As he put it to me recently, “I was very annoying.”

It was a period in his life both darkly lonesome and ethically ablaze. He tried not to be too showy or evangelical, but neither was he diffident about his rationale. The balance of his earnings was reserved for others.

When he met friends at the pub, he ordered only a glass of water, which he then refilled with a can of two-per-cent lager he’d bought on the corner for dinner, he ate bread he’d baked at home. MacAskill, however, could find nothing wrong with it.īy the time MacAskill was a graduate student in philosophy, at Oxford, Singer’s insight had become the organizing principle of his life. For about four decades, Singer’s essay was assigned predominantly as a philosophical exercise: his moral theory was so onerous that it had to rest on a shaky foundation, and bright students were instructed to identify the flaws that might absolve us of its demands. Singer, prompted by widespread and eradicable hunger in what’s now Bangladesh, proposed a simple thought experiment: if you stroll by a child drowning in a shallow pond, presumably you don’t worry too much about soiling your clothes before you wade in to help given the irrelevance of the child’s location-in an actual pond nearby or in a metaphorical pond six thousand miles away-devoting resources to superfluous goods is tantamount to allowing a child to drown for the sake of a dry cleaner’s bill. But at eighteen, when he was first exposed to “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” a 1972 essay by the radical utilitarian Peter Singer, MacAskill felt a slight click as he was shunted onto a track of rigorous and uncompromising moralism. Before this shift, MacAskill liked to drink too many pints of beer and frolic about in the nude, climbing pitched roofs by night for the life-affirming flush he was the saxophonist in a campus funk band that played the May Balls, and was known as a hopeless romantic. The philosopher William MacAskill credits his personal transfiguration to an undergraduate seminar at Cambridge.

False Prophet by Rachel Dylan