Peter Singer
Jill Owens, Powells.com
You're walking to work one morning when you notice a toddler flailing in a pond, about to go under the water. It's safe for you to wade in and save him, but you'll ruin your expensive shoes and be a few hours late to work. What should you do?
Peter Singer's powerful new book, The Life You Can Save, begins with this thought experiment. It seems straightforward enough — who wouldn't save the toddler? But, Singer argues convincingly, what is the difference between letting the child in front of us drown and choosing not to prevent a child's death across the world from poverty, when we could save his life with the cost of that pair of shoes?
Named one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World," Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher and ethicist currently teaching bioethics at Princeton University. In 1975, he published Animal Liberation, a seminal text for the animal rights movement. His textbook, Practical Ethics, is a classic in the field. He has written eloquently about globalization, euthanasia, abortion, and a host of other moral concerns.
In The Life You Can Save, Singer makes a clear, decisive case that the citizens of wealthier nations can and should be doing more to combat global poverty in order to lead truly moral lives. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly praises, "[C]ompelling....[Singer's] solution can be found in the middle, and it is reasonable and rewarding for all."
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"This book will challenge you to be a better person." Holden Karnofsky, co-founder, GiveWell
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"[It's] bound to change the way you eat." Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma
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"Singer suggests, plausibly and scarily, that a brand of Manichaeism best represents [Bush's] religious outlook — the idea of a force of evil in the world, with an apocalyptic Second Coming imminent and America as the divinely appointed nation set to destroy the forces of Satan." Washington Post Book World
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"When a leading ethicist like Singer addresses globalization, we all should listen very carefully." Paul R. Ehrlich, author of Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect
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"Singer is one of the most innovative, sensitive and honest philosophers of morality in today's world." Publishers Weekly
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"Singer's book is packed with admirably marshaled and detailed information, social, medical, and economic, and has a splendid appendix of notes and references to further reading. The utility of this utilitarian's book to students of its subject can hardly be exaggerated." New York Review of Books
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"A most important book that will change the way many of us look at animals — and, ultimately, at ourselves." Chicago Tribune
Jill Owens: You've been writing about the issue of global poverty for a long time. It comes up in Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics includes a chapter on it, and you also wrote a rather famous essay, "Famine, Affluence and Morality." Why did you choose to focus an entire book on the subject right now?
Peter Singer: I thought that the time was right for a book. There has been increasing public interest in poverty over the years since I wrote those other pieces. In addition, I believe the capacity of the affluent world to eliminate permanent large-scale extreme poverty has now increased. When I started writing about it, you really couldn't talk about eliminating large-scale mass poverty, but I think we now have the capacity to do that if we really make the effort.
Jill: You write in Practical Ethics that "absolute poverty is the principle form of misery today." Can you define absolute poverty?
Singer: By absolute poverty, I mean not having the resources to securely meet your basic needs. By basic needs, I'm talking about not getting enough food to eat; not being able to feed your children an adequate diet; not having safe drinking water or sanitation; not having even the most minimal health care, so that if your child gets diarrhea, you can't even get the extremely simple and inexpensive treatment for that; not being able to educate your children even through primary school levels. Basically, a condition of life that is so beset by the need to meet these needs that it has no dignity; it lacks kind of decency that we would hope a human life should have.
Jill: You hear about people living on less than a $1.00 or $1.25 a day. But that figure has actually been adjusted for what that amount would buy in the US. I never knew that before, and I think most people don't.
Singer: That's true. People often think, "Well, things are cheap there. You could probably get by for a dollar a day." But really, when you make the adjustment for purchasing power, it's incredibly hard to get by on that.
Jill: Could you sum up your basic argument in this book?
Singer: The basic argument is that we all think we should save a child's life, even at some modest cost to us. That's the point of the example of saving the drowning child in the pond, even though you might wreck an expensive outfit that you're wearing. I ask if that is true in the case of a child in front of us, shouldn't we also think that it's true in the case of the 27,000 children who are dying every day from poverty-related causes?
I explore some reasons why one might want to say that the two situations are not parallel — and I do agree that the parallel is not perfect, and certainly there are some significant psychological differences between the two situations. However, in terms of the ethics of the two situations, I still think that the ways in which they are parallel are more important than the ways in which they're dissimilar. The fact that many people do nothing to help the global poor is not all that different from walking past a child drowning in a pond because you don't want to get your expensive outfit ruined.
Jill: Or because you don't want to be late to work. It's a very powerful image, in that example.
Singer: Right.
Jill: You make the important distinction in the book between our affective and deliberate systems, which seems similar to the distinction between the critical and intuitive ethical systems you describe in earlier books. How do both of those work in ethical situations?
Singer: A child drowning in the pond appeals to our affective system. I think that we have a set of emotions and intuitive responses that are built into us which say, "No, you can't leave a child in front of you to drown." Very often, that's what we act from.
What I'm doing in the book is an effort of critical or more analytic reasoning. I think that can sometimes lead us to see that our affective system or our intuitive responses are not really what we should be guided by. I would regard that as a kind of critical challenge to the innate responses that we have to these situations. It's a test, in a way, of whether we can be moved by moral argument, even if it doesn't completely jibe with the affective system that is so influential in our behavior.
You mentioned the parallel with the different levels of critical and intuitive moral thinking, and you're quite right. There is a similarity. The only thing I would say is that when I'm talking about the affective system in The Life You Can Save, it is really just a matter of the emotions or intuitions we feel. The intuitive level of moral thinking, on the other hand, is one that is already to some extent guided by the critical thought, "What would be the best intuitions to have?"
The difference is that, whereas the intuitive level of moral thinking might be something that we try to modify a little bit in order to produce better consequences, the affective system that I discuss in The Life You Can Save is really just what we have. It's what we've evolved with because of our history as social mammals. It might not be the one, therefore, that even at the intuitive level produces the best results.
Jill: You point out that evolution has no moral direction. Has our own psychology evolved to work against the best solution to this global poverty?
Singer: Yes, I think that's true. We've evolved in small face-to-face societies, and that's obviously worked for us in the circumstances of the past. But now we're in a global community, which is not really face-to-face despite modern technology increasing the opportunities for it to be so. And it's vast in numbers.
The whole question is, "Can we change so that we can live in a way that promotes the interest of all those in our global community?"
Jill: The book is an attempt to make a higher moral standard the new normal, which in a way is a huge goal, but is probably the best way to permanently change behavior. How do you think we can do that?
Singer: I don't have all the answers to that question. I wish I did. What I'm trying to do in the book is to suggest some small steps we can take that may lead in that direction. I'm trying to promote a realistic public standard of giving which is not imposing any real sacrifice on anyone. In fact, in a broad sense it may be to the benefit of those who give as well as those who receive.
We should be talking publicly about this. I think it's very important that people know what we're doing. That's why I've developed a website to go along with the book, thelifeyoucansave.com, where people can go online and publicly pledge to meet those standards, so that others can see that they're not going to be the only ones giving, and that it's a broad movement. It's possible that if we get enough people doing this, it will set up a kind of virtuous reinforcing spiral. More people will see that others are doing it and they'll be encouraged to do it. The numbers will grow, and that will make it easier still for others to give, and eventually for it to become a social norm that giving is something we take for granted.
Jill: The example of the public radio fundraising experiment was interesting. People gave more money if they were told a high dollar amount that the person calling before them gave. It shows how much little things can change the way we act.
Singer: Yes. I think that kind of research is important. It shows something about human psychology that we might not have known. Obviously, you can't ask too much of people, but you can ask a little more than people are currently doing.
Jill: Thinking about money has proven to make us less helpful to others and more distant. Why is that the case?
Singer: In a way, that's the most puzzling of all the psychological findings that I report on in the book. It really surprised me that just getting people to think about money in quite trivial ways, like looking at a screensaver with bills on it, actually means that if they're asked to move their chair closer to someone, they leave a bigger distance. It's amazing that money has this distancing effect.
I suppose it has something to do with reinforcing our basically narrow selfish thoughts, our material thoughts. We want it for ourselves and not for others, in some way, and so we don't relate as directly to other people. This is something we need to watch out for, clearly.
Unfortunately, there's no substitute for money when it comes to helping people in distant countries. It's clearly not effective for everybody to go over there and bring people who are poor some food or drugs or things of that sort. Money is the only medium we have, and we have to be careful that it doesn't lead to too much distance between us and those we're helping.
Jill: You remind us that in religious and philosophical traditions, helping the poor is not an extra but essential to those traditions. Why do you think we've moved away from emphasizing that part of religion?
Singer: I suppose it's really just human selfishness reasserting itself against the reforming impetus of the religion, which was there at the start but which tends to get corrupted as the whole thing becomes more institutionalized. People take positions of power within it and then want to use those positions of power for their own interests.
I would say we need new waves of reformers coming through all the time to remind people of the original message of the religion or of the broad ethical outlook, and make sure people are not slipping back into selfishness. But yes, you certainly see it in religious leaders who claim to be representing the church that follows the teachings of Jesus, which have enormous emphasis on poverty and on the rich giving away all they have, and yet these religious leaders end up rich or living a luxurious lifestyle. It's completely incongruous, but it keeps on happening.
Jill: You do give credit to Jim Wallis and Rick Warren in the book for moving Christianity back in the direction of some of those original concerns.
Singer: Yes, it's really encouraging that they are putting such an emphasis on poverty.
Jill: People think we are a giving country. That's true, but very little of it goes to foreign aid. And what does go out is often shaped by political goals rather than true need.
Singer: That's right. That's a real problem. Firstly, we need to get Americans in particular to be aware of how little their country gives, and how it ranks compared to other more giving nations, like the Scandinavian nations or the Netherlands, which have good records in this area.
Secondly, people need to understand that our aid is not directed to the poorest of the poor. A lot of it is directed for America's geopolitical ends, and perhaps its efficacy is reduced by the fact that it's used to buy American products when there are other less expensive products available. People need to know more about those problems, and something needs to be done about it.
Jill: The people in poverty that you're talking about here are in great need through no fault of their own. But for the accident of where we were born, any of us could have been in that same situation. I think that can be difficult for some people in wealthier nations to understand.
Singer: Yes. I think a lot of people feel that if only the poor worked harder, or were more ambitious, then they could pull themselves out of poverty. That may be true for a small percentage of those who are really poor, but for most of them, it's not. They just don't have the possibilities. They're born in a situation where they really are unable to rise out of that poverty trap without some assistance.
Their land is poor and they don't have the money to buy fertilizers; they don't have good varieties of grains that yield a lot; they don't have the resources to dig a well and so the women have to walk two hours to fetch water every day. There's no escape from that without assistance. People can leave and try to go to the big cities, but as we know, there are millions of people hanging around the cities trying to scrounge some money somewhere, and it's not always possible to do.
Jill: What is the biggest reason people don't give?
Singer: I think probably the biggest reason is a feeling of powerlessness, what I call futility thinking. The idea that "I can't make a difference. It's such an overwhelming problem that there's nothing I can do about it." Of course, what they're focusing on is that even if they give a lot, there will still be a huge number of people in extreme poverty. But what they're failing to focus on is that their donation can help make a life-changing difference to one other person, or to a family, or even maybe to a village, depending on their resources. Even if there are many others who can't be helped by their donation, it's a huge thing to make such a difference even to one person.
Jill: You discuss experiments that show that people will give more when one child is identified than when abstract, general information is given. That's not particularly surprising. But there were other very surprising results, like the dramatic difference between giving to a family that has already been picked versus a family which had yet to be determined, even with no more information than that.
Singer: Yes, that was another completely crazy finding, wasn't it? I find that hard to explain, since they don't know anything about the family, other than that the family's been chosen. I guess it just shows that there is someone there, some individual, not even an identifiable individual but an already selected individual who will be affected by your donation. If you stop and think for thirty seconds, it shouldn't really make any difference.
Jill: You also discuss the "norm" of self-interest, particularly in America. People don't want to admit they'd done something philanthropic even when they have. Why does that norm exist?
Singer: It has been particularly strong in the United States. It exists in other countries, but maybe not as strongly. It's the ideology that pursuing self-interest is going to be good for the economy and good for everyone, the "invisible hand" ideology of Adam Smith, which certainly has been dominant in the United States for a long time. It was put forward by people like the Rockefellers and social Darwinists and so forth around the turn of the century. Maybe it's taken a little bit of a knock in the last year or so, with the idea that the markets haven't worked so well. But I think it's part of that idea, that somehow we should all be tough out there and fighting for our own interests in the market and that will be good for everyone. To be an altruist, to give anything away, is to be a sort of softie.
Jill: Do you think the fact that our economy is in such bad shape right now will make people more reluctant to give, or possibly more receptive to your message?
Singer: It cuts both ways. Certainly, people are going to say, "Oh, I don't have anything spare to give right now." At the same time, maybe it will lead them to reassess their values, to think again, "What's really important for me? What really matters in my life?" And if they do think about that, most Americans might say, "I still have enough, I still have a comfortable life, but there are a billion people out there with so little that maybe I still have the capacity to do something for them."
Jill: You write, "If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so." The important clause in your argument is the phrase "without sacrificing anything nearly as important." What that comes to mean, when you look at it, is up for debate. There's a lot of leeway there.
Singer: That's right; there certainly is. We can still have the good life. We can have what we want and what's important for our happiness, and still save the lives of others.
Jill: One of the most striking things in the book for me was your equation that instead of a museum spending $45 million for a painting, that money could have been used to cure blindness in 900,000 people so that they might see anything at all. That was an incredibly powerful illustration of your point.
Singer: Good. I'm glad that worked for you. I've had a bit of controversy in the discussions about the book in Australia. It's been published here already at the beginning of the month, so I've been doing a bit of media, and that is an issue that gets picked up. People say, "How do you compare the priority or value of art with other sorts of things? A lot of people who are quite philanthropic give to art."
I think art is great, but I think that we have to recognize that it is something of a luxury. At least, spending this kind of money on art is a huge luxury. Perhaps we're in this situation in the world right now where we should put a hold on that and come back to it when we've dealt with such urgent problems as 27,000 children dying every day from poverty-related causes.
Jill: Givewell seems like such a good idea that in some ways it surprised me that there had not previously been more oversight into how much good aid agencies are actually doing.
Singer: There had been a little bit of oversight in what percentage goes for administrative costs. That's kind of the easy bit, but in a way it's not a very meaningful bit. To say this organization spends 7 percent on administration and this organization spends 25 percent doesn't tell you very much about how effective these organizations are, because it might be that by spending 25 percent, you actually get your donations to where they're really needed, whereas if you only spend 7 percent, you don't. Now, of course, there are extremes; if you're spending 60 percent on administration, there's something wrong there. But most of the big organizations are more in the range of 7-25 percent.
What nobody had really been doing was to say, "Let's look at when it does go where it's supposed to go and see how much good it does, and really try to find some way of seeing how much it costs to save a life." That's what the guys at Givewell have done. I think that's really important, and I hope that that effort will grow and be widely recognized. I hope that the book will help to do that.
Jill: They calculated that it costs between $200-$2,000 to save a life. In America, for court cases, the median cost is valued at $2.2 million to $7.22 million. Those are staggering differences.
Singer: It is absolutely staggering. That's the nature of the world we're living in.
Jill: You are a utilitarian philosopher. Could you explain what that means, in general and in the context of your new book?
Singer: The basic premise is that the right thing to do is what would have the best consequences for all of those affected by our actions. What I tend to look for in the things that I write and the areas that I research is, Where can we make a really big difference, a major consequence, at relatively little cost? World poverty is one of those topics. As we were saying, it's where for very little sacrifice (and perhaps no sacrifice at all if you include the sort of fulfillment or reward that people get from giving), we can make a big difference to people who are in extreme poverty.
It's a classic example of applying a utilitarian ethic, and saying, "This is what will produce the best consequences."
Jill: I would think that Animal Liberation and your arguments for becoming vegan or vegetarian fall into that same category.
Singer: They do, exactly. I'm looking for cases where I think there are good things we can do relatively easily. Not supporting factory farming, which is so terrible for animals as well as being bad for the environment, is one of the easy things that we can do that makes a huge difference.
Jill: Who are some philosophers that you admire or have influenced you?
Singer: If you're talking about historical philosophers, I suppose the tradition that I'm in goes back to people like David Hume and Jeremy Bentham, as well as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick. The tradition goes right up to the professor who taught me at Oxford when I was a graduate student there, R. M. Hare.
Jill: Any contemporary philosophers?
Singer: I admire the work that Thomas Pogge does. He works in areas of world poverty, too. We don't have exactly the same views, but we share ideas of areas where you can make a difference. I admire Jeff McMahan, my colleague up the road at Rutgers, who has written The Ethics of Killing, a fine book on ethical issues about killing. He's currently writing about killing in war, which I think will also be an important and interesting book.
Jill: What sort of hopeful ethical signals have you seen coming from the Obama administration thus far?
Singer: A lot, I think. Withdrawing from Iraq, closing Guantanamo, prohibiting torture — those are all important ethical statements. In the speech he gave the other night, describing spending that we could cut back, he referred to wasteful agribusiness subsidies, which I totally agree with. They're really bad for poor people who are trying to sell their products on the global market, and who can't compete with subsidized American agriculture products. They're also really bad for fostering factory farming and making it cheaper. That was very hopeful.
He did promise during the campaign that he would raise American aid — I think he said he would double it — so I hope that that promise is still good and it's something he'll deliver on.
Jill: What are some ethical or philosophical questions that you continue to work on, that you don't feel you've answered to your satisfaction yet?
Singer: The question that I'm certainly not satisfied with my answers to and that I would really like to continue to work on is the fundamental one: How do we defend a position in ethics? We choose the sort of positions we're talking about, a utilitarian position rather than a rights-based view, or a Rawlsian view of justice, or whatever else it might be. How far down can the moral argument go? To what extent is there scope for argument and to what extent do you just take a stance at some really fundamental point? Those are issues that I'm not really satisfied with my answers to.
Jill: What good books have you read lately?
Singer: J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, which is a very interesting and rather different sort of novel, and has some opinions about a variety of things, including animals, that I'm very much in agreement with.
I spoke with Peter Singer by phone from his home in Australia on February 25, 2009.
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