What We Owe the Future is a 2022 book by William MacAskill. The book makes the case for longtermism—defined as the view that positively affecting the long-run future is a key moral priority of our time—and explores what follows from that view.

Summary

The book makes the case for longtermism and proposes that we can make the future better in two ways: "by averting permanent catastrophes, thereby ensuring civilisation’s survival; or by changing civilisation’s trajectory to make it better while it lasts...Broadly, ensuring survival increases the quantity of future life; trajectory changes increase its quality".^:35–36

Part 1: Longtermism

Part 1 introduces and advocates for longtermism, which MacAskill defines as "the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time."^: 4 This part of the book also describes how we, the current generation, can shape the future through our actions.^: 29

MacAskill's argument for longtermism has three parts. First, future people count morally as much as the people alive today, which he supports by drawing the analogy that "distance in time is like distance in space. People matter even if they live thousands of miles away. Likewise, they matter even if they live thousands of years hence".^: 10

Second, the future is immensely big since humanity may survive for a very long time, and there may be many more people alive at any given time. MacAskill points out that the "future of civilisation could...be extremely long. The earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years...And if humanity ultimately takes to the stars, the timescales become literally astronomical".^: 14

Third, the future could be very good or very bad, and our actions may affect what it will be. It could be very good if technological and moral progress continue to improve the quality of life into the future, just as they have greatly improved our lives compared to our ancestors; yet, the future could also be very bad if technology were to allow a totalitarian regime to control the world or a world war to completely destroy civilisation.^: 19–21 MacAskill notes that our present time is highly unusual in that "we live in an era that involves an extraordinary amount of change"^: 26—both relative to the past (where rates of economic and technological progress were very slow) and to the future (since current growth rates cannot contin...

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