The Most Good You Can Do | Peter Singer | Talks at Google

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JEFF KAUFFMAN: This afternoon we have Peter Singer with us to talk about his new book, "The Most Good You Can Do." This is a book about effective altruism which is the idea that you should use your time and money to try and have as much of a positive impact on the world as you can. Peter Singer has been interested in this sort of thing since at least the early '70s when he wrote "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" which is a pretty well-known paper. It's been very influential. It's influenced a lot of people, including me. Its basic idea is if you came across someone in front of you who very much needed help, you would help them. There are lots of people who need help elsewhere. Why don't we help them? Perhaps we should. And expanding this into effective altruism has happened sort of over decades with a bunch of ideas from elsewhere as well which Peter will get into. He's currently a professor of bioethics at Princeton and also, he's at the University of Melbourne. And now he's here, so please welcome Peter Singer. PETER SINGER: Thank you very much for that introduction, Jeff. I'm very happy to be here with you. So as Jeff said, this is an issue that I've been interested in for a very long time. And last night I was speaking to a lecture theater in Harvard that was organized by the Harvard Effective Altruism Group and I was introduced by Josh Greene who is a professor who works in psychology of-- essentially moral psychology. You could say psychology about how we develop our moral beliefs. But he started off as a philosophy student, he studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard. And he actually put something very nicely that I'm going to repeat, too, in terms of what's happened with the thought that goes back to the article that Jeff just mentioned. It was published in the early '70s. That article has been very successful in one sense, that is it's one of the most reprinted philosophy articles in anthologies that are used for teaching philosophy. And many, many people have come up to me and said, oh, I read your article when I was doing an undergraduate philosophy course. But as Josh put it last night, it was generally taught in the sense of here's a challenge to you. This article is obviously wrong. Find out why it's wrong, tell me why it's wrong because the claims that it makes or the conclusions that it draws are just too demanding. It has to be wrong, all right, because essentially the idea is you would rescue-- here's this child drowning in a pond, you can easily rescue this child. No great risk to you, it's just a shallow pond. But you're wearing some really expensive clothing that's going to get ruined, so there's going to be some cost to you. Not a life-changing cost, but some cost you in order to save that child. OK, so everybody in the-- everybody says, of course I'd save the child. You know, what can you compare some clothing with a child's life? And then I say, OK, but really you're in that situation right now because there are people dying from preventable poverty-related diseases in the world but you can save-- at not very great cost actually. You could debate the point of the cost and whether it is comparable to clothing that you might be wearing. That might depend on your penchant for designer clothing, I guess, but something like that. And then people say, OK, but once you've done that, once you've let's say donated the cost of one pair of expensive shoes or a suit to save one child. Unlike the pond case, there are more children so it seems that you ought to do it again. And again and again and again, and where do you stop until you reach the point of marginal utility? That is the point at which if you gave more then you'd be lowering yourself to the level of the poor person you're helping or you'd be doing as much harm to yourself or as much risk to yourself as you would be alleviating in terms of the person that you're helping. So that's the highly demanding conclusion that can't be right, and that's why I think the article was taught in that way. Seems plausible, but what's wrong with it? But what Josh Greene said yesterday is that an interesting thing has happened in the last few years and that is that the reaction that there's something wrong with this idea and we have to find out what has switched at least with a substantial number of people to saying no, this is really right. Yes, it's very demanding and maybe I'm not going to be able to go all the way that this says I should be going, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be right to do that. That in some sense, anyway, that's what we ought to do. And we should at least be trying to do as much as we can in that direction. And I think it is true and I find that have to say quite exciting that there is now this emerging movement known as effective altruism which is thinking along these lines. I won't say it's thinking exactly in terms of "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" article, but it's certainly thinking in some way that is in that direction. So essentially what people who are effective altruists are saying is I want to do to something significant that is for the good of the world that is going to make the world a better place. And I want that to be an important part of my life. Doesn't mean that I'm going to go to the point of marginal utility. Most of us are not saints. I don't claim to have reached that point myself, but I do think that making that an important part of your life is something that I want to do. So that's the altruism part of effective altruism. And then the effective part of it is it's not enough just to say, I'm going to make the world a better place. If I'm going to put part of my life into thinking about thinking altruistically about working for some good cause, I want to actually make the biggest possible difference that I can with the resources that I have available and that I'm prepared to put into this activity, whatever activity it happens to be. Might be donating money, it might be donating my skills and my time, might be some combination of those things. So that's the effectiveness part of it. We want to use our abilities to reason and to think about things, assess the evidence in order to make our altruism as highly effective as possible. So to say this is now clearly an emerging movement. There was a pretty large lecture theater in the Science Center that was packed. I'm told that the [? Battle ?] Theater where I'm speaking tonight is a sold-out event. And I've been doing a little book tour, was in the San Francisco Bay area and up in Seattle I also had full houses there. So there's clearly a lot of interest in this and there are EA groups as they're known, Effective Altruism groups, on a number of different campuses around the country. And it's not specifically a United States thing. In fact, I think if you said where did this begin, I would say it began at Oxford in England, but it certainly exists in quite a number of other countries. There are groups in Australia, where I spend part of each year, but there are also groups in Switzerland and Germany and Czech Republic and a number of other places. So it's an interesting emerging movement and there's quite a lot online about it. And it's all fairly new so there's things like the Wikipedia page on effective altruism is only about two years old. And that I guess gives you a sense of when people thought, well there ought to be something more out there. So let me just say a little bit about how it got started, because I said I wrote this early article and I've been writing a bit more about it in recent years. But I can't really take credit for starting it in an organizational sense. To the best of my understanding, the person who took the initial steps was a philosopher at Oxford called Toby Ord. Toby told me I think back maybe in 2007 that he was thinking of organizing something at Oxford to try to let more people know about how effective their giving could be. And what Toby did he was then a PhD student at Oxford expecting to have an academic career-- which things are basically going on course, he's a research fellow in philosophy at Oxford now. And he decided he would and he was living on a Graduate Studentship so he decided to work out how much money he was likely to earn over his academic career and then assume that he stayed roughly on the level of personal expenditure that was his Graduate Studentship, because he felt that was enough to cover what was important to him. Well, adjusted for inflation of course, maybe put it up a little bit, but not too much more than that, and see how much money he would be able to donate to effective charities. And then when he did that sum, so what his total earnings would be, deduct the studentship equivalent for the rest of his life and then divide that by the cost of something that an effective charity might do. An example he took was to either treat or prevent blindness. So there's a lot of people who are blind in the world because they can't afford cataract surgery which is a very simple surgery that everyone in the United States who is blind because of cataracts would get either from their health insurance or from Medicare when they reach 65, Medicaid if they were poorer. But in developing countries, there are millions of people who are blind because of cataracts. There are also millions more people who have become blind because of a condition called trachoma caused by a microorganism that gets into your eye when you're quite young and gradually develops and causes blindness and can again be very inexpensively treated. So putting some reasonably good estimates of the cost of these treatments, Toby calculated that if he did live on the equivalent of a studentship and donated it to one of these organizations, he could throughout his life either prevent 80,000 people from becoming blind or treat 80,000 blind people and restore their sight. And he thought that was quite an amazing figure. He thought that would be an incredibly important thing to do. So he thought firstly that he ought to do that and he took a pledge and made it public that he would live on something not that much more than his graduate studentship and donate the rest. And he's doing that. But he also set up an organization called Giving What We Can to provide this information for people, to let people know which charities were highly effective at doing not just treating blindness but a variety of other things, for example, preventing child deaths from malaria which is also something you can do quite inexpensively by distributing bed nets in areas where people don't have them and where they're prone to malaria, or getting rid of intestinal parasites in children, deworming them, which isn't lifesaving because the parasites aren't going to kill them but has been shown to be highly cost effective in terms of their achievements at school, both actually staying at school and doing better at school, because the parasites obviously weaken them, make them more tired, less energy, and so on. And again it's an extremely inexpensive treatment, about $0.50 a year to get rid of intestinal worms in children. So publicizing those sorts of things. And I think that was probably the first real effective altruism organization. There's also another thing that happened around that time, around 2007, that was very important for the movement, and that was an organization that was set up to rigorously assess charities for whether they really were effective in what they were doing. This was set up by two hedge fund analysts, Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, who had made quite a lot of money when they were still in their 20s and together with some of their colleagues decided to give a portion of it away. And then they debated among themselves so where should we give it? And they had different ideas so they said, well, why don't we all write to our favorite charity and ask them to say what they would do with a significant donation and then we can pool the results and decide what to do? So they all wrote to their favorite charities, but instead of getting back some real data about what the charity would do with a donation-- and of course these are people who were used to analyzing lots of data for their hedge fund-- they got back brochures with nice photos of smiling children and a few words about how much good your donation could do, but no hard information at all. Well, they weren't satisfied with that and they tried to follow up. They called some of the charities and said, look we're really serious about giving you quite substantial amounts of money, but we do want to know in more detail what you would do with it, how you decide to fund this program rather than that program, what evidence you have that the program is actually getting the results that you want it to have? And they still got really no useful response and in some cases, they got active hostility with the suggestion that these people were making that their programs were not working effectively. Or that in one case, one organization suspected that they were from a rival organization trying to know what their programs were and whether they were going to copy these programs or something like that. So Holden and Elie decided that there was a vacuum here that they needed to fill, and their colleagues agreed to support them for awhile in setting up GiveWell and actually to do some real research on which organizations were effective and to try to get this information from those organizations. So GiveWell now has grown to have quite a significant team, I think about a dozen researchers, and it is-- it's really raised the standard of what you can know about charities being effective. Before GiveWell, and some of you in the field might know there was things like an organization called Charity Navigator and another one called GuideStar, but really what they were doing was getting the form that the charity sends to IRS which shows or states-- I should say probably rather that claims to state the proportion of expenses that go on administration, fundraising, and programs. But firstly, that's quite a rubbery figure. Any creative accountant can reduce your administrative amount and increase your programs quite significantly. Secondly, it doesn't really tell you very much about how effective the charity is, because it doesn't tell you anything about how effective the programs are. And you could spend 90% of your revenue on programs and still be much less effective than another charity that spends 80 or 70 or even 60% of its revenue on programs, if its programs are more effective. And given that it has presumably more staff to select those programs and to supervise them, it's quite likely that they would be much more effective. So you might do much better to donate to the charity that has higher administrative costs. So really we didn't know very much until GiveWell came along. And GiveWell has certainly made it have a lot easier for people who want to give particularly to global poverty-related issues, because GiveWell decided early on that charities that were spending money domestically, say on poverty in the United States just couldn't really compete in terms of dollar for dollar cost effectiveness with those spending money on global poverty. So if you want to find that which are the most effective charities, there are-- well, let's say if you want to find out which of the ones that have most clearly demonstrated their effectiveness, then GiveWell is the place to go. And I put it that way because the charities that they don't recommend might be highly effective, too, or some of them might be highly effective, but simply have not been able to produce the kind of evidence GiveWell wants. And sometimes that's not because they aren't doing good work but because they're more diverse and more broad. The charities that GiveWell recommends tend to be very focused on based on one type of intervention. So for instance, bed nets against malaria, de-worming kids. There's one called Give Directly that hands out cash grants to very poor people. When you do those things, you can evaluate very rigorously. You can actually do a randomized study in which you get baseline measurements for a lot of villages, let's say, or a lot of schools. And then, you do the interventions in a randomly selected portion of them. And you go back and you measure what difference you're making. So you can do that if you're doing those sort of interventions. If you're doing a wide range of things, as the bigger organizations-- the Oxfams, the Save the Children's, the Cares-- do, it's much harder to evaluate all of the things across the board. Plus if you're doing things like advocacy work-- you're an advocate for the poor, let's say, trying to prevent mining industries from going into areas where they're going to damage the environment and perhaps pollute rivers that villages need for their water or their fishing. It's very hard to get any kind of rigorous evaluation of that. Because they're all one-off situations. You can't do a random study of a large number of mining companies, half of which you tried to intervene on behalf of the poor and half of which you didn't. So I'm not saying that these other organizations are not doing good work. I'm just saying that it's not been possible for them to demonstrate what they're doing as well. Now, I think all of this is a very significant movement. Because I think it challenges traditional ideas of philanthropy. And philanthropy is a big industry in the United States. Around $335 billion dollars are given to charities in the United States each year. That's about 2% of GDP. So it's a pretty large slice of money. And the majority of that, about 2/3 of it, is given by individuals. The rest is given mostly by foundations, but a small slice by corporations. The foundations, no doubt, do some research and have people, in terms of what they're going to donate to. But we know that most individuals do no research at all before donating to a charity. And the minority that do some research, it's mostly very cursory. And it's often things like what I mentioned, looking at the amount that goes to administration rather than to programs. So not very useful research. And when you add to that the fact that some charities do, I think, a very large amount of good with your money and others do negligible amounts, I think that it would be extremely important to shift some of this $240 billion dollars, say, that's given by individuals from the less effective to the more effective charities. And that may often mean shifting the area in which it's given. In fact, of the total $335 billion dollars that's given to charity in the United States, there's only a very small percentage-- really, there's not even very good statistics to say what it is-- but perhaps if it's something like 5%-- that was probably on the high side, in terms of what actually goes to global poverty out of that amount. So if, say, GiveWell thinks that that's clearly more cost effective than even charities that are concerned to help the poor in the United States, then there's a big impact you could have. And then, when you add to the fact that, in fact, the largest recipients of charity in the United States are religious institutions followed by educational institutions, and then a lot goes to art and cultural institutions, I think there's clearly a lot that could be moved to better causes. Now, some of it might not really be movable. I mean, perhaps people who give to their religious institutions will keep doing that and will be hard to persuade that they ought to get evidence about the good that this does. And you know, if what you're doing is giving to have a better church built, and you believe that that is going to save more souls, then it's certainly difficult to produce evidence about how much good that does. But I've been trying-- I use in the book-- to show that there are very good grounds for thinking that you're going to do more good if you give to the sorts of things I was talking about, helping people who are blind to see, helping children to survive, than if you give to, for example, art galleries or museums. Or take an example that was in the news just a week or so ago. If, like David Geffen, you give $100 million to the restoration of what has up to now been Avery Fisher Concert Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York, but is about to become David Geffen Concert Hall. So this may seem fairly obvious, that it's better to give to the poor than to give to the renovation of a concert hall in Manhattan, but the philanthropy industry, in fact, resists the idea that you can even make such comparisons or that we should try to persuade people to go in one direction rather than the other. In fact, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, one of the biggest philanthropy advisors in the country-- if you go and look on their website, you can find a brochure called Finding Your Focus in Philanthropy. And you could read in that the idea that-- to the sort of question I'm asking, what's the cause you should give to? --there is, they say, "obviously"-- that's quotes-- no objective answer. Well, there are certainly some questions where it's very difficult to say, is it better to give to prevent climate change? Or is better to give to the poor now? Is it better to give to still further reduce what are small risks of human extinction from bioterrorism or collision with an asteroid or possibly, some people think, the singularity takeover by artificially intelligent machines that are hostile to human beings? How do you compare that with giving to help the global poor now? So there are some genuinely difficult questions in which you might hesitate to say that there is an objective answer. But I think, if you say, is there an objective answer to the question, could David Geffen have done something better with $100 million than give it towards the renovation of a concert hall? I think the answer is clearly, yes. And so, that's part of the message that effective altruists are trying to get out. Their trying to say, we ought to be thinking harder about philanthropy. And we ought to be trying to persuade people to move away from some sectors towards others. And even if this means people are going to think that we're philistines, well, so be it. There are just more urgent things to do in the world at the moment. When we deal with those more urgent things, sure, let's go back to supporting the arts financially and a million other things. But the world in which we live-- with more than six million children dying each year, children under five, from poverty-related causes and, as I've said, millions of people blind, whose blindness could be cured-- that's not a world in which we want to go on supporting these things. I want to make sure that you have time to ask for some questions. So I'll just say one more thing very briefly. And then I'll stop. And you might ask, well, why are people doing this? Are we supposed to believe that they are just purely altruistic? And some people are skeptical about altruism. The Effective Altruism Movement is, despite its name, not really very concerned about people's motives. That is, in particular, it's not really concerned to focus on the idea of people making sacrifices for others. That's a view of altruism, right? That if you're not making a sacrifice, if you're not somehow making yourself worse off, then you're not an altruist. Or maybe, you're not even a morally virtuous person. I don't need the Effective Altruism Movement is really very interested in that. They're interested more in the outcomes, in getting more good done in the world. And certainly, I-- and I think most other effective altruists-- are actually very happy if people find that a rewarding and fulfilling thing to do. And there is a lot of psychological evidence that people do find it rewarding and fulfilling, that people who are generous-- if you do surveys in which you ask people whether they've given to charity in the past month, and then you also ask them questions about how happy are they? What sort of mood are they in? Are they satisfied with their life? --the answers do correlate. And of course, correlation is not causation. But it does seem that generous people tend to be happier. Maybe they give generously because they're happy. But there is some other evidence that may suggest causation. There's evidence of neuro-imaging studies where people are having their brains scanned in real-time. And they're given a kind of a kitty, some money. And they're asked questions about what they would like to do with it. And they're given charitable options as well as more selfish kind of spend-it-on-yourself options. And when people make the charitable choice, the reward areas of their brain, as they're known-- those that light up when you have delicious food or great sex-- light up as well. So there is some evidence that the causation goes in that direction. Anyway, as I say, I think a lot of people in the effective altruism movement do find this a fulfilling and rewarding thing to do. And it's possible that one reason why it's developed at this point is that there are a lot of people who feel that they are not worried about their economic security, but they do lack a sense of fulfillment in their life. And this gives them something that can enhance that sense. OK, I'll stop there. And we have, anyway, at least 20 to 25 minutes for questions. So who would like to ask a question? AUDIENCE: Hello, Professor Singer. Thank you for coming today. I've been following GiveWell and using that to guide my giving-- PETER SINGER: Terrific. AUDIENCE: --for the last couple years. It's been very useful. I'm also very concerned about global climate change. And I feel like if we aren't doing something about that now, there's not much point doing anything else. Is there a GiveWell that would help me decide which charity I should give to around global climate change? PETER SINGER: Not yet. The closest it comes to that is GiveWell has received significant financial support from a foundation called Good Ventures. And with that support, their doing something called the Open Philanthropy Project. So whereas the sort of more traditional work-- if you can call something traditional that's only been going about eight years-- is assessing these charities quite rigorously, the Open Philanthropy Project is doing broad surveys of different areas where it might be possible to have some particular leverage, where there might be a tipping point where some input will make a difference. So they are looking at climate change among a range of other things. I haven't very recently gone back to see what the state of their report is. I don't know whether anyone else in the room has and knows about that. But that would be a place to look. And if they do find that climate change is something that might be an effective use of charitable dollars, they will then start looking at potential organizations in that field. AUDIENCE: Thank you. PETER SINGER: Thank you. Yeah? AUDIENCE: Hi. Does the thinking around effective altruism try to take into account situations of leverage that is, for example, instead of giving money directly to blindness-- to lobbying for government to spend tax money on that sort of thing? Or is that just too difficult to measure? PETER SINGER: People certainly do talk about in the Effective Altruism Movement? Again, as far as GiveWell is concerned, that would be something that comes under this newer Open Philanthropy Project rather than its traditional assessment. In the book, I have a little bit of discussion about advocacy. I have an example from Oxfam, that they had an advocacy project. So Ghana discovered oil offshore, which was some sort of economic boom for them. It produced hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. And the question was, what would happen to that revenue? And we've already seen, in other African countries like Angola, that essentially it's gone to the elite. It's being corruptly siphoned off. Now, Ghana is a more hopeful country in that it's more democratic, got a more functioning civil society, unlike Angola. So Oxfam worked with local civil society in Ghana to get passage of a law called Oil for Agriculture, which allocated 15% of the government's oil revenues to help develop agriculture in impoverished regions. Particularly, the north of Ghana is in the Sahel and very subject to drought and so on. So for an expenditure of a couple of $100,000, they will now have, I think, 15% of their oil revenues is over $100 million going each year, hopefully effectively-- though we don't quite know that really-- to help Oil for Agriculture. So that's like winning the lottery almost. Of course, you could do advocacy on dozens of programs without it paying off like that. So it is pretty speculative. But at least, some of these programs do seem to pay off well. You know, bigger things like trying to change US government legislation-- Oxfam has also, with many other organizations, tried to get the Farm Bill changed so that we don't subsidize the US agricultural producers that then undercut developing country agricultural producers trying to sell into the same global market. As you would know, that's been unsuccessful so far. Thanks. AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you for coming. I don't know if you're up for evaluating specific charities. Historically, I-- and I think a number of other coworkers-- have given to Doctors Without Borders. I was wondering if you would consider them effective. PETER SINGER: So again, this is difficult for me to comment. I think they're-- like some of the other larger ones I mentioned-- Oxfam and Save the Children-- GiveWell finds them difficult to really evaluate. Because they do a number of different things. And so I think you can certainly look at what GiveWell says about Doctors Without Borders. And you'll see why they're not one of GiveWell's top-ranked charities. And I think you should then look at that and, then, decide for yourself whether this is something that really counts against them being effective or merely demonstrates the difficulty of proving their effectiveness by GiveWell standards. So-- AUDIENCE: Thank you. PETER SINGER: --I think that's about all I can say. Thank you. Yes? AUDIENCE: Hi. So your analogy of the drowning child scenario reminds me of something that I've seen a lot now on social media with these, like, pop-up, GoFundMe campaigns. Where somebody says, like, I just have X disease, and I'm losing my house, and-- and it elicits that sort of drowning-child reaction. And usually there are photos. And maybe it's a friend of a friend, somebody you sort of know. And sometimes it elicits a really huge response. And I've seen this many times. How do we weigh something that does have that kind of impact-- especially if it's somebody that you know or it's somebody your friend knows-- relative to people that seem so removed? Or are we just overreacting, because it feels like this kind of drowning child? I don't know. PETER SINGER: Yeah. AUDIENCE: I don't know what to make of it. PETER SINGER: So I think we are overreacting, which is not to say that you may not want to do things for your friends. Even effective altruists do things to their friends. Otherwise, they wouldn't be very nice people to be friends with, I guess. But effective altruists would see that as something different from the effective altruism they would do. I mean, I think I have one case I mention in my book of somebody who's gives a huge proportion of his income away. But he paid a lot of money to a friend whose dog was really ill, so that the dog could have surgery that was really quite expensive. And he sees this sort of parallel to deciding to go on a really expensive holiday to a tropical island in winter, not something that's really part of his altruism. But the phenomenon that you mentioned is really interesting. And since writing that article, I've learned a lot more about the psychology of the way we respond to things. And one of the most well-confirmed results is that we respond to identifiable individuals. So Paul Slovic, a psychologist at Oregon, did a study where he got students to come in for an experiment. Didn't tell them what the experiment was. Said they'd be paid $15. Gave them a clipboard with some questions, which they then answered, assuming that was the experiment. They then got paid $15 in small bills. And as they were paid it, the person paying them said, by the way, our lab has a charity, which it supports each month. Here is some information about our charity. Would you mind reading this? And then, perhaps, you'd like to give some of what you've just earned to the charity. Now, randomly, some of them got identifying information about an individual girl, her name, her age, and a picture of her. And others didn't. They just got statistical information that there are children, right? Well, as you would know from what you've been saying, the response with the identifiable information got a lot more. So that's what's going on here, I think. And that was, I guess, what was going on to some extent in my pond example. I was asking you to imagine there's this child. You can see this child. It's an identifiable child in front of you. And so, people will give more in those circumstances. But I think really, we ought to become more self-aware of the little tricks that our brain plays and try to compensate for them, really. We ought to know that, just as perhaps we become aware that, some of us, maybe there's some sort of tendency for us to prefer people who look like us, and this can fuel racism and we guard against that-- so I think, we ought to be aware that we have a tendency to prefer giving to these identifiable individuals and guard against that too. AUDIENCE: Thank you. PETER SINGER: Thanks. AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you for coming. I was recently introduced to the Effective Altruism Movement by some of my colleagues here. So I consider myself as a novice, but someone who is very interested in learning more. I think my question today is-- so the effectiveness seems to be based on a return or a yield. For every $100, I get this X demonstrable effect. But earlier in your remarks, you were talking about advocacy. So I'm wondering if effective altruists have, sort of, the stack rank or the hierarchy of goods that are worth pursuing? Because at the human level, we connect with something, like a problem, you see right in front of you. And that can be very motivating. It can help an important cause and make you feel good about it. But it's just one of many. So particularly things, like human rights is a hard thing to measure. PETER SINGER: Mm-hmm. AUDIENCE: You know, when someone is working to create rights for disenfranchised classes, whether you give to one political organization or another, which one is doing the most good? But maybe you can help be broaden the question a little bit. But speak to, how do sort or stack-rank-- PETER SINGER: So I think effective altruists-- AUDIENCE: --effectively? Thank you. PETER SINGER: --mostly, are concerned about well-being, really. So they're concerned about reducing suffering, improving welfare, happiness. And again, not all of them, but I think most of them would try to convert other things into that. So if you talk about human rights as an example, they would say, well, I think human rights are important. But human rights are important because, really, in a society that respects human rights, there will be fewer abuses, therefore less suffering. And there will be higher welfare. So I would say, most of them do have some idea that if you could somehow cash-out how much you're improving welfare by advocating for human rights, then you would have a metric whereby you could tell whether advocating for human rights compares favorably or unfavorably with providing basic health care for example. And in the absence of that information, of knowing how that cashes out, it's very difficult to compare. And there may be some people who would actually think that human rights are intrinsically valuable even if they don't lead to higher welfare. That's a possibility too. But that seems to me to be not the mainstream of the movement. AUDIENCE: OK, thank you. PETER SINGER: OK, thanks. Yeah? AUDIENCE: Hi, I have two questions on very different ends of the spectrum of how to choose how much to give. And one is, is there thought among the Effective Altruism Movement about what's enough and about when to stop? And then, on the other side, I think tying into some of the conversation about human connection and human psychology-- I wonder some if one of the reasons why people prefer local charities is that it's easier to convince themselves to give more or to give more wholeheartedly or expand that pie of what do they consider for charity when it's something that they can see and connect with? And if that doesn't provide some value as well. But at the same time, there's also that scaling factor of how effective they are. So that's two questions, sort of on very different ends of the spectrum. PETER SINGER: OK, so sorry. Just while listening to the second one, the first one went out of my head, I'm afraid. AUDIENCE: What's enough? PETER SINGER: Yeah, what's enough. AUDIENCE: And how do you decide what's enough? PETER SINGER: OK, good. So that's really the question that, as I said, I began with. And my original 1970s article seemed to suggest that you never got to enough until you got to the point of marginal utility. And there's a sense in which that is the only place you can draw the line. And anything else is going to be unsatisfactory, if you're really trying to draw a moral line, right? But you know, what I now say-- and I think what a number of other people in the movement would say-- is although that is the ideal moral limit, you shouldn't think of it as, somehow, if you don't reach that limit, then you're a failure; then you're acting wrongly; then you're an unethical person. We standardly think of morality in terms of, if you don't do what's right, then you doing what's wrong. And it's just the either-or dichotomy there. And that works for things. Traditional morality is where you have these simple rules. Don't murder. Don't lie. Don't cheat. Don't commit adultery. Those things you can either do or not do. But once you take into account positive obligations to assist, I think it's better to think of morality there as on a spectrum. So instead of saying you've either reached that point or you haven't, you've said, well, I'm here on the spectrum. It would be better, perhaps, morally if I was further over there. But I do have these other interests. I do have friends that I care about, my own interests, those of my family, and so on. And even if morality would tell me I should do more, this is as far as I'm going. And you don't have to feel really terrible about that. Because, firstly as I say, it's not a black and white matter. Secondly, if you look at how you compare with pretty much everybody else in society, if you're in the Effective Altruism Movement at all, you're doing something slightly or more substantial than 99 point something of the population are doing. So you needn't feel too bad about that, right? And now, I've forgotten the second half of the question, now that I've answered the first. AUDIENCE: My other question is, does perhaps local giving and that direct connection because of human psychology-- PETER SINGER: Oh, yeah. AUDIENCE: --give a bit more or that-- PETER SINGER: Yeah, do they give more? Well, maybe. This is how some people push back when I talk about global poverty. They say, look, you're going to put off givers. People give because of their emotions, their passions and, perhaps, sometimes also their personal connections. And if you tell them that they have to give in this more objective sort of way, they'll give less. And that's quite possible. I can't say that that's untrue. What I would say is that, sometimes, even if they're giving less, because it will do a multiple times as good, it might still be better. The other thing I'd say is-- although I'm excited by the emergence of this Effective Altruism Movement-- I don't think it's really ever going to completely dominate philanthropy. I think there's always going to be quite a lot of people who will give on an emotional basis and will give locally. So I don't think these other charities are going to disappear. I think they're still going to get plenty of funding, whether we like it or not. Yep? AUDIENCE: OK, so I wrote down part of this. Because it was a lot of thoughts. Kind of on the spectrum of environmental care versus poverty and health care, I can understand both of those actually being heavily weighted for the hierarchy of needs of the survival of our species. But my question is pertaining to the amount of discounting arts and humanities. Because, well yes, it's important to take care of health and your basic survival needs. Those problems-- I might be pessimistic-- don't see them going away in a measurable future. And to say that we should take care of arts after all of that is taken care of-- what kind of humanity and what kind of culture would we have if we focus in that way? And isn't art and humanities and culture a part of well-being and the full-rounded person and connection between multiple people? PETER SINGER: Yeah. Look, I'm certainly not against the arts and humanities. Especially, obviously, I've spent my life doing philosophy in various ways. And not all of it is directed to effective altruism. So I'm clearly interested in philosophy in its own sake as well. But what we're talking about here is the charitable dollars, if you like, and what good they do. I think arts and humanities would not disappear if we stopped donating charitable dollars to them. I think that there is a desire for artistic expression in people. That is something you see in a huge range of cultures where there's no commercial value in it at all. The indigenous Australians did rock art, which they certainly couldn't sell. They did drawings in the sand, which were quite ephemeral. People in concentration camps tried to create art if they possibly could. So I think there is a human desire to create art. And you don't really need to give to support it financially. I guess what you do need to do, given that there's a huge heritage of art, you need to preserve it. I'm not suggesting that no money should go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Boston equivalent and, therefore, the building should fall into disrepair. And eventually, all the paintings there should get ruined. I certainly think that we ought to maintain the heritage for future generations. But in terms of saying, do we need to build a new wing? Or take an example I used in an earlier book. Was it really important that the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a small Madonna by Duccio, the Sienese painter for $45 million? Would it have really mattered if that painting had gone to some other art museum? Or perhaps even to a private collector? I think it wouldn't have mattered as much as what $45 million could've done. AUDIENCE: I think that I'm thinking more of community based art that's happening in real-time. I'm thinking of things that bring together communities and liven up environments to help connect humans no than preservation of antiquities. PETER SINGER: Well, that's fairly low cost I would've thought, right? And-- AUDIENCE: No. I help throw some events in Boston. And it's quite expensive actually. It's-- PETER SINGER: Well, there may be expensive ways of doing it. But I mean, as I said, I think communities will create art without a lot of funding. And I think that would be as true in Boston as it would be in Outback, Australia, really. AUDIENCE: Well actually, funny you should say that. There's actually an organization I'm involved with called Figment. And we both have events in New York, Boston, around the United States, and Geelong, Australia. And they're all community-supported, free events that require fundraising. And as far as the value for your dollar goes, all of the money that goes into those foundations goes directly to the permits and all of those things to pull to make these festivals possible. And those, then, bring together communities and cross socioeconomic boundaries. PETER SINGER: OK. Well, you clearly are more involved in this particular area than I am. And I won't argue with you. I would still think that, if it comes to a choice, I would rather make it possible for people to see than make communities come together over art. And I would hope that you could find other ways of encouraging people to have that artistic activity. AUDIENCE: Thank you. PETER SINGER: Thank you. Over to this side. AUDIENCE: Thank you once again for your wonderful remarks. You are a philosopher. Most philosophers are not effective altruists as far as I can tell. You visibly talk to a lot of your philosophical coworkers from time to time. And philosophers do love arguments, I'm told. What sort of arguments have you heard from your colleagues against effective altruism? PETER SINGER: Well, there are some who present a different ethical view. Effective altruism goes well with a consequentialist or utilitarian ethic. But when I say, goes well with it, I think you can be an effective altruist as a deontoligist, that's somebody who thinks that we ought to observe moral rules. Because generally speaking, being an effective altruist doesn't require you to violate moral rules. So clearly, in a lot of use-- for example, in a standard Christian ethic, there is room for helping the poor. That's something that's emphasized. So you certainly don't have to be a utilitarian or a consequentialist. But there has been a fair amount of discussion in the literature about the sorts of arguments that I've put forward. Generally, people talk about the importance to individuals of pursuing their own projects. This is something that goes back to Bernard Williams, no longer alive, a philosopher who claimed that, somehow, if you like, every human being has their own commitments, their own projects, their own desires. And what I'm suggesting is somehow to take an external point of view to that, something that I've called the point-of-view of the universe. Not that the universe really has a point-of-view, but to get across that sort of idea. And Williams thinks that this is an abstract notion that doesn't really motivate people and that shouldn't motivate them, that people should feel as though they're able to pursue their own projects independently of the external circumstances. In other words, it's not that you're free to do that, even if the circumstance is such that you could do more good in another way. So others talk about rights and say, well, we have a right to a certain level of comfort or a certain level of meeting our needs beyond just the basic needs. So there certainly is a literature on that. I don't know. I guess that debate is going to be an ongoing one. As you say, philosophers like to argue. And for any philosophical thesis that anyone puts up, there'll certainly be counters. OK. And this'll be the last one then. AUDIENCE: OK, so I graduated college two years ago. And so, I'm relatively new to this whole having-a-paycheck thing. And the first thing that you learn about when you get your paycheck is, here's your 401K. And you should start saving for retirement, which feels ridiculous at the moment. But then, you see all these numbers about, well, if I save this much now, well then, when I'm 65-- and you don't know what will happen. And maybe I'll have medical costs. So how do you weigh-- especially speaking towards the younger crowd-- preparing for potential risk in the future and being safe, prepared, saving for retirement, versus being an altruistic person, particularly in the earlier phases of life? PETER SINGER: So I think you'll find your own balance in that. I think people do want to put some money towards those plans. As far as medical costs are concerned, I think, in the United States, as long as you're working, you're going to have good insurance cover. When you get to be 65, you're going to have access to Medicare, which is vastly better than most people have. And should you get dismissed and fall into serious poverty, you're going to have Medicaid, which is not a great program. But it's probably pretty unlikely, really, that you're going to need that. So that seems to me to be less of a worry. Although, in-- I think-- all other affluent nations, It's less of a concern than it is in the United States. Because they have a better national health service provision. But admittedly, you're here. And then, there are some holes that you could conceivably fall through. So I think you will still find, though, that when you've covered those to a reasonable degree, you have a surplus that hangs over and that that would enable you to make those sorts of decisions. But I don't know, Jeff, whether you want to comment on this. Jeff Kauffman is somebody who has faced these decisions together with Julia Wise, his partner. And Julia has written about it online. Shall I ask people or suggest that they go to that? JEFF KAUFFMAN: We try to half of what we earn. And we end up saving for retirement. We do the full Google match. Because it's, sort of, free money. And after that, we save maybe another 5% to 10% on top of that. We were saving for a house. Now, we've actually been spending that down. Because we just bought a house. But the basic idea being, that we set a budget for donation. We put half our money into that. And then, the rest of it we divide the way anyone who earned half as much as us would divide, thinking about what we'll need in the future and what we need now. AUDIENCE: I take a similar but, maybe, opposite approach, which is actually that I save, like, half of my income for retirement. And I give a few percent now. And my thinking is, if I don't want to retire in 10 years, I can keep working and just donate all my income after that and still have a safety net. PETER SINGER: OK. AUDIENCE: You guys are awesome. It's great. PETER SINGER: A couple of interesting and impressive strategies. Good to know that they're there. Have we got--? Lovely. AUDIENCE: You could save for retirement and then put in a will that whatever you didn't need to take care of you in your old age could go to charity. PETER SINGER: You could do that. Well, for one thing, I think it's actually a fulfilling thing to do to give while you're alive. And you can see where it's going and know what you're doing. And I think, in some ways, that's better. Also, you do need to be careful. Because things change. For example, in giving, GiveWell changes its list of most effective charities. Each year, it revises it and those change. So if you make a will at some time and revise it frequently, it can become out-of-date, in terms of where it's going. AUDIENCE: Thank you for that. PETER SINGER: You're welcome. OK, I think we're probably out of time. Thanks very much for coming. I appreciate your questions. [APPLAUSE]
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Channel: Talks at Google
Views: 40,920
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Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, The Most Good You Can Do, Peter Singer, peter singer ted talk, peter singer famine affluence and morality, peter singer debate, ethics
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Length: 60min 9sec (3609 seconds)
Published: Wed Apr 22 2015
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