Somewhat echoing atucker: the moral ideas behind effective altruism have been around for a long time, but are also quite contrarian and have never been widely embraced. But the moral ideas—even in a form pretty damn close to their current one, like Peter Singer’s writings in the 70s—aren’t enough to give you EA as we know it. You also need a fair amount of expertise to come up with a strong game plan for putting them into practice. Singer couldn’t have founded GiveWell, for example.
(One odd thing: as far as I know, Singer has never been involved in the nuclear disarmament movement. That would’ve seemed like the obvious existential risk to care about in the 70s or 80s.)
It probably wasn’t immediately obvious how important the future is.
The ancestors of far future concern are Sagan and Parfit. E.g Sagan: “If we are required to calibrate extinction in numerical terms, I would be sure to include the number of people in future generations who would not be born.… (By one calculation), the stakes are one million times greater for extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill “only” hundreds of millions of people. There are many other possible measures of the potential loss—including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.”
Singer probably read Reasons and Persons not long after it came out, but then the Berlin Wall fell a couple years later, and nuclear risk would have looked less pressing. Also, I’m not sure it ever looked to anyone like nuclear risk was at all likely to be an existential catastrophe cutting off billions of future generations.
“No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race.”
Reasons and Persons paraphrased:
“I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:
1 Peace.
2 A nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population.
3 A nuclear war that kills 100 per cent.
99% kill would be worse than peace, and 100% kill would be worse than 99% kill. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between peace and 99% kill. I believe that the difference between 99% kill and 100% kill is very much greater. The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilisation began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilised human history. The difference between 99% kill and 100% kill may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.”
So I think many people were worried about the extinction risk of nuclear war.
Somewhat echoing atucker: the moral ideas behind effective altruism have been around for a long time, but are also quite contrarian and have never been widely embraced. But the moral ideas—even in a form pretty damn close to their current one, like Peter Singer’s writings in the 70s—aren’t enough to give you EA as we know it. You also need a fair amount of expertise to come up with a strong game plan for putting them into practice. Singer couldn’t have founded GiveWell, for example.
(One odd thing: as far as I know, Singer has never been involved in the nuclear disarmament movement. That would’ve seemed like the obvious existential risk to care about in the 70s or 80s.)
It probably wasn’t immediately obvious how important the future is.
The ancestors of far future concern are Sagan and Parfit. E.g Sagan: “If we are required to calibrate extinction in numerical terms, I would be sure to include the number of people in future generations who would not be born.… (By one calculation), the stakes are one million times greater for extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill “only” hundreds of millions of people. There are many other possible measures of the potential loss—including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.”
Singer probably read Reasons and Persons not long after it came out, but then the Berlin Wall fell a couple years later, and nuclear risk would have looked less pressing. Also, I’m not sure it ever looked to anyone like nuclear risk was at all likely to be an existential catastrophe cutting off billions of future generations.
Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955) link
“No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race.”
Reasons and Persons paraphrased:
“I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:
1 Peace.
2 A nuclear war that kills 99 per cent of the world’s existing population.
3 A nuclear war that kills 100 per cent.
99% kill would be worse than peace, and 100% kill would be worse than 99% kill. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between peace and 99% kill. I believe that the difference between 99% kill and 100% kill is very much greater. The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilisation began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilised human history. The difference between 99% kill and 100% kill may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.”
So I think many people were worried about the extinction risk of nuclear war.