Is It a Moral Imperative to Have Kids?

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There are other ways to contribute as well, which will segue on me onto the other action that I can find. So one is donations. You can do enormous amounts of good by spending your money well. And then a second thing is career choice. If you spend 80,000 hours working in the course of your life, maybe even more,. So I set up an organization called80,000 hours that encourages people to pursue those careers that do good. But most of all, if you can pivot your career onto issues that are to help and work on issues that are going to be pivotal for the future of human race, enormous amount of good that you can do.

It’s always a little humbling to think about what affects your words and actions might have on other people, not only right now but potentially well into the future. Now take that humble feeling and promote it to all of humanity, and arbitrarily far in time. How do our actions as a society affect all the potential generations to come? William MacAskill is best known as a founder of the Effective Altruism movement, and is now the author of What We Owe the Future. In this new book he makes the case for longtermism: the idea that we should put substantial effort into positively influencing the long-term future. We talk about the pros and cons of that view, including the underlying philosophical presuppositions.

Mindscape listeners can get 50% off What We Owe the Future, thanks to a partnership between the Forethought Foundation and Bookshop.org. Just click here and use code MINDSCAPE50 at checkout.

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William (Will) MacAskill received his D.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He is currently an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford, as well as a research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, director of the Forefront Foundation for Global Priorities Research, President of the Centre for Effective Altruism, and co-founder of 80,000 hours and Giving What We Can.

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