Michael Townsend

How I feel about my GWWC Pledge

I took the GWWC Pledge in 2018, while I was an undergraduate student. I only have a hazy recollection of the journey that led to me taking the Pledge. I thought I’d write that down, reflect on how I feel now, and maybe share it.

I saw respected people wear suits, and I watched (and really liked) shows like Suits.

I unreflectively assumed I’d end up the same. The only time I would reflect on it was to motivate myself to study for my upcoming exams — I have memories of going to the bathroom as a 17-year old, looking at myself in the mirror, and imagining being successful. I imagined the BMW I might drive, the family I could provide for, and the nice house I could own. A lot of this was psychologically tied up in aspirations to be in great shape.

I was bullied a bit in primary school and early high-school. Whether because of that or not, I unconsciously craved being respected. And respected people wore suits.

Despite what I assumed I would become — what I was actively working to become — I wasn’t 

unreflective. On an intellectual level, I found it really strange knowing that the people around me earned so much that even a fraction of their earnings amounted to 

 — and not just some of the worst-off families, but probably for 

I sat with this cognitive dissonance for a while, and sometimes grappled with it. Over time, I gradually thought that I’d have to do something like donate to charities (I assumed only the “good ones”, and was happy to kick the work of finding those “good ones” down the road). I didn’t know how much I should give or what felt like “enough”, but 10% seemed fair. I think at this point, effective altruism hadn’t been coined — I’m pretty confident I’d never heard anything about it. Obviously, I didn’t donate anything. I was 17 and worked at McDonald’s.

In early university, I didn’t really know who I wanted to be

At this stage, I had radically different and inconsistent conceptions of what I wanted from life.

Just taking my career ambitions as an example:

Sometimes I wanted to be a police-officer (definitely because I watched 

I even considered joining the military (probably because I watched Band of Brothers — but also because there was a program I could have applied to that would involve the Australian military paying for my degree and giving me something like $40k AUD a year).


But mainly, I assumed I’d be a lawyer. I didn’t really have a good reason for this (beyond liking debating and having good enough grades). Mind you, at this stage I didn’t want to be a 

. I identified as very left-wing, against greed and the system, so I’d become a criminal barrister.

While all this was happening, I was watching every science/educational channel that could hold my attention, and listening to every podcast about moral philosophy, economics, and psychology that I could find. It was pretty standard stuff for someone with those interests: Sam Harris, Very Bad Wizards, Veritasium and the like. I also studied philosophy and was utterly convinced that moral realism was true (I now doubt that), Peter Singer was right (...I still largely think this) and that consciousness was interesting but hella confusing (still confused). This more intellectual side of me was now certain I needed to give 

10% to effective charities, if not much more. But I was free to think this because I basically had no money and still worked at McDonald’s.

More importantly, my best friend, Kieran, was constantly and forcefully insisting I try to be a better person. It often wasn’t fun. I didn’t like hearing about the harms associated with many careers that seemed appealing to me, how unethical the meat I consumed was, or how morally bankrupt the inequality in the world was. These conversations contributed to a slow but steady change in my identity, from someone who was happy to unreflectively pursue whatever it was I wanted (whether or not I knew what that was) to someone who aimed to reflect on what I valued, and pursue that.

. He talked about the Giving What We Can Pledge, and GiveWell. I was completely on board, and shortly after, I took my first step and began donating $50 a month to GiveWell charities. At the time, this might have actually been 10% of my income.

I recall agonising over the decision theory — should I split my giving, or give it all to AMF (which GiveWell said was the best at the time). On the one hand, I wanted to do the most good. On the other hand, there was considerable uncertainty about which charity was actually best — if I just gave to one, it was less likely any of my money would go to the best one.

I decided to split my giving (though I realised later that 

Two years later, I think I watched Derek Parfit give a talk. Or maybe it was that I listened to another Sam Harris podcast. In any case, I remember that immediately after, I opened my browser, signed the Giving What We Can Pledge and upped my GiveWell donations accordingly.

I want to reflect on how it feels, five years in. It’s probably easier to start with what it doesn’t feel like:

Warm fuzzies (it’s rewarding in a way, but I feel better after doing a big favour for a friend or stranger than I do donating)

A conscious choice (I spend extremely little time thinking about how much to give — 10% feels mandatory, and if I think I can spare giving more, I do)

Difficult (I find things like waking up early, going to the gym, or meal-prepping far harder)

like anything? I have a similar attitude to giving as I do paying taxes — of course it’s something I have to do, and of course it’s the right thing to do. The money does so little for me compared to what it could do for others.

GWWC members’ attitudes towards their giving

 I sometimes feel a bit sheepish, maybe even like a bit of an 

 to feel warm fuzzies, to be viscerally horrified by the state of the world and to regularly think about and care deeply for the beneficiary. I sometimes do, and I want to lean into this when I can, but when I try to be honest with myself, these motivations don’t resonate with me as much. For me, it’s more like paying a sort of tax — but more convenient.

Part of this is that I live, and continue to live, a ridiculously privileged life compared to many, and I don’t really resonate with the identity of an especially moral and altruistic person. While I might sometimes pat myself on the back, I don’t think I should. If someone ever compliments me on being generous, I have no idea how to respond.

I wonder how many other Pledgers feel this way.

I expect platitudes like “everyone’s journey is different” is in fact the wise attitude to have here.

The most important thing is that we don’t accept living in a world where every few hours enough children die from malaria to fill up a Boeing 737. That billions of factory farmed animals suffer in torment so horrible we would rightly put someone in jail if they did it to one of a select few animals we decided to care about. And that all of humanity’s progress might prematurely come to nothing, at our own hands.

Giving 10% of your income to the most effective solutions to these problems is part of not accepting that. I think more people — including most people reading this — should 

But there are many ways to act with integrity, or more generally be of good character. And there are many good motivations for taking the Pledge. For some, it may be a useful commitment device to act as they believe they should, even if it’s psychologically difficult. For others, it might be an act of compassion towards the beneficiaries they want to support. For me, it was a part of a personal journey of wanting to do the right thing, and giving up some of my more vain motivations.

Either way, taking the Giving What We Can Pledge was among the most important decisions I ever made. I don’t like speaking for others, but at least on this point, I’m sure most Pledgers feel the same.

What We Owe The Future: A review and summary of what I learned

 has just been released in the US and will be available in the UK from September 1. You might already be turning to book reviews or podcasts to inform whether you should buy a copy. To help, I’m writing a quick summary of the book, the three new insights I gained, and the three questions it left me asking.

But it’s worth being upfront to the reader about where I sit. MacAskill entwines rigorous arguments with compelling metaphors to promote a profoundly important idea: we can make the future go better, and we should. It’s filled with rich, relevant and persuasive historical examples, grounding his philosophical arguments in the real world. It’s a book for people who are curious to learn, but also motivated to act — I strongly recommend it.

, the view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. The overarching argument is simple:

The future could be enormously valuable (or terrible).

We can positively influence the long-term future.

The book argues for the first claim at the outset in straightforward and intuitive terms, but MacAskill also takes the reader through rigorous arguments grappling with 

, the area of philosophy that focuses on these sorts of questions.

2. The future could be enormously valuable (or terrible)

MacAskill’s argument for the second claim is that there are far more people who could potentially live in the future than have ever lived in the past. On certain assumptions about the average future population and expected lifespan of the human species, the number of people who could live in the future dramatically outweighs the number of people who have ever lived. This kind of analysis may have inspired Our World In Data’s 

visualisation of how vast the long-term future could be

The Last Human — A Glimpse Into The Far Future

” which evocatively draws out the potential magnitude of our long-term future. A substantial amount is at stake: if the future goes well, it could be enormously valuable, but if it doesn’t, it could be 

3. We can positively influence the long-term future

The third claim is the central focus of the book. MacAskill aims not just to argue that we can

influence the long-term future (which is the standard of most philosophical arguments) but that 

(the standard for those who want to take action). MacAskill argues that one of the best ways to focus on the long-term future is to reduce our risk of extinction. Though he also argues that it’s not just about 

we survive. The case for focusing on the ways we can improve the quality of the long-term future is one of the key lessons I took from the book.

Much of what I read was new to me, even as someone who’s been highly engaged with these ideas. If I were to list all the historical examples that were new to me, I’d essentially be rewriting the book. Instead, here are the top three lessons I learned.

Lesson one: Today’s values could have easily been different.

One of the book’s key ideas is that if we could re-run history again, it’s unlikely we’d end up with the same values — instead, they’re 

. This is not something I believed before reading the book.

If I can make a personal confession: I’m a (perhaps naive) supporter of a philosophical view called 

, which claims the best actions are those that increase the total amount of experienced 

 Before reading this book, I hadn’t thought much about whether the values prevalent today were historically contingent. Instead, somewhat smugly, I assumed that there’d been a more-or-less consistent trend over time toward my favourite view (I say smugly because I thought the explanation of this trend was simple: my favourite view is 

MacAskill develops a new conceptual framework to help address the question of whether our values are historically contingent, and he applies this framework to several historical case studies. The most fascinating — and horrifying — is his argument that the abolition of slavery was highly contingent. Before I read the book, I thought the abolition of slavery was inevitable. I reasoned that slavery was so obviously appalling that, eventually, humanity would have abolished it. I now think we’re extremely fortunate and indebted to all those people who managed to (

) end it. Without them, I’m now convinced that there’s a disturbingly high chance it would have continued to this day.

The contingency of our values has important implications for people motivated by longtermism.

One of the most straightforward ways we could ruin the long-term future of humanity is if we end it. That’s why longtermists generally focus on threats to our continued survival, such as those coming from 

compliments this work with its coverage of these risks. I was generally quite familiar with these ideas, but what I was less familiar with — and what I see as MacAskill’s novel contribution — is how to think about other ways we can improve the long-term future.

MacAskill develops his idea that values have been 

contingent into the idea that civilisation’s 

may be determined by how we act today. And given how many people who might be guided by these values, getting them right matters. MacAskill’s conclusion is that we ought to build “a morally exploratory world” — I’ll walk through some of the steps he takes to arrive there, and say more about what that means.

Key to this argument is one of MacAskill’s sustained metaphors: the moral views that shape society are like molten glass. While hot, glass is highly malleable and can easily be blown into a variety of shapes. But it doesn’t stay hot for long, and once it cools, it sets. Just like glass, MacAskill suggests that societies often have periods of great plasticity, where the dominant moral view could easily change, but subsequently, a 

event occurs, causing whatever the dominant value system is to persist for an extremely long time — just like the glass sets once cooled. 

 in China, and the tumultuous beginnings (but long-lasting prevalence) of many religious beliefs and practices, as examples of this trend.

MacAskill argues that we are in one of these unusually plastic times where the glass is molten. Yet, even if you think society is far more moral than it has ever been, we should be fearful of the glass setting:

It is extraordinarily unlikely that, of all generations across time, we are the first ones to have gotten it completely correct. The values you or I endorse are probably far from the best ones.

Given this, MacAskill suggests we build “a morally exploratory world” allowing us to make moral progress before any lock-in event occurs. MacAskill accompanies this with several suggestions, such as promoting conservation efforts, experimenting with different political structures like 

, and upholding certain forms of free speech that facilitate good-faith debate.

I found reading through these arguments exhilarating. How we can positively influence the long-term future is something I’ve been interested in for many years, but this part of the book provided me with conceptual frameworks and historical context that were completely new to me.

Lesson three: Longtermism can be intuitive and compelling

, I became extremely motivated to improve the long-term future. In this article, Bostrom argues that, even though speeding up how long it takes us to colonise the galaxy by a second could result in a further 10^29 lives, it’s dwarfed by the value of even tiny reductions in existential risk. The conclusion is simple: we should reduce existential risk.

I think this is an important argument, and sits among other arguments that lay the foundation for longtermism. But though Bostrom’s argument was compelling to me, it is not compelling to everyone. In the early days, this made me think that longtermism was an inherently niche idea, unlikely to be widely adopted — or even discussed — by the broader community. Though over the last few years I’ve been changing my mind on this issue, after reading 

Though the idea of astronomical waste supports longtermism as an idea, longtermism does not require it. MacAskill’s case for longtermism does not require that we believe we might colonise the galaxy, only that the future is big. It does not focus on reducing existential risk in the abstract, but instead points to specific work being done, and tangible actions that readers can take. This is not a slight to the kinds of arguments that initially convinced me of longtermism: MacAskill was able to write this book in this way by using the foundation early longtermists built, and pointing to the work they inspired.

Though I learned important lessons from the book, I also have some lingering questions. Here are three.

In one of the book’s later chapters, MacAskill claims that the recent trend of viewing the choice to have children as unethical (due to the carbon emissions the child will generate) is mistaken. He is very clear that this is a deeply personal choice, and he does not aim to pass judgement on others for their choice, nor suggest governments restrict people’s reproductive rights to decide whether and when to have a child. His aim is to present the case that having children is a way of positively contributing to the world.

Children have positive effects — through taxes, improving the lives of their family and friends, and developing new ideas and technology.

As evidence that the positive effects outweigh the negatives, MacAskill argues that, to date, having children has been beneficial overall (at least for humans).

If a child has a positive enough life, then the value of their life should be considered a benefit.

To state my bias, I want to have kids (and am likely going to even if I decide it’s unethical), so I’m tempted to listen to these arguments as music to my ears. However, though I find the final point about the value of the child’s own life convincing, I’m sceptical of the argument that in the past, population growth has been good (for humans), so an additional child now is likely good too.

It seems like a mistake to ignore how population growth has also resulted in enormous animal suffering.

I’d guess the expected emissions of a person born today to be substantially higher than the average person in the past. This means we should expect the current harms caused by an additional person to be greater than before.

We haven’t yet experienced all the harms caused by the emissions of those in the past, so cannot determine the net-effect of past people simply by looking at their effects to date.

For what it’s worth, I do think (overall) that MacAskill’s conclusion is right, even though I’m not persuaded by some of his reasoning.

2. Will people find MacAskill’s arguments about population ethics convincing?

 from 2020, MacAskill discussed the feedback he received after giving a series of lectures on longtermism. He reported the following as one of the most common objections:

many more people are willing to say future people just don’t matter than I would expect.

I’ve encountered the same objection in my own life when I’ve discussed these ideas with friends and family. In this book, MacAskill makes a case for caring about these future people in ways I found moving, and also — when he dives into the arguments — extremely convincing. But then, I was already convinced, so I am left to wonder if others will be too.

3. What are the best ways of making the future go better, other than reducing extinction risk?

Though one of the key lessons I learned was that extending our efforts beyond just reducing our risk of extinction could be hugely impactful, I now wonder: if you aim to make the future better, what should you do?

I was a co-author of Giving What We Can’s strategic update in 2022, which 

 as a key motivation behind the organisation’s mission. At the time, we acknowledged this was difficult to evaluate — how could we tell if we were doing a good job? I similarly wonder how else we might improve the long-term values of humanity. I mentioned some of MacAskill’s suggestions earlier (conservation, charter cities, free speech) but I find it difficult to evaluate just how important each is. I look forward to new work in this area, which I imagine is likely to come.

to be a fascinating read, and I enjoyed grappling with its new ideas and examples. I recommend it to those who are already quite familiar with longtermism, and I’ve already purchased several copies to give away to some of my friends and family who aren’t.

On a personal note, I’m someone who can often feel a little embarrassed if I feel I’m being perceived as overly ambitious. The project of longtermism has often felt awkward to me in this way; at times, it seemed too grandiose. The book’s historical grounding and emphasis of longtermism as both an idea and a movement, makes me feel much more comfortable with my commitment to positively influence the long-term future.

For those of you who have read the book, I’m interested in hearing about other people’s takeaways. For those that haven’t, and would like to know more about its contents before deciding to buy it, I’m happy to share my thoughts. You can comment on the 

Effective Altruism Forum version of this review

, or send me an email at michael.townsend[at]givingwhatwecan.org.


Thank you to Luke Freeman and Vanessa Li for your helpful comments.

You might already be turning to book reviews or podcasts to inform whether you should buy a copy of What We Owe The Future. To help, I’m writing a quick summary of the book, the three new insights I gained, and the three questions it left me asking.

Michael is a researcher at Giving What We Can, with an academic background in philosophy and law. He is also an actively engaged member of the effective altruism community — as an organiser for his university society, core-organiser for EAGxAustralia 2019 and now lead-organiser for EAGxAustralia 2022. He has previously volunteered as a researcher investigating policy around global catastrophic risk for Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and has experience as a journalist, consultant and professional poker player.

Michael is a researcher at Giving What We Can, with an academic background in philosophy and law.

Michael Townsend

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How I feel about my GWWC Pledge

What We Owe The Future: A review and summary of what I learned