I finally broke down and got a better microphone. My own ears are accustomed to fifteen year old Librivox recordings, but we live in a podcasting world, and a crappy compressor mic doesn’t slide the way it once did, so I decided to make the bare minimum effort.
A sidenote: at one point in this essay, I referred to Will MacAskill as a utilitarian. He has publicly rejected the label, and that’s fair enough. The book itself does reluctantly advance a utilitarian philosophy and doesn’t make much mention of alternative approaches, so it’s no surprise I and so many others came away from it reading MacAskill as a cautious utilitarian (and EA as a utilitarian movement, which it undoubtedly was at least originally), but apparently he’s more of a moral agnostic. Since EA has exploded, I’ve encountered several of its advocates arguing that it can be justified without falling upon a utilitarian moral calculus, a claim I wholly agree with. Anyway, this essay isn’t a critique of utilitarianism of the sort writers like Erik Hoel have offered, mainly because I feel like there’s nothing new to be said there-anyone who knows much about philosophy knows that utilitarianism is at best a very flawed theory. But since I do mischaracterize MacAskill in the essay and the term “utilitarian” has become a bit spicier since I wrote it, I thought I should mention that the characterization was a misreading on my part, and didn’t give enough weight to MacAskill’s circumspection about the argument offered in the book.
Longtermism and the Democratic Culture (Audio)