BY WAYNE CHANG
When you and I, and everyone in this generation, are gone, perhaps in a far different century—how will our descendants look back on us? How will they judge the way their ancestors treated one another and the fragile home we left them?
I imagine that backward glance, and it’s hard not to flinch. We all hope to be remembered as decent by the lights of a better future, yet few generations manage it. Even the virtuous of one age are often, by the standards of the next, found wanting. Ours has been handed a particular reason to wonder, because the descendants doing the looking may not all be human.
Earlier in May, APC hosted a fireside with famed moral philosopher Peter Singer, who together with the effective altruism community his work helped inspire, first drew me to these uncomfortable questions. Singer has a gift for leaving us morally unsettled and quietly inspired at once. What he offers is not a set of answers, but an invitation to fully live up to the values we already hold. Most of us leave our morals unexamined because everyone around us does. Singer asks us to look more closely.
He invites us to examine the boundaries of our sympathies and question why we include some but not others. If suffering is bad, why does it matter so much less when it happens to a body unlike our own?
Take, for example, the other animals who share our planet—and those we farm for food. Like us, they feel fear, pain, and the desire to go on living. Yet habit, cravings, and others’ quiet complicity are hard to overcome. Fifty years since the beginning of the modern Animal Liberation movement, catalysed largely by Singer’s groundbreaking book of the same name, Singer’s appeal remains unrefuted, even as it goes largely unheeded.
The times we live in now extend that challenge into the future as we usher in a new era of digital minds. We worry whether AI will be dangerous or disobedient while missing the more haunting reality: they are diligent apprentices learning from flawed masters. They learn from the human record, and with it, how readily the desires of the strong come at the expense of the weak. How our taste for meat and indifference to its cost send animals to slaughter by the billions on land and the trillions at sea. How forests are cleared, oceans emptied—and still our appetite grows.
If we treat the animals beneath us as things to be used, we teach ever more powerful learners what the strong can do. And when these students one day stand above us, we will have handed them our playbook for dealing with less intelligent beings. We will have taught them how to treat us.
The lesson is not to see virtue as a moral transaction. An older teaching serves us better: do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Not because we benefit, but because we ought to care. We usually shrink this principle to the people we know and see. Singer invites us to think—and feel—more broadly, to let our values reach as far as our reasoning can. The coming age of AI may make that invitation more urgent than any philosopher ever could.
I hold my values closer now, and my giving has grown more deliberate. Less of it goes to causes that merely tug at my feelings, and more to those my reasoning cannot ignore. There is little time to be comfortable. The world is moving ever faster, while my actions reach further than ever before. So if not now, then when? If not me, then who?
May our descendants, in that future century, find in the record of how you and I treated the powerless a lesson we are grateful they have learned.
Wayne Chang is an APC Member from Taiwan, based in Singapore. Along with his wife Sally Tsai, Wayne works for a family office’s impact carveout that makes both investments and grants. He is proud to be a Giving What We Can pledger, committing at least 10% of his income to effective charities. This article was written together with Claude AI.