The effect of such extreme climate change is difficult to predict. We just do not know what the world would be like if it were more than seven degrees warmer; most research has focused on the impact of less than five degrees. Warming of seven to ten degrees would do enormous harm to countries in the tropics, with many poor agrarian countries being hit by severe heat stress and drought. Since these countries have contributed the least to climate change, this would be a colossal injustice.
But it’s hard to see how even this could lead directly to civilisational collapse. For example, one pressing concern about climate change is the effect it might have on agriculture. Although climate change would be bad for agriculture in the tropics, there is scope for adaptation, temperate regions would not be as badly damaged, and frozen land would be freed up at higher latitudes. There is a similar picture for heat stress. Outdoor labour would become increasingly difficult in the tropics because of heat stress, which would be disastrous for hotter and poorer countries with limited adaptive capacity. But richer countries would be able to adapt, and temperate regions would emerge relatively unscathed.--William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, "chapter 6: collapse" p 136
Two ground-rules about what follows:
- I ignore all the good non-longtermist, effective altruism (EA) has done. It's mostly wonderful stuff, and no cynicism about it is warranted.
- I ignore MacAskill's association with SBF/FTX. I have said what I want to say about it (here), although if any longtermists associated with the EA movement come to comment here, I hope they remember that the EA community directly benefitted from fraud (and that there is an interesting question to what degree it was facilitated by the relentless mutual backscratching of the intellectual side of the EA community and SBF); and perhaps focus on helping the victims of SBF.
- Perhaps, for some consequentialists (1) and (2) cancel each other out?
Anyway, after my post on MacAskill's twitter thread (here) and my post on the concluding pages of Parfit's Reasons and Persons (here), I was told by numerous people that I ought to read MacAskill's What We Owe the Future. And while I am going to be rather critical in what follows (and subsequent posts), I want to note a few important caveats: first, MacAskill is asking very interesting social questions, and draws on a wide range of examples (also historically far apart). I am happy this is a possible future for philosophy today. Second, he is an engaging writer. Third, What We Owe the Future is -- as the first and last chapter make clear -- quite explicitly intended as a contribution to movement building, and that means that the standards of evaluation cannot be (say) identical to what one might expect in a journal article. In a future post, I'll have something to say about the relationship between public philosophy and movement building, but in this post I will be silent on it. Fourth, if you are looking for a philosophically stimulating review of What We Owe the Future, I warmly recommend Peter Wolfendale's essay here for a general overview (here). If you are especially interested in objections to the axiology, I warmly recommend Kierin Setiya's piece in Boston Review (here). It's also worth re-reading Amia Srinivasan's high profile, prescient critique of MacAskill's earlier work (here).*
In today’s post, I offer two (kinds of) criticisms of What We Owe the Future. First, I discuss its cavalier attitude toward injustice. This criticism will be extrinsic to MacAskill's own project. Second, I argue it treats a whole number of existential risks as uncorrelated which are, almost certainly correlated. (This I consider an intrinsic problem.) And this exhibits two kinds of lacunae at the heart of his approach: (a) his lack of theoretical interest in political institutions and the nature of international political coordination; (b) the absence of a disciplining social theory (or models) that can help evaluate the empirical data and integrate them. (That is, lurking in this second criticism is the charge of cherry-picking data and relentless privileging of some measures/inputs rather than being transparent about these being one of many such measures/inputs--a charge I will develop over subsequent posts.) I have argued elsewhere all integrative or synthetic philosophy requires such models, so here I illustrate what happens absent such a synthetic glue.
So much for set up.
The quoted paragraph is literally the only time MacAskill confronts injustice in the book. To his credit, he notices that climate change is generating what he rightly calls a "colossal injustice." The countries and peoples least responsible for climate change shoulder most of its downside risks and burdens. I would emphasize more than he would that this will have foreseeable consequences in such places of civil war, famine, flooding, and emigration of the population, including skilled labor who may find refuge elsewhere.
While MacAskill treats the possibility of colossal injustice as something in the future, these unjust effects of climate change are already visible in the world today, often exacerbated by imperfect political institutions and/or irresponsible social elites (arguably the case in Sri Lanka and Pakistan). Elsewhere in the book, MacAskill notes that 15% of the world's adult population (!) wants to move, but he does not connect it to the unfolding climate crisis (see p. 101, which, while descriptive, I read the implicature as a defense of the "quality of life" in "rich liberal democracies." These are the VERY countries responsible for the colossal injustice he diagnoses two chapters later!)+
Now, one would think that the diagnosis of colossal injustice would motivate, say, discussion of reparations, or less ambitiously, mitigation and prevention. But as the quoted paragraph shows, that's not MacAskill's route. In fact, because he is so concerned with evaluating the risk of civilizational collapse, the significance of this colossal injustice never quite gets internalized in or further developed in his approach. In fact, while climate change is by no means ignored in the book (MacAskill is, for example, a proponent of decarbonization—a topic that recurs regularly), climate justice is missing, except in this quoted passage.
The lack of further focus on this colossal injustice is due to three features of his longtermist population ethics approach (two of which are philosophical in character): first, the nearly infinite number of possible future people simply dwarf the interests of the living, as Srinivasan already noted ("the expected value of preventing an x-risk dwarfs the value of, say, curing cancer or preventing genocide.") To be sure, this is not MacAskill's intent -- in the book one can find plenty of statements that one should not sacrifice the interests of present generations to an uncertain future --; but there is a clear distinction between actively sacrificing present interests, and actively undoing harms to present generations. On his approach there is simply no reason to privilege attention to (say) intersectionally vulnerable populations. Second, the relentlessly forward looking longtermism of MacAskill doesn't really know what to do with the past (and the possible colossal injustice he diagnoses is, in part, the effect of imperialism, colonialism; and in part the effect of industrialization). From the vantage point of maximizing effective value, compensation or reparations for developing injustices among relatively poor or unskilled populations is simply an inefficient use of money. (Again, this point is not original with me; it echoes the complaints of those who worried about the effects of, say, trading emission rights on the poor without a seat at the technocratic negotiating table.) Third, MacAskill's implied 'we,' -- and I would bet 'we' is one of the most used words in the book -- which often seems like it's speaking for all of humanity, clearly does not include the victims of this injustice (this is made explicit when he addresses who his likely readers are on p. 194).
Okay, let me turn to the second issue I promised to discuss in this post. On the very same page that I have quoted above, MacAskill writes,
There is a substantial chance that our decarbonisation efforts will get stuck. First, limited progress on decarbonisation is exacerbated by the risk of a breakdown in international coordination, which could happen because of rising military tensions between the major economies in the world….Decarbonisation is a truly global problem: even if most regions stop emitting, emissions could continue for a long time if one region decides not to cooperate. Second, the risk of prolonged technological stagnation, which I discuss in the next chapter, would increase the risk that we do not develop the technology needed to fully decarbonise. These are not outlandish risks; I would put both risks at around one in three. (136)
The underlying concerns strike me as very apt (even if I would like to see more transparency about how MacAskill arrives at his probabilities--the endnotes often send you to a website, and the calculations are then burried in cited papers). But it is odd to treat the risk of a breakdown in international coordination and the risk of technological stagnation as independent from each other. In fact, if the breakdown of international coordination would lead to world war, then decarbonization is off the table not just because war is truly a great source of carbon emissions, but also because it (de facto) ends international coordination.
In fact, it is odd that MacAskill misses this point because earlier he recognizes “that great power war also increases the risk of a host of other risks to civilization.” (p. 116) He reports “a chance of a third world war by 2050 at 23%” and add that “annual risk stayed the same for the following fifty years, this would mean another world war before the end of the century is more likely than not.” (p. 116) If that’s right then the numbers reported for “engineered pandemics” (risk 1% [p. 113]) and technological stagnation (as well fossil fuel depletion [which MacAskill wants to prevent] all seem rather optimistic because in reality they represent correlated or systemic risks.
While MacAskill is highly interested in great power war (pp. 114-116), he is curiously uninterested in how to theorize explicitly about great power politics in the context of international institutions despite these being the causal source of the main factor in the probabilities he bandies about throughout the book. Throughout his argument, he tacitly black-boxes what he calls “the international system,” “international cooperation,” “international coordination” and “international norms.” (Obviously, he could claim that great power politics is independent from international institutions and shaped by the interactions of small number of elite actors—something he hints at in his historical examples; but it is not developed in his future oriented chapters.) And so, somewhat curiously, a book devoted to building a social movement and changing values, leaves under-theorized the main social factor that will determine (by its own lights) the possibility of that movement having a future at all.**
To be continued.
*And after reading What We Owe to the Future and re-reading Srinivasan's review it generates the unsettling feeling that MacAskill simply ignores objections that he can't turn into a feature of his approach.
+As regular readers know, I can't be accused of excessive criticism of liberal democracy.
** In my next post, I’ll suggest that a related problem also shows up in non-trivial ways in MacAskill’s potted history of abolitionism (which is the social movement that is the main rhetorical model or template for longtermism).
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