Famine, Affluence, and Morality | Peter Singer | Talks at Google

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[APPLAUSE]
PETER SINGER: Thank you very much.
It's great to see so many of you here
despite the temptations of getting out
in the sunshine on a beautiful day.
And thank you very much, [? Christine, ?]
for having set this up and for that introduction.
So I'm talking about an article that I
wrote a very long time ago.
"Famine, Affluence, and Morality" was originally
published in 1972.
And it's now been republished together
with a couple of more recent essays, and a previously
unpublished preface, and a forward by Bill
and Melinda Gates as this little book,
"Famine, Affluence, and Morality."
And I'm delighted that OUP have had the idea that this essay is
still relevant today and that it's
something that is worth getting out there and reminding people
about.
But let me just take you back a little bit to the circumstances
in which it was written, which most of you
will not be able to remember I can
see looking around the room.
[LAUGHTER]
So for those who don't know, there
was a time when the country that is now Bangladesh
was a part of Pakistan.
It was called East Pakistan.
There was a movement for independence
from what was then West Pakistan and is now just Pakistan.
And that movement for independence
was very brutally repressed by the Pakistani army.
As a result of that repression, nine million people
fled across the border from East Pakistan to India.
And this is just a small, tiny segment
of that mass of humanity that was
trying to escape the repression and widespread starvation that
also had occurred because of the disruption of infrastructure
because of that repression.
I was living in Oxford at the time.
I was a graduate student at the University of Oxford.
And I was troubled by the fact that despite this vast number
of people in great need, affluent nations were not
doing very much to help.
It wasn't that they didn't know about the situation.
It was well publicized.
The Beatle, George Harrison-- or ex-Beatle, I guess, by then,
perhaps-- put on a concert for Bangladesh,
and tried to raise money for it, and did
raise some money for it.
And Oxfam and other organizations
were fundraising for it.
But they raised I think something
like 20 or 30 million pounds.
And the World Health Organization
was saying that something like half a billion pounds
was needed to feed and provide sanitation and shelter
for this very large number of refugees.
And India was a much poorer country then than it is today.
So it was not really going to be able to cope with this burden.
So I wanted to write something about this.
This was at a time when philosophy, at least
English speaking philosophy, was just
starting to return to what I see as its roots and true nature,
going right back to Athens, and ancient Athens, and Socrates,
of suggesting how we ought to live.
It was emerging from a period where
it was really analyzing the meanings of moral terms
in what was sometimes ordinary language philosophy
and I think of as a phase that-- you know,
it wasn't completely worthless.
But it was less interesting than actually
trying to grapple with these questions of how
we ought to live that traditionally philosophy has
been about.
So I wanted to write something about this.
And this seemed a good example to ask
what are our obligations as people living
in an affluent society-- pretty comfortable,
pretty secure-- in terms of helping
in a situation like this?
But I didn't want to limit it either just
to this particular crisis, which obviously at some point
was going to be solved one way or the other--
but generalizing to what we ought to do to help people
in extreme poverty, which existed all over the world
and which was also taking lives.
So the argument that I put forward
was really a very simple one.
And I'll just run you quickly through the premises
in the argument.
So the first premise I think is very difficult to deny,
that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter,
and medical care is a bad thing.
And that was what these nine million people were being
threatened with at the time.
So there was a bad thing happening.
Second premise, somewhat more controversial--
and I'll come back to this and say a little bit
in defense of it.
But I wanted to claim that if it's in our power
to prevent something bad happening without sacrificing
something of comparable moral significance, then
we ought to do that.
You're probably saying, well, what's
of comparable moral significance?
But I wanted to leave that as a kind
of open expression for people to put their own values in.
I didn't want to make my judgment, in this article
anyway, as to what might be of comparable moral significance
to suffering and death from lack of food and so on.
I wanted people to ask themselves-- so, you know,
I could do something.
We're getting obviously to the question of,
I could donate to Oxfam's appeal.
I could do something.
What would I be sacrificing if I were
to make a substantial donation to that appeal?
Would it be of comparable moral significance
to the death and suffering that it would prevent?
And I thought that most people living in affluent countries
if they were honest with themselves would say, well,
I could give quite a lot before I reached the point where I was
sacrificing anything that even in terms
of my own values, whatever they might be,
would be of comparable moral significance
to what we would be preventing.
So that's the second premise.
And the third is a factual claim that it is in our power
to prevent suffering and death without thereby sacrificing
anything of comparable moral significance.
So that's obviously a claim that needs
to be defended as well in terms of what the factual situation
in the world is.
And I'll come back to that.
But from those three premises, we
can draw the conclusion that we ought
to do what would prevent the suffering and death from lack
of food where we can and if indeed it's
the case, that when that's in our power, we ought to do it.
So that's the really simple argument.
And I think one of the reasons why the article has
been very successful, and is still widely known
and discussed, and reprinted in many anthologies and textbooks
is because that argument is so simple.
It doesn't require a great philosophical sophistication
to spell out what the argument is.
Now some people see that as a disadvantage.
Particularly if I go and lecture on this sort of topic
in a place like France, they all think, oh, this can't really
be philosophy.
I can understand that.
[LAUGHTER]
It's not profound enough.
But I think we can get into deeper questions if we want to.
And we don't need to make the language more complicated.
OK let's, though, look at the defense of the premises.
And we'll start with the second premise.
So in defending the second premise,
I told a little story-- and the story
might be the other reason that the article has
been so widely read-- called "The Drowning
Child in the Shallow Pond."
I couldn't find, despite everything
that's on the internet-- you'd think everything is there.
I could not find a photo of a child drowning in a pond.
[LAUGHTER]
But I found a photo of a rather happy toddler playing in water.
And that's going to have to do.
[LAUGHTER]
So the story is-- it's laid out here--
you're walking across a park.
And there's a shallow pond in the park.
You know that the pond is shallow.
You've been walking through the park on summer days
when kids have been playing.
And you know that if there's a teenager in the water,
it's only up to his waist.
But today, it's not summer.
There's nobody else around.
You wouldn't expect anyone to be in the water at all.
But you do see something in the water.
And when you look more closely, you
see it's a very small child, a toddler.
And although the pond, is shallow it's
too deep for this child.
And this child is apparently drowning,
in danger of drowning.
Your first response probably would
be to look around and say, who's looking after this child?
Where's the father, or mother, or babysitter?
Somebody has to be taking care of this child.
But you can't see anyone.
You don't know how it could happen
that this small child could be alone and fallen in the pond.
But that apparently is what's happened.
And there's nobody else there.
So it looks like the only way to stop this child drowning
is for you to run into the pond, and quickly grab the child,
and pull the child out.
Not a dangerous thing to do, but you
realize there is some cost to you involved.
As bad luck would have it, you've
dressed in your most expensive outfit,
because you're going to meet someone you want to impress.
And it's going to get ruined.
Your expensive shoes, suit, whatever else it might be
is going to get ruined by wading into this muddy pond.
It's going to be inconvenient for you.
You're going to have to go back and dry off, call your friend
and say you're going to be late, whatever.
And you're up for the expense of replacing your nice clothing
that you bought recently.
Nevertheless, most people would think if you said,
yeah, well, I don't want to damage my shoes.
And after all, this is not my child.
And I'm not responsible for this child.
Nobody said, you know, please look
after this child or anything like that.
So why don't I just forget about it and go on my way?
If you said that, most people I think
would think that you'd done something really bad,
something really wrong.
I thought of this as a purely hypothetical example.
But there are cases of people who
neglect to take simple steps that will save a child's life.
There was one that got a lot of attention in China
three years ago because it was caught on video.
This is a street in the city of Foshan.
And there is a child here who has been previously hit
by a van driving down the street.
The child's mother is not aware that this
has happened to her child.
She's doing something else.
And the video camera captures a number
of people walking down the street, like this man,
basically looking away from the child.
It's pretty hard to imagine that this person who
has walked from down there has not noticed that there's
a child lying in the street.
But he's paying no attention to the child.
And over a period-- I can't remember
exactly how long-- but over a period of 10 minutes
or so, something like a dozen people
walk down the street without paying any attention.
And tragically, a second car hit and ran over the child
while she was lying on the street.
After that, a woman who was cleaning the street
did notice the child and sounded the alarm.
The child was taken to hospital.
But the injuries were too severe, and the child died.
That was then shown in China on national news programs.
And there was a huge outcry that this was a terrible thing.
What's happening to China?
Don't we care about each other?
And there was very widespread condemnation,
as you'd expect of the people who had done nothing
to help the child.
So it's not just a sort of local thing.
I think that if we think, yes, you
ought to have helped the child in the pond and people in China
also I think you ought to help someone in the street,
it may not always happen.
But the moral judgment that I am looking for,
that I am inviting you to make is one ought not to do this.
I hope you would be thinking that you yourself
if you were in this situation would not do this,
that you would help the child.
You would think that the cost of replacing your clothes
would not be anything of comparable moral significance
to saving the child's life.
And therefore, that's something you ought to do.
So if I do have your agreement on that, your support on that,
then I can use that as a way of saying,
at least in that particular case,
the child in the pond sort of case or the child in the street
here, you agree that if it's in your power
to prevent something really bad happening without sacrificing
something comparably significant,
you ought to do it.
And that is an important step in the argument.
It shows that you're not taking the view that you only
have obligations if you have in some way
some special responsibility-- let's say you promise to look
after the child, or the child is your child,
or something like that.
If you think that this would be wrong,
you're actually saying we do have obligations
to help strangers even when we haven't voluntarily taken
on those kinds of obligations.
And that's part of the judgment that
lies behind the second premise that I
want to get you to agree to.
But of course, you might say, well,
I agree in the case of the child in the pond
or the child in the street there.
But the analogy, if you're going to use--
as I presume you've probably already seen
the strategy here-- if you're going to use this
as an analogy for saying I ought to help strangers
in Bangladesh, or refugees from Bangladesh or in India,
or for that matter right now that you
or to help people in developing countries who
are in need who you can help, then that analogy--
there's too many differences between the two situations.
And so I want to say a little bit about that now.
So the question is, yes, there are obviously
differences between the situation, many differences.
Are they morally relevant differences
between those situations?
And there's such a lot of differences
that I'm not going to be able to mention them all.
But I am going to mention some that I
think are psychologically relevant in that they would
affect, perhaps, the likelihood that people will help--
differences between the child in the pond and the global poverty
situation today.
And maybe they affect the moral judgments
that people will make about whether we ought to help
or not.
So I'll just go fairly quickly through these,
because I know we have a limited amount of time.
So in the child in the pond, there's an identifiable child.
You don't know this child's name or much about this child,
but you can see it's that child I'll be helping.
It's one particular individual.
In global poverty, you don't know who you'll be helping.
You may donate to the Against Malaria Foundation,
a highly effective charity that distributes bed nets in areas
where malaria kills children.
And it's been very well documented
by the best possible methods, by randomized controlled trials,
that distributing bed nets does reduce
child mortality at modest cost.
But of course, if you contribute to the Against Malaria
Foundation, you're never going to know
which child's life you saved.
Because it's a counterfactual.
It's, well, if this child hadn't been sleeping under a bed net,
he or she would have got malaria and would have died.
And if you distribute enough bed nets,
there will be such a child that fills that description.
But you'll never know which one it is.
And psychologically, we're much readier to help
an identifiable individual than a statistical individual.
The futility aspect is another little sort
of psychological trick that we play on ourselves.
When we think of the child in the pond,
we think I can save that child.
And when I've saved that child, I've solved the problem.
There's nobody else needing to be saved around there.
But when we think about global poverty,
we often think, oh, but there are-- the current World Bank
figure is 700 million people living in extreme poverty.
There's no way I can help all of them.
In fact, the difference that I could make
is insignificant compared to the size of the problem.
It's a drop in the ocean, we sometimes say.
And that is a discouraging factor that
makes us less likely to do it.
But if you think of it from the point of view
of the individual you have helped,
it's just as much a benefit for that individual
that you've saved their life, or saved the life of their child,
or prevented them going blind, or reduced their suffering
from a disease.
It doesn't reduce the value of that benefit
that sadly, there are hundreds of millions of other people
who are still in that situation.
I think it's still just as important a benefit.
The diffusion of responsibility--
also in the child in the pond, I said you're
the only person who can help.
But clearly, that's not the case with global poverty.
There are, again, hundreds of millions
of people who can help, some of whom are wealthier than you.
And some of those people who are wealthier
than you are helping like Bill and Melinda Gates, for example.
Others who are a lot wealthier than you
are not helping at all.
So you might say, well, why me?
Why am I the one who should do something about this?
And again, psychologically, there
are all sorts of experiments psychologists
have done that show that we are less likely to help others
if we are one of a group and we see that others in the group
are not helping.
It's something that, in a sense, deters us from helping.
But mostly, we think that that's wrong, at least in retrospect
when we're outside it.
I mean, we think that people should have helped.
And the fact that they were part of a society where
people didn't help very much doesn't really excuse them.
If we think about people who turned a blind eye to what
was happening in Nazi Germany, we
don't think the fact that they were just one of many
is a sufficient excuse.
And I think here too, we should think that, well, I
can still make some difference.
Even if other people won't, I can make some difference.
And maybe if I and a few others start helping,
that will make it easier for others to join in.
We'll build up the critical mass of people helping.
And we'll actually counteract this psychological effect
of diffusion of responsibility.
The child in the pond is near.
And the people, the refugees in India, were far away.
And other people in extreme poverty
are far away from where we are now.
Most people when they think about that
are pretty clear about that doesn't really make
a difference to my obligations.
If the distance makes it harder for me
to actually do anything, then sure, that makes a difference.
But that's relevant to the other premise
that I showed you, the one about whether it's
in our power to do something.
If it's just distance, I think we
can see pretty clearly that it's not that critical.
You can see the child for yourself
and sum up the situation.
You don't have to rely on information from others.
Psychologically, that makes a difference too.
But again, I would say, what really matters
is the quality of information.
Are you getting good information?
Is it reliable information?
Could somebody be trying to scam you
into sending them a donation or sending
a donation to an organization that isn't
a bonafide organization at all?
All of those are very relevant and proper concerns.
But otherwise, whether you actually
see it with your own eyes or whether you get information
from a source that you believe is fully reliable I don't think
should make a difference.
So although psychologically these are disanalogies,
I want to argue that morally, they're not really relevant.
And this is my explanation of what's going on,
which owes something to the Harvard psychologist
Joshua Greene who has a book called "Moral Tribes," which
is about moral psychology and its implications
in this kind of area, that I highly recommend.
So why do we have these responses
that I just described?
We have them because we evolved in small face-to-face societies
where basically we knew the people we could help.
They were identifiable individuals.
And they were part of our group.
And to that extent, some of these responses
are hardwired into us.
They're part of our biology.
But the world has changed in the last century or two
very dramatically.
It's changed in the sense that we're living now
in a much bigger community.
And we have the ability to know what's
going on far away from us, which we never had before.
And we have the ability to actually help and make
a difference, not quite as instantly
as we have the ability to know what's happening,
but quickly enough.
Of course, evolution doesn't work that fast.
The biology hasn't changed.
We still have the innate responses
that are more suited to the many millennia in which we lived,
or millions of years, going back to our pre-human ancestors
even, in which we've lived in small social groups.
So that's why we have these notions.
But now we really need to go beyond them-- not that I'm
saying we shouldn't have emotions in this area,
but we need to use our reason and our ability
to reflect in order to go beyond them
and think about what we ought to do in a different way.
So the psychological differences I'm saying
are not always morally relevant.
And I've just said-- what's the second part of that slide,
so I needn't repeat that.
Briefly, I want to make sure that you
have time for questions.
So I don't want to go on too long.
I'll just briefly run through the factual claim
I made that it's in our power to do something--
has been challenged.
Some of you may have read some critiques
of aid-- Bill Easterly's book, "The White Man's Burden,"
Dambisa Moyo's "Dead Aid."
And my Princeton colleague Angus Deaton
who this year got the Nobel Prize for Economics
also has some criticisms of aid in his excellent book,
"The Great Escape."
But I think the more sweeping critiques that
come from Easterly and Moyo are not
applicable to what I'm talking about.
They're directed at government aid, multilateral aid,
not at the NGOs that I would recommend you give your aid to.
Very few of us say we want to give money to the government
so we can increase its aid.
Even as far as government's concerned,
I think Easterly and Moyo are a little unfair, especially where
you have governments that have been reasonably thoughtful,
as Difford has in this country, in terms of overcoming some
of the objections that certainly have existed in the past
to aid.
And as far as Deatons critique, which is a more nuanced one,
Deaton acknowledges that aid, particularly in the health
area, has saved millions of lives.
And I think there's no doubt about that.
You look at the figures-- child deaths have
come down very dramatically in the last 50 years
or more from 20 million in 1960 to under six million today.
So we had less than a third of the number of children
who die before their fifth birthday as
compared to 50 years ago despite the fact
that the world's population has more than doubled.
So effectively, the death rate for children under five
is less than one sixth of what it was.
That's very good news.
Aid can't claim all the credit for that.
Obviously, economic development in countries
like China in particular has made a huge difference here.
But I think it's clear that aid has also made a difference.
And there's data on that which I could go into.
But I think that the data is pretty clear in some cases
that aid programs have made an important difference
in reducing child mortality, also
in doing other things like reducing incidence
of preventable blindness from trachoma,
and dealing with a whole range of other conditions
that cause a lot of suffering, providing
more education, particularly education for girls,
providing information about family
planning, a whole lot of different things
that aid has done.
So I think the factual premise is justified.
We do have it in our power to do things
as long as we choose carefully and thoughtfully about what
we're doing with our resources.
So the only thing that I do want to correct
here, having said that, is in the original article,
I said, like, for the cost of your ruined pair of shoes,
you could save a life.
Well, you're going to have to really
be very much at the top end of the shoe market--
[LAUGHTER]
--for that to be true on the more recent research.
Because whereas I thought earlier maybe
there was some suggestions that for a couple of hundred dollars
you could save a child's life, more recent research
suggests that it's significantly more than that.
It might be in $1,000 or two range.
But it's still, I think, not something that's-- most of us
would not have to give up something comparably
significant in order to achieve that.
OK, aren't I giving through my taxes?
Well, yes, if you pay taxes in the UK,
you are giving to one of the countries
that now, thanks to a bipartisan pledge that's actually
being fulfilled, is among the better nations in the world.
And that's really good, much better
than where I spend part of each year, Australia,
and better still than where I spend
the other part of each year.
The US is really pretty miserable on this scale.
But still, this line is 0.7% of gross national income,
so not very much.
70 pence in every 100 pounds the nation earns is not very much.
I think we could do a lot better than that.
So this is sort of the big, big question
about the whole thing is, well, how much should we give?
What is this level of comparable moral significance?
Doesn't it make life very demanding
to go all the way there?
And when the article, the "Famine, Affluence,
and Morality" article, first came out,
it was used, as I said, in a lot of classrooms.
Professors gave it to their students to read,
because they could read it.
And they could be challenged by it.
But I've heard from a number of people
that the-- the way in which it was used
was basically, look, here's a rather plausible argument.
The premises seem like they're plausible.
Certainly, the conclusion follows
if you accept the premise.
But the conclusion is so demanding,
it must be wrong, right?
So your job is to show where the argument goes wrong.
And that was something that to work quite well as a teaching
tool.
But one of the interesting things that's
happened more recently, and perhaps one of the reasons
why OUP thought it would be good to have the article out there
again, is that, in fact, more people now
are seeing this not as an objection
but as a reason for doing something about it.
And that relates to what's now known
as effective altruism, a new movement,
certainly within the last 10 years, that
is trying to publicize the idea of living
as if that argument actually mattered
and as if we could do something about it.
So here's one of the founders of this movement.
It's sort of not a single organization
that's got it going.
There are a number of different people,
different organizations.
One of them is Toby Ord, who is now a research
fellow in philosophy at Oxford.
He read the article as a student.
He decided that he wanted to live so as to make
the world a better place.
So he thought, well, I'm doing OK as a student.
I'm on this graduate studentship.
I think it was around 16,000 pounds or maybe 14,000 pounds.
He said, yeah, I could maybe have a little bit more.
But, you know, I'm not really missing anything.
And I'm heading for an academic career.
After I get my DPhil, I'm probably
going to get an academic job.
I'll be earning a lot more than my studentship.
Suppose that I just continue to live
on this studentship, or inflation
adjusted amount of this studentship,
or a little bit more.
So he's pledged to live on that amount adjusted for inflation--
it's probably a bit higher than that by now,
because he made that pledge a few years ago--
and to give away the rest.
And he worked out what he might do with that.
He picked, as a highly effective thing to do,
preventing blindness from trachoma, the largest
cause of preventable blindness in the world that
affects people in developing countries--
pretty cheap to prevent.
He, because he likes doing maths, and sums,
and so on, he decided to work out
how much he would be able to give away
if he had a normal academic trajectory at the kind
of salaries that academics are likely to have until retirement
and continued to live on this amount.
And so he got this large sum of money,
notional a large sum of money, divided it
by the cost of preventing blindness from trachoma,
and ended up with a figure of 80,000-- 80,000 cases
of blindness that he alone, not a very rich person,
no Bill Gates or Warren Buffet-- he alone
would be able to prevent.
And he thought that was very impressive.
He was sort of thrilled to think that he could
do that much good in the world-- and decided
to tell people about it.
So he founded this organization, Giving What We Can,
encouraged people not to take a pledge as tough as the one he
did, but to pledge to give 10% of their income
to effective charities.
Here's somebody who came to this completely independent,
Julia Wise, a woman living in Boston who sort of thought
that learning how much better she is than other people wanted
to give quite a lot to help people and could live on less--
persuaded her then boyfriend now husband
to join her in doing this.
And incidentally, he worked-- Jeff Kauffman
works for Google in Boston.
But even before he got this job at Google,
they were already donating a substantial amount
of their income.
They were I think donating something like 30% of it
even when their total income was no more than around $50,000
a year.
Now that Jeff has a nice Google job,
they've upped this to 50% of their income.
And if you want to read about how Julia feels about it,
she writes this engaging kind of personal blog
at givinggladly.com.
And you can see what she does, and how she lives,
and why she thinks this is important by looking at that.
And this is probably the most impressive sort
of a case of the influence of philosophy on direct behavior.
This is not somebody that I've ever met.
But I got an email out of the blue a few years ago telling me
that as a result of discussing "Famine, Affluence,
and Morality" in class, the sort of discussion
went, well, you know, there's this argument.
And it leads to saying you should give away
a lot of money.
And then somebody else they read said,
well, you know, if that argument were true,
it wouldn't just apply to giving money.
You could help people for example
by donating a kidney to a stranger.
And again, this was seen as a reductio ad absurdum
that morality couldn't be that demanding that that's
what we ought to do.
But Chris, after thinking about it
and discussing it with other people--
he didn't rush into this-- took some months
to reach this decision-- decided that was what he wanted to do.
And you see him here just after doing that.
I've continued to be in touch with him.
And he's very happy about what he's done.
He's in good health.
He's been in contact with the person who
received the kidney who was a man in his 40s
who was a schoolteacher teaching in an underprivileged school
in St. Louis, so he feels really good about that.
Of course, you never know who you're going to give to.
It could've been someone who was a conservative Republican
or whatever.
[LAUGHTER]
Chris might have felt less happy.
But that's-- it turned out well for him, anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
So there are a few people who do this.
I think it's probably, for most people including me,
it may be a step too far.
But it's an example of the way that philosophy
can make a difference.
OK, I'm nearly done.
So this is this movement, effective altruism.
You can look it up on Wikipedia now.
So it's pretty new.
It wasn't there a few years ago-- stresses the idea
about applying evidence and reason.
And here's one way of doing this.
An organization-- this is American rather than UK--
but an organization called GiveWell
that reviews charities, finds ones for which there's
really clear evidence, and recommends them--
so just this thin slice.
That doesn't mean that all these other charities that
have been reviewed are actually not effective.
What it means is they have not been
able to produce good enough evidence to satisfy
the rigorous assessment that GiveWell
does that they are effective.
And that's a very different question.
But GiveWell is kind of driving the movement to get more data,
to get independent studies, to get good analysis so
that we can know which are the really effective charities.
And that's certainly helped the whole effective altruism
movement.
Here again is the one that Toby Ord started.
And if you go to their Where to Give tab,
they also recommend charities more
suited for purposes for the UK, if you're
interested in tax deductibility for donations in the UK.
And there's one that I've involved
with that started as the title of a earlier book of mine,
"The Life You Can Save"-- somewhat more global
in the charities that it recommends,
slightly less rigorous in the evidence required than they
GiveWell, because we wanted a broader group of organizations.
But if you're interested, have a look at any of those websites.
And at that, I'm going to stop so that we still
have some time for questions.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 1: Great.
So we have two microphones.
We've got Jan with a microphone over there.
I've got one.
I'm going to start with a question, if I may.
I love the link between this book
and the ideas around effective altruism.
I wonder though about what your thoughts
on the immediacy of social media and the immediacy of what we're
able to do now in order to bring us closer to things happening
on the other side of the globe-- does that change our behavior?
Or do we suffer from information overload?
PETER SINGER: I'm hoping that we'll change our behavior.
It probably already is changing our behavior,
but I haven't seen good enough data on that.
Obviously, you know, all of these things
have positives and negatives.
I would like sort of the positive
that we feel more closely connected to people
on the other side of the world.
So I like the idea of, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's internet.org,
that everybody in the world eventually
is going to be on the net.
And we can communicate with them in some way.
I think it will be excellent if that spreads.
Sometimes the social media get people
to focus on a particular thing that goes viral.
And it may not be the most effective thing.
We had the ice bucket challenge a year or so ago.
You know, that was fine, but it was
dealing with a fairly rare disease in affluent countries.
If we want to use our resources most effectively
to help people suffering from diseases,
there are others affecting people in developing countries
where it would be much more cost effective to donate.
SPEAKER 1: Perfect.
AUDIENCE: So there's two elements of this.
Is this on?
Yeah.
PETER SINGER: Yeah, yeah.
AUDIENCE: And one of them is getting people to donate more.
And the other one is donate to effective charities.
For example, Against Malaria Foundation from what I know
is about 100 times more effective than the ALS ice
bucket challenge per dollar.
Which of those areas do you find it is easier
to convince people to make an improvement?
And what sort of strategies have you learned
from writing your books and so on
and how you have managed to convince
those people to do that?
PETER SINGER: Yeah, that's a good question.
I don't really have good data to say which of them
have I found more successful.
I've certainly-- I do know people
who've started giving because of arguments that I and others
in the effective altruism movement have put forward.
I know quite a lot of people who've
taken that up and perhaps in some way responded
to that argument-- maybe thought they should do something
before, but didn't get around to doing it.
So that's certainly possible.
Probably though, you typically get more resistance
when you tell people they ought to be giving
or they ought to be giving more than if you tell them
they ought to be giving more effectively, at least the kind
of audiences that I talk about.
But I do get pushback from that as well.
I get pushback from-- some people say, but look,
you're taking the emotional component out of giving.
You're telling people to think about it.
And if people don't feel emotionally,
then they're not going to give at all.
I've don't accept that I'm taking the emotional component
out of it.
I'm trying to change the emotional component
in some way.
And I also get pushback, I should
say, from people in the philanthropy sector
as such, so professional philanthropy advisors, those
who are involved in organizations
for promoting philanthropy.
They want to be cause neutral.
Because they don't want to turn people away.
If they're find to be advisors, and potential clients
come to them and say, we'd like your advice on how to give,
or we want to give away some of our money,
or leave our estate to something--
and then they say to you, and we're
really passionate about music, so we want to endow a new opera
hall for our city.
And if you then say to them, well, I
don't really think a new opera hall
is what the world most needs, you know,
should be helping to prevent blindness in Africa,
then they're worried that those people would just
go away and find somebody else to talk to so.
So they kind of have this official idea
that we can't judge.
We can't judge between different causes.
I think that's wrong, but I can sort of
understand from their point of view why they're saying that.
We had someone in the back there.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I was going to ask actually
a really similar question but with the example
of International Rescue Committee who
were really praised, because they did this large scale
monitoring and evaluation process.
And it turned out that their most expensive, longest running
program had no impact.
And there was debate, should she publish that or not?
Because it will be so psychologically discouraging.
It is a moral thing to publish that finding or not?
You just answered it.
But yeah--
PETER SINGER: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
PETER SINGER: No, I think it's great
that people do those trials and that they
are prepared to publish them.
Best of all is if they commit themselves
in advance of the trial by announcing
that they're doing a trial.
And that's what some organizations are doing.
One very transparent organization is GiveDirectly.
GiveDirectly has pioneered handing out one-off cash grants
to poor families in East Africa.
It sort of finds poor families, gives them $1,000,
makes it clear that that's what they're
going to get-- it's not a permanent thing--
and then sees what they do with it
and whether they come out better.
And they announced beforehand that they were
going to do a randomized trial.
So they were committed to publicizing
the results of the trial however they came out.
They did come out well.
They're now actually trying a guaranteed minimum income
scheme to see whether if they do give regular minimum amounts,
what that does to people.
And again, they've announced that they
will do a trial on that without knowing
how it's going to come out.
AUDIENCE: So you explain your moral argument
with sound logic that applies to NGOs.
But there are many ways in which entities
try to target helping the developing world, sometimes
even extreme such as military interventions.
So my question is, how do you think--
to what extent do you think your moral framework applies
to such ways of helping out rather than just directly
through NGOs?
I think the overriding framework applies.
I'm focusing on NGOs, because I'm
addressing people who might have decisions about what
to do with surplus income, or sometimes with time
that they might be prepared to volunteer, or whatever it is.
Nobody-- none of you will have the power to say,
oh, we ought to be intervening in Syria, so let's do that.
I mean, you might decide to write a letter to a paper.
Or you might decide to vote for someone who
thinks you ought to do that.
But very marginal effect that you can have there.
But I do think if you're considering something
like intervention, you ought to be weighing out
the costs and benefits of what that ought to be.
And that's why some cases I think
we've missed opportunities to get huge benefits at rather
small costs.
Rwanda would be the classic case of that
where according to the Canadian leader of the UN forces
that were there before, another 5,000 well-trained troops could
have stopped the massacre that took 800,000 lives.
I think it's very regrettable that that didn't happen.
But other people have called for intervention-- for example,
at the time of the Kosovo intervention against Serbia,
other people said, well, what about what
Russia is doing in Chechnya?
Isn't that just as bad as what the Serbs are doing in Kosovo?
And the answer might well be yes, it was just as bad.
But who wants a war with a major nuclear armed power, right?
The costs are going to be absurd.
So I do think the ultimate framework is
applicable to those situations.
AUDIENCE: With your argument, how should we compare
individuals to corporations?
So if a company such as Google, what level
should we be giving a percentage of our profits
back to charities?
PETER SINGER: What level should Google give?
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Corporations in general.
PETER SINGER: Yeah.
You know, corporations are in somewhat different situations
in that they have fiduciary responsibilities
to their shareholders.
Of course, they can give.
And they can justify this in terms of being good
for the image of the company.
So there is a fair amount of flexibility.
And I think Google would enhance its reputation
by giving quite a lot.
I know that it does have google.org.
And its funding a lot of projects through that.
And some of those I hope will do a lot of good.
So it's hard for me to put any kind of specific figure
on that.
But that's an important thing.
And then also in terms of what the company is doing,
the sort of corporate social responsibility policies,
I think are also important.
And there's quite a lot of thought
going into that has also had beneficial consequences
on a number of different companies.
So that's not a very specific answer.
I'm sorry.
If you have suggestions about what kind of level
ought to be set, I'm interested in listening to them.
But I don't feel I have the knowledge to be more specific.
SPEAKER 1: OK.
We've got time for two more questions.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: I like your initial three-step argument.
I wonder, where do you stop?
So in the example of a child that is drawing,
if somebody told me, you can have a meal,
or you can skip lunch today and you'll save a child,
I'll probably skip lunch today and save a child.
So if I give all my spare money to charity today,
I could still probably miss a meal one day and save
a child's.
So I should do that.
And then I could probably get another job
and donate that money to charity and save even another life.
Because that's what I would do for a child if somebody told me
you have to work an extra two hours today
to save a child here.
And the same goes as why only focus on donating money?
You know, I walk home, and there is a homeless person.
And that person would probably be hungry and cold tonight.
I could take him home.
So why shouldn't I do that?
It's a bit of a tricky question.
But I think I understand your moral framework.
And I like it.
I just wonder as such a simple moral framework,
if you would do anything to save a child that is drowning right
here, then where do you stop?
Like, where do you put the boundary between how much
are you willing to give?
Because with such a simple analogy,
what occurs to me is that I should stop
or everybody should stop doing everything
and give 100% or more 100%-- like, make a massive effort
to donate everything.
PETER SINGER: Well, you probably shouldn't stop working,
because that's the source of your income.
[LAUGHTER]
And, you know, you actually should
be trying to work to-- if you're fortunate enough
to have a well-paying job, you should be using that income
and perhaps maximizing that income.
Some people in effective altruism movement
have deliberately chosen higher income careers.
I had a student at Princeton who could
have gone to graduate school and probably
had a career as a philosophy professor.
But because he had a strong maths background,
he also had very good offers from Wall Street
to go and work there-- and decided to do that.
And he's been doing that for the past four or five years,
donating half of his income, which even in the first year
enabled him to donate $100,000 to effective charities.
So, you know, he sees that as a path of doing good.
Some people would say, well, no.
I mean, if that wasn't the kind of work
that I really want to do, I just couldn't face doing that.
But they'll earn less, but they'll still
give significantly.
But you're asking, I suppose, you know,
where do you draw this line?
And I don't have a very good answer to that.
In the original essay, I said, ultimately,
the only line you can draw is the point at which-- well, I
said two things.
One is, if there are certain things
that you need in order to maintain your income-- so it
doesn't apply to Google obviously,
but some jobs you need to be able to dress in a suit,
and wear a tie, and so on.
So you can't give away so much that you can no longer hold
a job and do well in your job.
That's one thing.
But apart from that, I said, really the ultimate line
would just be where you've impoverished yourself
so much that if you gave away more,
you would be adding to your own difficulties,
suffering, whatever you want to call it,
as much as you would be alleviating the difficulties
or suffering of someone else.
That's the ultimate line.
But, you know, I was a lot younger when I wrote that.
And maybe I've become a little more realistic in terms
of what you can say to people and what
you can expect them to do.
And I think that even if in some sense that still is ultimately
what you ought to do, there's a difference between that
and what we ought to expect people to do,
what we ought to blame people for not doing.
And I think that if people sort of just start doing something,
make a substantial difference, and then say,
I'm going to try this out.
If I'm comfortable with it, I'm going to increase it.
Year after year, I'll be doing more.
I think that's the kind of appeal
that has more hope of attracting a large number of people.
So that's the least the public answer
that I give to your question.
Thanks.
And there was a last one here?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
Quick question-- in your slide when
you were talking about the psychological reasons
against it and things, you didn't
touch at all I think on sort of reciprocation, which
seems to be quite a big-- the idea
that if you see a child drowning, you can think,
well, if my child was drowning, I'd
want one of my neighbors to help me.
But when you're seeing a disaster, famines
across the other side of the world,
people probably don't feel like one day that
could be me in the famine if you're
in sort of developed world.
I think that can take some of the sort of the-- at least the
urgency out of things.
PETER SINGER: Mhm.
OK, so that's not-- when you said reciprocation,
I thought you meant, you know, this person
is actually likely to help me in some way.
That's one sense of reciprocation.
But that doesn't apply to the child in the pond either.
So what you're talking about is rather
the kind of imagine yourself in that position,
you know, that could happen to you.
Or your child could be drowning.
And you'd want somebody to do that.
And then the question would be, well, how far can
we carry out that exercise, right?
OK, so I do have a child let's say that age.
I mean, I don't anymore.
My children are grown up.
But I guess I have a grandchild of that age,
so I could say that.
I would want somebody to rescue my grandchild.
Could I say, well, I could become a refugee
or something like that?
I think I could imagine that.
In fact, you know, my parents were refugees from the Nazis.
They came to Australia when the Nazis took over Austria.
So I don't have to go that far back to think that, well, I
certainly am very glad that people helped them
and that Australians took them.
And so it depends on how far you're going to carry that.
But I think we can put ourselves in the position of others
in some ways.
We can form connections.
And the original question that [? Christine ?]
asked about social media I guess may make it easier
for us to see how we could be in that situation in some perhaps
not really likely circumstances, but imaginable circumstances.
AUDIENCE: Just I don't think that the reciprocation thing
is-- I don't think it's a good argument,
but I think that sort of intuitively it feels that
that's--
PETER SINGER: Uh-huh.
AUDIENCE: --that would inherently
stop people taking that step.
PETER SINGER: Right, OK.
OK, right.
So then it's also related to the they're people like me.
That part of my group and so on.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
It's sort of a in-group, out-group thing
on a fundamental level.
PETER SINGER: Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
And that is something that I could have added to that list
but didn't.
Yeah.
Thanks.
SPEAKER 1: I'm terribly sorry, but we're out of time.
This has been an incredible, thought provoking
talk with a wonderful call to action.
I hope we all stop and think about what we ought to do,
how we ought to live.
Please join me in thanking--
PETER SINGER: Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: --Professor Peter Singer.
[APPLAUSE]