in mind to support it. His reply was “most of sub-Saharan Africa”, specifically Ethiopia. Prompted for the time period for Ethiopia, he said the 1970s. Unprompted, he then went on to say that Deng Xiaoping, who introduced market reforms in China, “did a lot of good”.
The audience for this free talk was enough to fill the floor of the chamber, although there was no shortage of space in the balcony. There were plenty of audience questions still coming when the allocated time was all used.
Related
- ClientEarth, a novel environmental law charity, discussed by its founder 26 November 2017, Cambridge: James Thornton, Martin Goodman and Brian Eno in discussion
- UK tax-efficient charity: a way to quadruple a donation The little-used potential of the UK's 2012 lower rate inheritance tax
External links
- FT article: Steady rise in UK charitable bequests worth more than £1m Lucy Warwick-Ching, FT, 14 September 2018
- New York Times article: FTX's Collapse Casts a Pall on a Philanthropy Movement Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, 14 November 2022 (...“that is deeply tied to Mr. Bankman-Fried, one of its leading proponents and donors.”)
- New Yorker article: Sam Bankman-Fried, Effective Altruism, and the Question of Complicity Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker, 1 December 2022 (“MacAskill repeated this fable to me”...)