Rob Wiblin: belief

Transcript context

…Not too long before he died, Parfit gave a talk. I think it’s still on YouTube. I think it was at Oxford. It was on effective altruism. He spoke maybe for 90 minutes, and he never once mentioned economic growth, never talked about gains in emerging economies, never mentioned China. I’m not sure he said anything in the talk that was wrong, but that omission strikes me as so badly wrong that the whole talk was misleading. It was all about redistribution, which I think has a role, but economic growth is much better when you can get it. So, not knowing enough about some of the social sciences and seeing the import of growth is where he was most wrong. I think where he was most important is simply being the walking, living, breathing embodiment of the philosopher who is obsessively curious and will plumb the depths of any argument to such an extreme degree like has never been seen before on planet Earth. He was just remarkable, and that’s why he and his work have influenced so many people. I’m not sure which of his conclusions stand up, or even what his conclusions are. He’s not about conclusions; he’s about philosophizing in the Socratic sense. For that, he was just such a marvel. I wish more people could have known and seen and heard him. Yeah, he was hugely influential on me and a lot of other people. It’s a real shame he’s not with us anymore. Who do you see as his kind of philosophical successors? Because I think of Nick Bostrom at the Future of Humanity Institute. Perhaps Nick Beckstead, who wrote this great dissertation on the overwhelming importance of shaping the long-term future. Are there other people who you think we should now look to in lieu of Parfit? I’m big fans of the two Nicks you mentioned. I don’t think of them as substitutes for Parfit; I think they’re doing something quite different. Nick Bostrom has an engineering mentality to his work that Parfit never did. Like, “What can we do? What should we do? How do we apply resources?” Maybe it’s the next step, but who is the next Socrates? We will see. Probably it will be someone from quite an unexpected corner, perhaps. I would also mention two influential figures: Nozick and Rawls. Rawls influenced a lot of people, but when you read Rawls on growth and the future, it’s incoherent. Rawls is afraid of economic growth. At times, he seems to endorse a stationary state because any savings makes the first generation worse off, and they’re the least well-off people. That to me is a reductio on Rawls’s argument, the entire argument.…

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