45: Effective Altruism and a Scholarly Inheritance

Peter Mommsen talks with Phil Christman and Joey Keegin about effective altruism. Then, Peter and Susannah welcome Dhananjay Jagannathan to discuss his piece “What Is Our Scholarly Inheritance?” Both past and future, Dhananjay argues, make us who we are, and in scholarship as in other human cultural pursuits, we step into a world, receiving an inheritance and becoming responsible for enriching and passing on that inheritance. Though this kind of generational relationship is not biological, it is very deeply human, and the chosen and unchosen aspects of non-biological generational obligations are what make up a civilization. His uncle Mark’s scholarship was an inspiration to him, and on his uncle’s death, he felt the obligation to take up aspects of his work. The project of humanism is a multigenerational one, and not one that we do alone.