Future people deserve moral weight equal to people alive today

MacAskill's foundational move is refusing to discount the interests of people simply because they haven't been born yet. He argues that being born in 2200 rather than 2026 is morally arbitrary in the same way that being born in a different country or with different skin color is arbitrary — it says nothing about whether a person's suffering or flourishing counts. If we'd condemn discriminating against someone for where they were born, we should be equally uneasy discounting someone for when they were born.

He extends this with a thought experiment: imagine burying broken glass in a forest, knowing a child will step on it centuries later. The distance in time doesn't erase the harm; the child's pain is exactly as real as if it happened tomorrow. Actions like burying nuclear waste carelessly or destabilizing the climate work the same way, just with subtler feedback loops.

Takeaway: distance in time doesn't shrink the moral significance of harm or benefit — it just delays which generation experiences it.