Episode #085 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today we’re going to be talking about the philosopher Peter Singer and the ethical approach to life known as effective altruism. Let’s get on to the program.

So, I want us all to imagine something. Imagine you just went out to dinner with your friends or your family or whoever. Imagine it was a good meal, a tasty meal. Imagine you had a really good time there. You know, the staff of the restaurant only sung “Happy, Happy Birthday” to seven people around you on this particular trip. And as you’re exiting the restaurant and you’re heading out to your car, you hear a sound. You look over to your right. And you’re shocked to see a little girl—maybe 4, 5 years old—lying in the gutter, crying, bleeding out of her head; looks terrified. You look around, and nobody’s really helping her. She doesn’t seem to have any parents around getting help.

What would you do if you were in that situation? Would you stop and try to help the girl? Or would you look at her and continue walking to your car and just go on about your day pretending nothing happened? Well, I think somewhere around 99% of people would say that they would stop and at least try to help the girl. Now, new situation, imagine instead you’re watching this all unfold on the news. You know, there’s a story about a 4-year-old girl that died in front of a restaurant, and they were showing security footage of 10, 20 people coming out of the restaurant, looking at this little girl dying on the ground, and they just kind of shrug their shoulders, say “Oh well,” and keep going to their car. What would you think of those people?

Well, again, I think most of us would say, “How could they possibly do that?” More than that, how could you possibly live with yourself for the rest of your life knowing that you could have saved this little girl’s life, you could have done something about it, but instead you decided to just turn a blind eye and go on about your day. What was so important that a human life couldn’t be saved?

Peter Singer points out, we currently live in a world where 6.9 million children die a year of completely preventable, poverty-related causes. That boils down to about 19,000 children every single day. We currently live in a world where each and every one of those people that were negatively judging those other people walking past the little girl dying on the news have resources and access to charities that could drastically decrease that number, yet they choose not to. Now, given that we’ve already established that we care about the cause of children dying when we could have done something about it, why are we so willing to help the girl in front of the restaurant and simultaneously so willing to turn a blind eye to the millions dying a year when we could do something about it?

Maybe the best place to start—maybe the place Peter Singer would start—is to congratulate you. That’s right. Peter Singer would like to personally congratulate you on winning the lottery. You know when people line up around the block to get their lottery tickets? The Power Ball gets up to like 1.7 trillion dollars or something. The Power Ball has surpassed the national debt, and these people are lining up around the block to see if they can get their piece of paper with the right numbers on it. Maybe they can win.

But just think about what they’re doing there. They’re essentially asking the universe to let them win the lottery twice in one lifetime. Because one thing’s for sure, right? For reasons we’ve talked about all throughout the history of this show, if you’re born into modern Western civilization, in relation to every other human being that’s walked the face of the planet, you have already effectively won the lottery. I mean, the efficiency your money commands, the amount of money you get paid for the job that you do, the benefits that you have, access to fresh food, water, entertainment, healthcare—of course every one of these things could be better. But from a historical context, you are the Sultan of Brunei. It’s true. We all are the Sultan of Brunei.

Ah, yes, modern civilization—it’s pretty great. It’s become almost an inexorable fact of life that you go to work, you make your money, you bring it home, and then you use it to buy things that you don’t necessarily need. Just think of how amazing that is. Think of the scarcity that’s haunted practically every generation of human being that’s ever lived. We’re not tribespeople anymore. We’re not peasants trying to scrape by enough to barely feed ourselves with. Every single person listening to this right now buys stuff that they do not need. Let me tell you, as someone that was homeless at the age of 9, living off of bread for three months of my life before Child Protective Services came and got me, trust me, you could be spending a lot less than you do. And that doesn’t make you a bad person. That’s the point. Peter Singer thinks this is actually a really exciting thing. Think of the opportunity that you have that no other human in the history of the world has ever had. You have the resources at your disposal to save lives.

Maybe a key point to clarify here is that there’s a direct relationship between the resources you have at your disposal and your moral culpability in various situations that you find yourself in. For example, imagine there’s a person drowning in a lake. Now, let’s say that you’re wearing clothes in this example. Hopefully that’s not too big of a stretch for you. You could in that moment take off your shirt, hold the shirt out to the person in the water that’s drowning, and pull them to safety. Or I guess, you could stand there and watch them drown because that’s your favorite t-shirt. You just saw them over there on the dock eating some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. You’re not going to let them get their greasy red fingers all over your favorite shirt. They don’t even make this shirt anymore!

Now, a lot of people would say there that you were wrong for not sacrificing your shirt to save a human life. Now, imagine you’re in the exact same situation, except now you’re a member of some nudist brigade. Nobody’s going to say you did anything wrong there. You didn’t have a t-shirt that you could sacrifice in the first place. This is an example of how the resources at our disposal sometimes change whether we’re seen as morally reprehensible or not. Now, at this point you might be thinking, “Come on. That’s so unfair. What did I really do? I didn’t actually do anything. Sure, I didn’t donate to a charity, but it’s not like I went up and karate chopped one of these starving kids in the neck. In fact, I didn’t do anything. How can you say I’m a bad person when I really haven’t done anything on either side of the issue?”

Well, in the words of Peter Singer, being a good person or leading an ethical life is not only about staying away from the “thou shalt nots;” sometimes there are things that we are morally obligated to act on, the “thou shalts,” I guess. And there’s a direct relationship between the resources at your disposal and how many of these “thou shalts” we have to consider during our time on this planet. And this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. I mean, on episode 59 of this show I believe—categorical trolley cars, right? We talked on that episode about the famous ethical dilemma where a train is barreling down the tracks towards five people. All of them are going to die. The only way to save them is to pull a lever that would switch the train onto a different track where only one person is going to die. The question is, do you pull the lever to save the five over the one?

Well, think of the lever in that ethical dilemma as resources at your disposal. Fact is, if you didn’t have a lever that could switch the train onto a different track, you wouldn’t be making a decision at all. You wouldn’t be at a moral decision point. You’d just be some weird person that hangs around train tracks for some reason and likes to watch people die. The fact that you have the resource of the lever changes everything. It gives you more potential choices to pick from on the multiple-choice, choose-your-own-ending book of living an ethical life. Peter Singer would say that inaction does not absolve you of all guilt. No, by choosing not to pull the lever, by choosing not to use resources at your disposal, you’re still making a choice. And you’d have to ask yourself: as someone who’s already established themselves as a person who cares about the child dying in front of the restaurant, as someone who cares to the extent that they would feel it would be wrong not to intervene in that scenario, someone who certainly wouldn’t give someone else a free pass if they did nothing—you know, they said, “What? I didn’t do anything. I just walked past the kid and went to my car.”—you’d have to ask yourself, why aren’t we giving more to these causes? Is it just because they’re far away from us and we don’t have to look the suffering in the eyes ourselves?

Peter Singer talks about a spritely young fellow named Toby Ord. Toby Ord was a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford when he asked himself this very question that we’re asking ourselves. He calculated how much money he would need to live comfortably—turns out it’s about £18,000 a year—and he subtracted that from the total amount of money he was going to make over the course of his career. And what he realized was that, on top of living a totally comfortable lifestyle, he could also give back enough to cure roughly 80,000 people of blindness in countries rife with poverty. There’s a bacterial infection called Trachoma, gets under your eyelids. Puss starts oozing out. Gross! Point is, it’s completely treatable. Costs about 40 bucks to do. But if you don’t treat it fast enough, you eventually go blind—blind for the rest of your life because you didn’t have $40. Current estimates are that around 6 million people have gone blind from Trachoma, and this is the cause that Toby Ord wanted to do the most he could to help in.

Now, Peter Singer would say, sure, it’s great that Toby Ord wanted to give so much. But we don’t all have to give massive portions of our income to be able to make a difference. We don’t all have to be Toby Ord. In Peter Singer’s book The Most Good You Can Do, he advocates 10% of your income. Most churches ask you to donate 10% of your income. For most people it’s not a life-ending amount of money to give, but it is a life-saving amount of money to give. Plus, just think of where that money’s going. If you give that money to your church, what are they going to do with it? Fix up the rec room? Maybe print up more of those glossy, colorful pamphlets they like to leave on everyone’s doorstep? No question they’re doing good with it. They’re using it for the most good they can, but that money would accomplish so much more in Africa than it ever could in the United States.

What he’s saying is, it’s not enough just to give to charity. We have to be smart about it. We have to use this capacity of reason that we have to find not just where our resources are going to help marginally, but where our resources will do the most good they possibly can. This is the effective part of effective altruism. And it’s extremely important. We all have known somebody that, you know, they mean well; they really wanted to try to help somebody. But all the stuff they did ends up doing more harm than good because they didn’t really think it through. We can all imagine somebody who has great intentions, tons of heart—you know, they feel so strongly for a cause—but if they don’t think through what they’re going to do, they’re just this big bundle of emotions with zero direction.

So, if you feel like donating money to try to make the world a better place, instead of donating it where people typically do in today’s world—like to your alma mater or to the church down the street, so they can get more lemon cookies for fellowship next Sunday—Peter Singer’s saying, use that ability to reason to find where the money’s going to do the most good it possibly can. Something interesting that struck me as I was reading this is that this commitment to use your capacity to reason to find out how you can effectively do the most possible good for a cause that you care about—it really does extend beyond just the resource of money and the cause of eliminating poverty.

Like, me personally—I realize I’m not curing the blind in Africa. But as you guys know, I think that philosophical thinking is a very important thing to spread around in the world. I think that there’s nothing that affects everything quite like philosophy does. It’s obviously a cause I care about a lot. Now, I’m not getting rich doing this show. I love doing it. That’s why I do it. And about a year into doing this show, I had a pretty strong influx of people—people I respected—that were telling me that I should quit the podcast, go back to school, and get my teaching certification. And then I could just go be a teacher somewhere. Maybe I could work my way up to that prestigious job at the community college I’ve always had my eyes on.

Their point was, I’d be making a lot more money teaching at a college, not to mention the wonders it would have done on my self-esteem. I mean imagine. Do you guys know how awesome it is to have people groveling at your feet, begging for a grade every single day? It’s magical. Not that I’d know. I’ve never been a teacher. But I got to be honest, I thought about this move in my life a lot. But then I thought of something, and I haven’t even considered being a teacher ever since. And it was this. Yeah, professors make a lot more money, but they also charge their students tuition, which is extremely limiting. This podcast is free. Anyone can listen to this. How many people am I really going to be spreading this message to as a teacher? What, 200 students a class, 5 classes max—what, 1,000 people a semester? 1,000 people download this show in an hour.

My point is, much like Peter Singer talking about reasoning to the way of contributing to a cause that you care about that’s going to do the most good, this show is a much more effective way of getting this message that I care about so much out to as many people as possible. And I guess I just want to make the point that, whatever cause you care about personally—is there a way you might be able to sacrifice a little bit of personal comfort in the name of doing the most good you can possibly do?

Okay, so we’ve established that we care about the dying little girl. We’ve established that we would intervene and morally condemn others who did not choose to intervene. We’ve established that we do in fact have at least a dollar that we could give and that inaction is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. We’ve established all that, and yet, I’m going to guess, there probably are tons of people out there still listening to this that really want to disagree with Peter Singer on an operational level. How feasible is this actually? A lot of people feel attacked. And to be honest, it’s easy to understand where they’re coming from. I mean, I’m not a bad person. I volunteer down at the food bank. This old lady dropped her change purse the other day. I picked it up, and I gave it back to her. I don’t feel like I’m a bad person. Yet here I am, Peter Singer, being told by you that I’m doing something wrong in my life.

This sort of dynamic is a perfect recipe if you want to get people to come up with arguments for why they act the way they do that aren’t necessarily philosophically sound but are attempts at trying to justify the way that they already behave. You see this exact same sort of behavior when you talk to people about, you know, why they treat their significant other the way that they do—like in our insecurity episode—when you talk to them about their criteria that they use to morally justify killing animals for food. And I guess, unsurprisingly, another area that Peter Singer specializes in—this one—the life of an effective altruist in today’s extremely unique world.

Now, because of this dynamic, Peter Singer spends most of the works that he’s done on this subject answering common questions and covering counterarguments that people commonly throw his way whenever he has conversations about it. Let’s look at some of the most common ones. One argument that always seems to come up is, “Alright, Peter Singer, you care about the children? Do you really care about the children? I think if you honestly cared about the children, you wouldn’t spend your time sitting around writing books about how everyone else should be helping them. You’d quit your job as a philosopher, and you’d go down there yourself and provide aid to these poor people.”

And on that same note, where do we even draw the line? Let’s say that I feel really compelled now to go help end global poverty. Can there be too much of a good thing? Like, why shouldn’t I conclude that I too should uproot me and my family’s life and move somewhere where I can constantly help? The core thinking here being that if I want to help out with a particular cause, the most good that I could ever do is to be something like a Mother Teresa or a Buddha, dedicating every second that I have.

Now, at this point in the conversation, Peter Singer would probably direct your attention back to that amazing and very unique life that you were born into. And he’d say that because of the tools you have at your disposal, you can really do the most good possible by just being a highly productive citizen living in the United States as you already are. There’s actually a whole group of people out there that are much more extreme than Peter Singer that say that we as citizens with this sort of opportunity available to us to make a lot of money—we have a moral obligation to work really hard towards making more money in our careers so that we can give all that back to these causes. Again, that’s a much more extreme position to take, but the sentiment still remains in Peter Singer’s point. What he’s saying is that, sure, you could quit your job, move to Africa, and spend all day every day handing out sack lunches to people. Or you could continue living your life as you currently do and eventually donate enough money for a charity to employ three aid workers, five aid workers—all of which are going to be doing the same job you would have done, but they’re people that didn’t have the unique opportunity like you do to have their skills pay for the work of multiple people.

Another common argument that people will come back with is, “Okay, so I want to help. I want to sacrifice so that other people don’t have to die. Why shouldn’t I take that notion to the extreme? Why do I even need to be comfortable? Why would any comfort of modern existence ever be more important than those dollars being spent to potentially save another life? Why shouldn’t I go all in an donate every penny I possibly can?” In other words, why shouldn’t I live in a box? Why shouldn’t I eat once a week and in between meals crush up some rocks and water into a thick paste that serves as a benign mass inside of my stomach, tricking it into thinking that I’m full all the time? Why shouldn’t I do that?

Again, because you were born into such a unique set of circumstances—one where you can use this opportunity to work to contribute truckloads of money to these causes—it actually is counterproductive for you to not be comfortably living. It’s a little bit like when they say on the plane, secure your oxygen mask before you secure the mask of the child next to you. The thinking being that if you’re not breathing, it’s probably going to inhibit your oxygen mask-fastening abilities. Now, in the same way, if you’re weak and mentally foggy because you’re not getting your caloric needs met—if you’re sick because you’re drinking your water out of the communal hose on the side of the apartment complex—even if you’re just not able to maintain a professional veneer and follow the dress code of your workplace—all of these things inhibit your ability to make the money to donate, if in fact you wanted to truly to the most good you could possibly do.

Another argument that people commonly give is that, “Look, everything you’re saying is true. I’m on board, alright? I want to donate. But unfortunately, another thing that makes this time period I live in unique is that we live in a world where charities are often wasteful, ineffective, or even downright corrupt. I wish I didn’t have to go through a charity. I wish I could just give my money more directly so it doesn’t have to go through this middleman that might be stealing it where I have no idea where it’s going. It’s the charity that prevents me from donating.” It’s a good point. There was a poll that Peter Singer cites in his book: 70% of Americans that give to a charity do absolutely zero research into where the money is actually going. And around 29% of that remaining 30 do an extremely cursory look over things—usually looking for a single criteria to be met like typically what percentage of the money actually goes to the people versus administrative costs.

But even that statistic can be misleading. Even though it sounds great on paper—right? “Oh, they’re giving 98% of every dollar I spend to people that are actually in need.”—oftentimes the fact that they only use 2% to cover administrative costs makes them much less effective at providing the help than some other charity that used, say, 5%. Also, because they have such a low budget to operate on, oftentimes the service they’re providing isn’t the most effective way to help the people they want to help. For example, imagine a charity that has a very low operating cost, and they use 2% of the money donated to travel to places where people are dying of malaria and give the malaria vaccine. Pretty simple operation, right? Versus another charity that sends teams of people out to these communities and teaches everyone how to make their own nets that prevent mosquitoes from biting them in the first place. Now, the second operation might cost a little bit more to execute, but think of how much more good is being done as a result of it.

So, no question it can be tough to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to finding what charities are actually going to be doing good. But again, Peter Singer would say, a hallmark of the time period that we live in is that we have access to information. There are independent groups right now that do nothing but just audit charities all day long, exposing any waste, exposing any corruption, showing where every dollar goes. They even give them a ranking so that you can very quickly and easily see which ones are actually doing good. Again, this goes back to the effective part of effective altruism. It’s not enough just to have a knee-jerk, emotional response to something. We need to be willing to do a little bit of digging to find out what organization is going to be doing the most good with our money.

But by far probably the most common argument that people give back when they’re faced with this thought experiment about the little girl dying in front of the restaurant is that, “Look, it’s not that I don’t want to help. For me it’s the problem of, how much good can I actually do? I mean, I’m one person. I’m not a billionaire. I don’t have millions of dollars to be throwing around. Yeah, I could give a dollar. I could give five bucks a month or something. But how much good is that actually doing?” Well, what if five million people have that exact same outlook? There’s the millions of dollars that could have actually made a huge impact.

By the way, real quick, I feel obligated to say this. I am walking proof of how big of a difference the dollar, five-dollar donations make. I mean, I pay my bills and survive from the one, two dollars an episode that people give on Patreon. So, for all of you out there that didn’t say, “What good could I possibly do?” thank you because you make this show possible. The same dynamic applies to people dying in developing countries, alright?

Peter Singer talks about how, you know, we’re born into a world that tells us hard work is a virtue, and that the paradigm that you’re supposed to strive for is to make more money so that you can spend more money. You know, it’s an exciting thing when you get that big raise at work, because now you get to buy the car that you’ve always wanted. Now you get to have a bigger and better house, more square footage. You make more to be able to spend more. But Singer says what often happens is that you find yourself on this hedonic treadmill where you’re always thinking about what the next thing is you’re going to buy. And then once you get it, it’s onto the next thing you’re going to buy, and then onto the next thing. And so on and so forth until you realize that the stuff is never going to bring you satisfaction. The satisfaction needs to come from the inside.

Peter Singer asks, why does it have to be this way? Why, hypothetically speaking, couldn’t we live in a world where we have the same idea that hard work is a virtue—we still want to make a lot of money—but instead of making more so that you can spend more, you make more so that you can give more? When it’s all said and done, when you’re 80 years old looking back on your life, Peter Singer would ask you, which would you rather look back on: a lifetime where you made tons of money that you didn’t need and bought all sorts of stuff that you didn’t need—stuff that’s all sitting in a landfill somewhere now—or would you rather look back and say, “I made much more money than I ever needed, and with that money I was able to save 100,000 lives. 100,000 people are alive today that otherwise would have died. And that’s because of me. That’s because of this guy.”

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.