Peter Singer | It Is NOT Immoral To Be A Billionaire (8/8) | Oxford Union

[Music] and Alex Pisa singer to place the picks for the opposition's fight thank you very much Madam President it's a pleasure to be here and to address the Oxford Union now I have to let you in on a little secret as to why I'm speaking against this motion when I was first invited to speak on this topic the committee appeared to believe that I was likely to speak on the affirmative and they sent me this motion which is you remember worded this house believes that it is immoral to be a billionaire and I said look I'm sorry I can't really affirm that motion because it suggests that the moment that you become a billionaire you are immoral even although there are several billionaires they may not be the majority but there are several of them who are thoughtfully giving away 99% of their wealth and thinking about what are the best causes I said if you would change the motion to it is immoral to die a billionaire I will be happy to be on the affirmative and indeed I would have been but the committee in its wisdom chose not to change that motion there would be another possible motion that I would have been happy to be on the affirmative and that is it would be better to have a tax system in which it was not possible to become a billionaire and the tax revenue was used for purposes such as helping people in poverty solving climate change and the various other things that have been mentioned on that side that is also not the motion we are debating so with great respect the speech that you just heard from professor Messer Burton is really not to the point I can agree that it would be much better if we had higher taxes and a democratic polity that actually allocated money really effectively to where its most needed to solving homelessness in Oxford as you wish to overcoming climate change to helping people in extreme poverty being that 3.7 billion people who are the poorer half of the world better off all of those things would be good sadly it's not the world we're living in today the world we're living in today is one in which it is possible to become a billionaire and there are many people who have become billionaires and some of them many of them if you like most of them I'll accept are amoral because they are not thinking hard about how to give away their wealth most effectively but the motion that we have before us is in the present tense it says it is immoral that it would be immoral present indicative not not conditional it would be immoral under some other system and it is universal it doesn't say most doesn't say the typical it just says it is immoral to be a billionaire I think with respect to Brian over there I think we have to take that literally right and you should know that as someone doing philosophy we can't just thank you we can't just write into this the idea that somehow we're talking about some average or some stereotype of billionaires we are if you vote for this motion you are condemning all people who are billionaires so let's think about that a little more specific what you're doing you're saying that Bill and Melinda Gates are immoral despite the fact that they set up the Gates Foundation operating in accordance with the belief which is prominent on their website that all lives are equal they talk about how Bill Gates talks about how horrified he was when he discovered that children were dying from a simpler diseases diarrhea which we know how to cure and he wanted to do something about that the Gates have given so far fifty billion dollars to endow that foundation and there's going to be more to come you're saying that they're immoral although they have undoubtably already saved and the foundation site has been going 19 years now they have that ability already saved several million lives perhaps more than any other living person today you're also saying that Warren Buffett is immoral why Warren Buffett has given more than 30 billion dollars to the Gates Foundation and has said that he plans to give away 99% of his wealth Warren Buffett also set up an organization called responsible wealth which is an advocacy organization for such things as estate taxes death duties in other words here's one of the richest men in the world saying it's a scandal that the United States effectively does not have any death duties that that's a fair tax and people who are rich should have to pay you should not be able to pass on vast sums to their heirs Warren Buffett has also gone public in saying that it's a scandal that there are billionaires who can take advantage of tax loopholes and pay an effective rate of tax that is lower than the rate that his secretary pays and he's trying to change that so these are people who are giving who are trying to change the very system that the people on this side of the house are criticizing now perhaps you say well philanthropy is not the right thing we need serious political change to change this system okay but if you vote for this motion you are saying that Tom Styer and his wife Kat Taylor are immoral they are the largest donors to the Democratic Party politics in the United States they have supported they supported both Barack Obama's campaigns very heavily they supported Hillary Clinton's campaigns they have supported a lot of congressional candidates significant number of whom won in the 2018 election they have been particularly concerned about climate change and they have set up a nonprofit organization called next-gen America to try to make sure that climate change is a more prominent issue if possible on the on the political scene and today has also said that he's in favor of raising personal taxes on upper income people so he's trying to change this no thank you you're also condemning as immoral Dustin Moskovitz and Kerry tuna now it's been said on this side that if you become a billionaire you've exploited people in some way Dustin Moskovitz was lucky enough to be a co-founder of Facebook so he was writing some code I guess no thank you he was writing some code and he became very wealthy he became a billionaire those of you who think that Facebook in itself is totally immoral and you should have nothing to do with it and therefore who do not have any Facebook accounts or go to any Facebook pages if you feel like you wonder what vote for the affirmative because you think anybody who got wealthy through Facebook as a billionaire okay you're entitled to the rest of you I don't think you're in any position to condemn people who made billions through Facebook and like Dustin Moskovitz and Kerry tuna then thought hard about how to give nearly all of it away and what they did is they supported give well which is an organization that assesses the best charities working to reduce global poverty and then they also set up another organization called open philanthropy which is looking at other ways of effecting change not necessarily through standard philanthropy for the poor but perhaps through political change through various other kinds of reforms it's completely open now they have been giving away large amounts of money they've also supported an incidentally the Center for effective altruism here in in Oxford they have been giving away large amounts of money but they are getting really bright people to research where the best value is so if you vote for this motion you're effectively saying once you've got a billion you've got to get rid of it fast otherwise you're immoral what they're saying is I'm sorry I don't have time what they're saying is it takes thought it takes research to give away billions of dollars effectively you can't just do it all at once you'll end up wasting most of it you want to be sure that you're doing it as well as possible otherwise you're wasting it and that could mean that more people die from preventable diseases it could be that political reforms do not succeed it could be that climate change is climate change continues when it there would be ways of slowing it it takes thought to find these things out and that's the kind of thing that I think we should be respecting those relatively few I admit relatively few billionaires who do this and we should not simply have a blanket condemnation of billionaires that if you vote for this motion you will be having so now one other thing that might be said is I think we're set by our last speaker and we want to build a different system in which the Democratic polity controls where the money goes decides on the best causes and puts it to it fine again let me say I will certainly join you in trying to build that polity which in which we have a good democratic structure we have good taxes we use the revenue for the best purposes and perhaps there are some countries that operate quite well that way perhaps if we were restricting this to Sweden let's say we might think this is good enough already to work with but we're not talking about that we're talking perhaps about the United States where if more money goes into tax revenue what's going to happen with it well Donald Trump will get more money to build his wall that's a great use of money compared to what the Bill and Melinda Gates are doing isn't it or perhaps it'll go into more military spending perhaps will go into more weapons that go to the Saudis who are currently using American weapons in Yemen in one of the worst Human Rights atrocities we've seen in recent decades that is not the system we're in and I'm happy I have to say but people like gates Buffett and carried tuna and Dustin Moskovitz and Tom Styer and Kate Taylor that they actually have money that they can put two really good causes and it's not just the United States on the day that I arrived in the in the United Kingdom a few days ago I looked at the newspaper and it said that the UK government has paid ninety seven million pounds to advisors for the brexit negotiations well would you really rather tax revenues go to paying their advisers on the brexit negotiations 97 million pounds rather than go to the kinds of causes that I've described that these philanthropies billionaires are carrying out I don't I don't really think we should so I urge you to be reasonably literal-minded in thinking about this motion if this is a house that makes decisions then it should be careful in the decisions that it makes we don't want you know if we're a parliament we wouldn't want to pass legislation that was carelessly drafted and produced outcomes that we don't want to see and I think if we are making statements about morality about morality for people who are actual people who are living in this world today I think we want to be careful before we rush to judgment about all of them and so given the way this motion has been phrased I urge you to think seriously to put aside your progressive ideas which I no doubt share but which might bias you to thinking oh billionaires bad unfair system unjust 26 billionaires have as much as 3.7 billion or whatever it is that's a terrible system we've got a vote for this motion no you've got to say I would like an opportunity to discuss a different motion on another occasion where we can talk about the system but today I'm going to vote on the motion before me and that means I have to vote no thank you you

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Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019