William MacAskill: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But there’s a lot of nature. We have very effective bombs, weapons. We could develop animal-killing weapons if we set our minds to it. That’s right. There’s a lot of nature, but there’s far more future. If we’re willing to take philosophical reasoning far enough, where we’d be seriously considering removing nature, then you should be taking much more seriously the fact that we can have this enormous impact over our long-run future. I will caveat and say I really don’t know whether animals in the wild have lives that are good or bad. When you look at the world as a whole, it gets incredibly determined by, where’s the cut-off for conscious experiences? Because is it, are ants conscious? They have an awful lot of the total neuron count of animals in the wild. If they are, do they have lives that are good or not? I’m like, “I have no idea.” [laughs] I worry a bit this is verging into the absurd, and I’m aware that word is a bit question-begging. But if we think about the individual level — like what do you, Will, value? — you value, in part, the inefficient. It’s very hard to give people just pure utilitarian advice, because they’re necessarily partial. At the big macro level — like the whole world of nature versus humans, ethics of the infinite, and so on — it also seems to me utilitarianism doesn’t perform that well. The utilitarian part of our calculations — isn’t that only a mid-scale theory? You can ask, does rent control work? Are tariffs good? Utilitarianism is fine there, but otherwise, it just doesn’t make sense.…

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