#44 — Being Good and Doing Good
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Summary
Will McCaskill is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and co-founder of three non-profits based on effective altruist principles, Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Center for Effective Altruism. He is also the author of a book, "Doing Good Better: A Radical New Way to Make a Difference," and the founder of the Play Pump, a company that provides clean drinking water to poor children in Africa. In this episode, Will talks about his journey to becoming a philosopher, his work with Tim Ferriss, and his work in philanthropy and philanthropy in general, and how he thinks about what it means to do good in the world. He also talks about why he believes that the play pump is a great idea, and why it should be used to provide clean water across the world, not just in developing countries like Africa, but in the rest of the world as well. Sam Harris is the host of the podcast Making Sense, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, NPR, and The Huffington Post. He's also the co-host of the popular podcast, The Difficult Truth podcast, where he talks about all things New York City and New York Magazine. This podcast is produced in partnership with The New Republic. Please consider becoming a supporter of The Making Sense Podcast by becoming a patron of Making Sense by becoming one of our patron(s) and/or subscribing to the Making Sense. We don't run ads on the podcast. . Thanks to our sponsor, Sam Harris Media! We don t run ads, and therefore, we re made possible entirely through the support of our sponsorships, which helps us make a better podcast. We re all better listening to the podcast, better listening and listening to more of the things we're doing better listening, more of us listening to us, and we're making more of you, making better listening listening to you, better things, better products, and more of our podcasting ourselves, better of you listening to our podcast, making sense of things we all are better listening of us, we all together, more like that, making a better of ourselves, more listening, and better listening more of ourselves. We hope you enjoy what we re doing more of that, you like it, you're making sense, and you re making sense and we appreciate it more of it, we love you, we really do, we'll hear you.
Transcript
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Will is an associate professor in philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford.
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He was educated at Cambridge, Princeton, and Oxford.
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He may in fact be the youngest tenured professor of philosophy in the world, and he's one of
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the primary voices in a movement in philanthropy known as Effective Altruism, a movement which
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And he's the co-founder of three non-profits based on effective altruist principles, Giving
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What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Center for Effective Altruism.
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He's also the author of a book, which I just started reading, which is really good, and
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the title is Doing Good Better, Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference.
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And there is no question that Will is making a difference.
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If you don't have two hours to spend on our whole conversation, which I absolutely loved,
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please listen to the last few minutes of this podcast so that you at least know the tangible
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I first heard about you when you did your appearance on Tim Ferriss's podcast, and that
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And I'm now in the habit, sorry, Tim, of poaching your podcast guests.
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I did it with Jocko Willink, the Navy SEAL, and Eric Weinstein, the mathematician, VC.
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And so I just, the one thing I do is I try not to recapitulate the interview that was
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So we will not cover much of the ground you did there.
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So I recommend that interview because that was fascinating.
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And you have a fascinating bio, much of which we will ignore because you described it with
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But, you know, briefly, just tell me what it is you're doing in the world and how you come
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to be thinking about the things you think about.
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I'm associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford with a focus on ethics
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and political philosophy, a little bit of overlap with economics.
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And I'm also the CEO of the Center for Effective Altruism, which is a nonprofit designed to develop
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and promote the idea of effective altruism, which is the use of your time and money to do
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And using evidence and careful reasoning and high quality thought in order to ensure that
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when you try to do good, you actually do as much good as possible, whether that's through
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your charity or through your career or through what you buy and helps you choose what the
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And put that way, it seems like a purely commonsensical approach to doing good in the world.
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I think as we get into this conversation, for people who are not familiar with your work or the effective altruism movement,
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they'll be surprised to learn just how edgy certain of your positions are, which is why this will be a fascinating conversation.
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So I should say, up front though, you have a book entitled Doing Good Better, which I have only started,
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I regret to say, but it's a very well-written and very interesting book, which I recommend people read.
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It covers many things we, again, probably won't cover in this conversation.
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You start your book with this story, and it really encapsulates much of what is wrong and much of what is potentially right with philanthropy.
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Yeah, so the play pump was developed in the late 1990s, and it was an idea that really caught the attention of people around the world,
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but especially in philanthropic development communities.
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And so the play pump was built in South Africa, and the idea behind it was that it was a way of providing clean water
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to poor villages that didn't currently have clean water across sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa.
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It was a children's merry-go-round, so children would push this thing, look just like a merry-go-round,
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but the force from the children pushing it would pump clean water up to a reservoir that would provide the clean water for the community.
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The children of the village would get their first playground amenity,
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and the people of the village would get clean water.
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And, you know, it really took off for that reason.
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The first lady, Laura Bush, at the time, was part of the Clinton Global Initiative,
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gave it $17 million in funding to roll this out across sub-Saharan Africa.
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It won the World Bank Development Marketplace Award for being such an innovative invention.
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Really, it was like, it was the thing within development for a while.
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And when I first heard about it, I thought, wow, yeah, what an amazing idea.
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This is great that you can do two things at once, making children happy, but then also providing water.
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It just seems such a good example of, and everyone, of course, was like very well-intentioned behind it.
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Yeah, well, I should say, reading that section of your book, which again is the first few pages,
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the effect on the reader is really perfect because you find yourself on the wrong side of this particular phenomenon
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because you just think, oh my God, that is the greatest idea ever, right?
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This is a merry-go-round for kids that has the effect of doing all of this annoying labor
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that was otherwise done by women pumping these hand pumps.
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Yeah, as you might expect, there's a twist in the story, which is just that simply in reality,
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the play pump was a terrible idea from the start.
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So unlike a normal merry-go-round, which spins freely once you push it,
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in order to pump the clean water, you need constant torque.
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So actually pushing this thing would be very tiring for the kids.
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Sometimes the children would vomit from the spinning.
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But the main problem was that they would just simply get very tired.
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They wouldn't want to play on this thing all day.
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And so it was normally left up to the elderly women of the village
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to push this brightly colored play pump around and around for all hours of the day.
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A task they found very undignified and demeaning.
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And then secondly, it just wasn't even very good as a pump.
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And often it was replacing very boring, but very functional Zimbabwe hand pumps,
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which when you actually ask the communities, they preferred.
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It would pump more water with less effort, but actually a third of the price.
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There had initially been an idea that maintenance would be paid for with billboards on these
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reservoirs, but none of advertising companies actually wanted to pay for it.
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And so these things were often left in disarray and no maintenance would happen to them either.
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And so this all came to light in a couple of investigations.
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And thankfully, and in what's actually a very admirable and rare case,
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the people who are funding this, especially the Case Foundation,
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acknowledged that this had been a big mistake and then said,
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What about the man who had invented or was pushing the idea of the pump?
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So the people who are pushing it, Play Pumps International and the other field behind it,
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This is perhaps a phenomenon you're very familiar with.
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And so actually the organization does still continue in a vastly diminished capacity today.
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They're still producing Play Pumps sponsored by companies like Colgate, Palmolive and Ford Motors.
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But what is unusual in the world of doing good is that actually these,
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this actually was investigated, criticism came to light and people were willing to back out.
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But the lesson from this is just that what seem like, you know, good intentions aren't good enough.
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What seems like a really good idea, it just seems like, yeah, this is amazing.
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Actually can just not be very effective at all.
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What we need to do if we want to really make a big difference is do the boring work of actually
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investigating how much does this thing cost, how many people's
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lives are going to be affected and buy how much, what's the evidence behind this.
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And there are many other things that we could be spending our money on that
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are much less sexy than the Play Pump, but do vast amounts of good.
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And that's why it's absolutely crucial if we really do want to use our time and money to make
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a difference, that we think about what are the different ways we could be spending
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What's the evidence behind the different programs we could be doing?
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And what's the one that's going to do the very most good?
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It seems to me there are at least three elements to what you're doing that are very powerful.
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And the first is the common sense component, which really is not so common as we know, which
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is just to actually study the results of one's actions and in the spirit of science, see what
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But the other element is you are committed, I know you're personally committed, and to
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some degree, I guess you can just tell me how much the EA community is also committed
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explicitly to essentially giving until it hurts.
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I mean, giving what many people would view as a heroic amount of one's wealth to the poorest
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people in the world or to the gravest problems in the world.
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And we'll talk about Peter Singer in a moment, because you've certainly been inspired by him
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And the third component is to no longer be taken in by certain moral illusions, where
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the thing that is sexiest or most disturbing isn't often the gravest need or doesn't represent
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And to cut through that in a very unsentimental way.
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And this is where people's moral intuitions are going to be pushed around.
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So let's start with the second piece, because I think the first is uncontroversial.
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But how far down the path with Peter Singer do you go in terms of, because I've heard you
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say, I've watched a few of your talks at this point, I've heard you say things that more
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or less align you perfectly with Singer's level of commitment, which where he more or less
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argues, I don't think he has ever recanted this, that you should give every free cent
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It's morally indefensible to have anything like what we would consider a luxury when you're
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looking at the zero-sum trade-off between spending a dollar on ice cream or whatever it
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So just tell me how much you've been inspired by Singer and where you may differ with his
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So I think there's just two framings which are both accurate.
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So the first is the obligation frame, just how much are we required to give.
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And Peter Singer argues that we have an obligation to give basically everything we can.
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And argues for this by saying, well, imagine if you're just walking past a child down in
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a shallow pond and rescued that child, or failed to rescue that child.
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What's the difference between that and spending a few thousand dollars on luxury items when that
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money could have been spent to save a life in a poor country?
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If you'd try to justify not saving the child in the shallow pond because you were going
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to ruin your nice suit that cost you a thousand pounds, that would just be, you know, no moral
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justification at all, nor if it wouldn't be a justification if it was 10,000 pounds.
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And so for that reason, he argues, yeah, we have this obligation.
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There's another framing as well, which we call just excited altruism, which is, I use the
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story of, imagine if you're walking past a burning building and you run in, you see there's
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a child there, you kick the door down and, you know, you save that child.
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On this framing, the thought is just, wouldn't that be amazing?
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Wouldn't you feel like that was a really special moment in your life?
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And imagine if you did that several times in a year, you know, you save one child from
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a burning building, another time you take a bullet for someone, a third time, you know,
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You'd think your life was really pretty special and, you know, you'd feel pretty good about
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And the truth of the matter is actually, yeah, we can do that every single year.
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We can do much more than that hero who runs into the burning building and saves that child's
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life just by deciding to use our money in a different way.
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And so there's these two framings, obligation and opportunity.
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Many people in the effective altruism community don't actually agree with the obligation framing.
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They think they're doing what they do because it's part of their values, but there's no
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I think that certainly if you can help other people to a very significant extent, such as
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by saving a life, while not sacrificing anything of moral significance, then you're required
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I mean, in my own case, I just think the level at which I'm at least approximately just maxing
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out on how much good I can do is just nowhere close to the level at which I think, wow, this
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And so perhaps a big sacrifice in financial terms.
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So, you know, as an academic, I'll be on a good middle class income and I'm planning to
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give away most of my income over the course of my life.
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So in financial terms, it looks like a big sacrifice, but in terms of my personal well-being,
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And if you look in my own personal happiness, if you look at the literature on well-being,
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this is also the case beyond even quite a low level of about $35,000 per year.
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The relationship between money and happiness is very small indeed.
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And on some ways of measuring it, it's non-existent, in fact.
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And then on the other hand, being part of this community of people who are really trying
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to make the world better is just very rewarding, actually, just has these positive effects in
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So the kind of answer is just that, yeah, in theory, I agree, just even if it was the
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case that, you know, I would think that, yeah, this is a moral requirement and so on.
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But then in practice, it's actually just not really much of a sacrifice for me, I don't
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Let's linger there, because I have heard you say in response to challenges of the sort
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that Singer often receives, well, if you can live comfortably and do good, well, then
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And now you have just claimed that you're living comfortably.
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But in fact, by most people's view, you, I think, so spell out how much do you, what is
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actually your commitment to giving money away at this point?
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Yeah, so to giving money, so in 2009, I made a commitment to give everything above
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£20,000 per year, inflation and purchasing power parity adjusted to Oxford's 2009.
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So now that's about £24,000, a current exchange rate, that's something like $33,000.
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And then with my time as well, I just try and spend as much time as I can.
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And do you actually think that would or will scale with vastly increased economic opportunity
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if you get dragged into a startup next week, where now you're making millions of dollars
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at some point, you aspire to keep it where you've set it now?
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I mean, I think, you know, the amount of money I've been earning over the last year is much
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greater than when I was a postdoc or PhD student.
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I mean, the one worry, the biggest worry I have with my commitment is just value of my
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So there's certain ways you can spend money in order to save time eating out rather than
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making food for yourself, being more willing to get a taxi places rather than the bus.
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That means I think I'd be making a mistake if my player...
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One is just because I'm using my time to, you know, build up Center for the Effect of Altivism
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I want to ensure that I have as much time as possible to do that.
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But then at the same time, I don't want to say, oh, well, people should be giving or it's
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really good for people to be giving their money effectively.
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But I don't do that because my time is so valuable that just seem kind of hypocritical.
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So I also just want to demonstrate like, yeah, you can do this and just, it's actually just
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It's not nearly as much of a sacrifice as it might seem.
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Let's linger there for a moment because I think that if you are not following Singer all
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the way so that the implications of his argument is really that there should be some kind of
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equilibrium state where you are more or less indistinguishable from the people you're
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helping at a certain point because you've helped them so much.
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So you, if, if you are living a comfortable life really at all, I mean, but a comfortable
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life by Western standards, you are still from Singer's view culpably standing next to the
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And obviously, I mean, you, and needless to say, there's no judgment in this because what
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the scheme you have just sketched out is already qualifies you for sainthood in most people's
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So I think, I think even on, even if you endorse kind of pure utilitarianism, you just should
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I think that just for practical reasons, that doesn't mean that you should, um, move all of
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your, um, you know, keep donating until you're living on $2 per day.
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Um, not if you're in a rich country, because the opportunities you have to spend, let's just
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But if you were to say, okay, I'm going to live a normal, um, you know, keep going in
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my own job and just donate as much as I can until I'm earning like very little.
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Firstly, I think, you know, that's going to damage your ability to earn more later.
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It means that, um, there's risks of yourself burning out, um, which is, I think, very significant
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if you're going to, you know, wear a hair shirt for three years and then completely give up
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That's much worse than just donating a more moderate amount, but for the rest of your life.
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And then also in terms of, yeah, your productivity and your work as well, it's just actually really
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important to ensure that you've got the right balance between how much you're donating so
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And then finally, in terms of the influence you have on other people, I think if you're
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able to, you know, if you're able to act as a role model, something that people actually
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really aspire towards, think, yeah, this is this amazing way to live a life and look at
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these people are able to donate a very significant amount and still have a really great life.
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That's much more powerful because it actually might mean that many other people go and do
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And if just one other person does the same thing as you do, you've doubled your life's
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Um, whereas if you're walking around utterly miserable, just so you can donate that extra,
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that last cent to fight global poverty, you know, you might seem a little bit like an
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Um, and I think that's a very important consideration.
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So I actually think that when it comes to the practical implication of singer's ideas,
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it doesn't lead you to donate everything above, you know, $2 per day.
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Um, instead you, you kind of max the optimal amount is actually quite, quite a higher level,
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which is, um, maximizing the amount of good you'll do over the course of your lifetime,
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bearing in mind the ability to say, get promotions or change career, earn more, the value of your
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time, ensuring you're productive and ensuring you're a good role model to other people as well.
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Um, and so I actually think that, yeah, the case at which I try and maximize my own impact
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is, you know, way far away from the line at which, uh, I'd think this is really, really
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And I think that's true, at least for many people.
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Yeah, this is, this is really a fascinating area and it's, it's going to get more fascinating
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because it's, it just becomes strange the closer you look at it.
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Now, I, I'm totally convinced by your opportunity framing.
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And while I had heard it put that way before, your emphasis on that is very attractive and
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And, and so, I mean, just to remind our listeners so that by dint of having the resources you
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have, and if you're listening to this podcast in any developed country, you almost by definition
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have vast resources relative to the poorest people on earth.
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And this puts you in a position to quite literally save the child from the burning building.
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Any moment you decide to write a check for, I mean, what, what is it that actually in your
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view is sufficient to save a life using the best charity?
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Yeah, so the best guess from GiveWell donating to Against Malaria Foundation is $3,400.
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Well, statistically speaking, on average, save a life.
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And they're keen to emphasize that, you know, that's just an estimate.
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A lot of kind of assumptions go into that and so on, but they're very careful, very skeptical.
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It's the best, you know, estimate that I know of.
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And I guess one of the challenges from a philanthropic point of view and just a, the point of view
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of one's own maximizing one's own psychological well-being is to make that opportunity as salient
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Because obviously writing a check doesn't feel like rushing across the street and grabbing
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the child out of the burning building and then being rewarded by all the thanks you'll
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But if you could fully internalize the ethical significance of the act, something like that
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And, and so therefore taking those opportunities more and more and making them more emotionally
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real seems like a very important project for all of us who have so much.
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The other side, the, the, the, the, the, the Singerian obligation side, I think is, is fraught
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And so I just want to explore those a little bit.
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The problem we're dealing with here is that we are beset by many different forms of moral
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illusion where we effortlessly care about things that are in the scheme of things, not all
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that important and can't be goaded to care about things that are objectively and subjectively
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when you actually connect with the lives of the people suffering these conditions, the
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And the classic example is, you know, a girl falls down a well, it's one girl, it's one
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And what you see is wall to wall coverage on every channel for 24 hours, tracing the, the
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rescue successful or otherwise of this little girl.
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And yet a genocide could be raging in Sudan and not only do we, can't we be moved to
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care, we so reliably can't be moved to care that the news organizations just can't bear
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I mean, they, they give us a little bit of it just because it's their obligation, but
00:25:04.280
it's, it's five minutes and they know that that's, that's a losing proposition for them
00:25:12.280
And that seems like a bug, not a feature of our ethical hardware.
00:25:16.360
For me, it exposes an interesting paradox here because, because the, the most disturbing
00:25:25.240
things are not reliably the most harmful in the world and the most harmful things are
00:25:35.260
And you can talk about this from the positive or negative sides.
00:25:37.840
We can talk about the goods we don't do, and we can talk about the harms people cause.
00:25:41.940
And so it's an example from my first book, the end of faith to find out that your grandfather
00:25:46.960
flew a few bombing missions over Dresden in the war is one thing to find out that he killed
00:25:54.540
a woman and her children with a shovel is another.
00:25:57.580
Now he undoubtedly would have killed more women and children flying that bombing mission.
00:26:02.780
But given the difference between killing from 30,000 feet by dropping bombs and killing up
00:26:12.540
close and personal, and this is where the paradox comes in, we recognize that it would take a
00:26:17.340
different kind of person with a very different set of internal motives, intentions, and global
00:26:24.060
properties of his mind and emotional life to do the latter versus the former.
00:26:29.900
So a completely ordinary person like ourselves could be, by dint of circumstance, detached
00:26:36.520
enough from the consequences of his actions so as to drop the bombs from the plane.
00:26:42.080
It takes a proper psychopath or somebody who was pushed into psychopathy by his experience
00:26:53.720
And to flip this back to philanthropy, it is a very different person who throws out the appeal
00:27:01.840
from UNICEF, casually ignoring the fact that he has foregone yet another opportunity to save a life.
00:27:09.280
That person is very different from the person who would pass a child drowning in a shallow pond
00:27:15.940
And so the utilitarian equation between life and life, which Singer's obligation story rests on,
00:27:27.760
doesn't acknowledge the fact that it really would require a different person to ignore suffering that
00:27:36.420
was that salient or to perpetrate, in the case of creating harms, suffering that's that salient.
00:27:42.720
And yet we're being asked to view them as equivalent for the purpose of parsing the ethics.
00:27:50.540
So I think there's an important distinction between assessing acts and assessing a person,
00:27:58.480
And I think normally when we go about doing model reasoning,
00:28:02.080
most of the time we're talking about people's characters.
00:28:07.360
Can I trust them to do good things in the future?
00:28:09.320
Is it the sort of person I want to associate with?
00:28:11.980
Whereas model philosophers are often talking about acts.
00:28:16.160
And so I think Singer as well would agree that it's in some sense a much worse person
00:28:21.860
who kills someone than who, like, intentionally kills someone than who just walks past a drowning child.
00:28:29.560
Because in part, the idea that it's much worse to kill people intentionally is a far greater
00:28:35.360
model wrong in our society than merely failing to save someone.
00:28:41.200
Although, let me just, the difference between an act of commission and omission,
00:28:45.280
I think it brings in a different variable here.
00:28:47.180
I mean, I agree that that is a difference that we find morally salient.
00:28:51.200
But what I'm talking about here is in both cases, you are declining to help someone on the side of not doing good.
00:28:58.580
And in both cases, in war, you are knowingly killing people.
00:29:06.000
And so I agree that it's kind of, I would also just be very troubled by someone who wasn't moved by
00:29:12.200
the more salient causes of suffering in human in some way.
00:29:16.500
But when we think about moral progress, I think it's absolutely crucial to pay particular attention
00:29:21.840
to those causes of suffering that are very kind of mechanized or have the salience stripped away from them.
00:29:27.360
I mean, if you look at the orders that were given to SS guards in terms of descriptions of
00:29:33.060
how to treat Jews in the Holocaust, every step has been taken to remove their humanity,
00:29:42.840
And it's through that almost mechanization of suffering that I think humanity has committed
00:29:50.900
And I think that that's also going to be true today.
00:29:53.180
So when you look at practice of factory farming, or if you look at the way we incarcerate people.
00:29:58.220
So, you know, if we saw a country, as happens, that was regularly flogging or inflicting
00:30:06.280
corporal punishment on its criminals, I think that's absolutely barbaric as a practice.
00:30:11.860
But yet putting someone in a prison cell for several years is a worse harm to them.
00:30:16.920
I think it's like considerably worse the punishment we're inflicting on them.
00:30:20.080
But it doesn't give us that same like emotional resonance.
00:30:23.040
And I think insofar as there's this track record throughout human history of people doing
00:30:28.720
absolutely abominable acts, not realizing that it was morally problematic at all, even taking
00:30:34.540
its common sense, precisely because the ways in which the harm caused had been stripped
00:30:41.540
away, had been made sterile, as with the case of the SSR guards.
00:30:46.260
That should give us pause when there's some case of, you know, extreme harm that has this
00:30:51.120
property of being made sterile, should make us worry, are we in that situation again?
00:30:55.440
Are we just thinking, oh yeah, this is common sense, normal part of practice, but only because
00:31:02.680
And the really powerful thought, I think, from, you know, Singer's arguments or thinking
00:31:06.920
about extreme poverty is, well, maybe we're in that situation now with respect to us in
00:31:13.840
So if we look back to think of Louis XVI or something, or imagine some monarch who's incredibly
00:31:20.600
wealthy with his people starving all around him, I think, God, that's absolutely horrific.
00:31:24.540
It doesn't seem so different from the way that we are at the moment.
00:31:28.660
Everyone in a rich country in the US or UK is in the, basically most of the population
00:31:34.020
are in the richest 10% of the world's population, even once you've taken into account the fact
00:31:41.500
I imagine most of the listeners of this podcast are in the top few percent.
00:31:45.880
If you're earning above $55,000 per year, you're in the richest 1% of the world's population.
00:31:54.480
It's only in the last 200 years that we've seen such a radical divergence between our rich
00:31:59.700
countries and the poorest countries in the world.
00:32:01.560
So it's not something that our moral intuition, I think, is really caught up to.
00:32:04.880
But in the spirit of thinking, well, what are the ways in which we could be acting in a
00:32:10.300
way that seems radically wrong from the perspective of future generations, but that we take for
00:32:16.080
I, you know, I think Singer's definitely put his finger on our possible candidate, which is
00:32:19.980
the fact that the fact that we, you know, have what by historical standards and global
00:32:28.320
And it's currently like common sense or normal just to use that on yourself rather than to
00:32:31.940
think of it as, in some sense, resources that really belong to all of humanity.
00:32:38.860
Well, we're going to keep digging in this particular hole because this is where we are going to
00:32:44.160
So you did a debate with Giles Frazier for Intelligence Squared, which I was amused to
00:32:53.760
He liked you much more than he liked me, I think, probably because you weren't telling
00:33:01.000
But I thought he raised a very interesting point in your debate and your answer was also
00:33:08.940
Again, we're in a burning house with a child who can be saved.
00:33:13.140
But in this house, there is a Picasso on the wall in another room, and you really only have
00:33:18.100
a moment to get out of there with one of these precious objects intact.
00:33:23.920
And Giles suggested that on your view, the Picasso is worth so much that you really should
00:33:31.420
save it because you can sell it and turn it into thousands and thousands of bed nets that
00:33:41.560
I'm not sure that's actually the conversion from bed net to life.
00:33:44.240
But in any case, we're talking about a multi-million dollar painting, let's say a 50 million dollar
00:33:54.880
And so he put that to you, I think, expecting, perhaps not, but expecting that that is a knockdown
00:34:06.760
So perhaps you want to respond again to that thought experiment.
00:34:10.920
So the first question, the first thing to caveat is that Giles is asking this as a philosophical
00:34:17.180
So you strip away extraneous factors like what's the media going to think of this?
00:34:22.140
And what, you know, perhaps also kind of, are you going to be able to live with yourself
00:34:27.000
afterwards as a matter of human psychology and so on?
00:34:29.420
So stripping away those things to just have the pure thought experiment of, well, you can
00:34:33.680
save this child or you can save this Picasso and sell it by bed nets.
00:34:37.560
And the question I asked him was, well, supposing it's just two burning buildings and one there's
00:34:42.600
a single child and in the other burning building there's, let's say it's a hundred children that
00:34:48.120
And the only way you can save those hundred children is by taking this Picasso off the wall
00:34:52.700
and using it to prop open the door of this other building such that a hundred children
00:35:02.080
You ought to save the hundred children, even if you're using this painting as a means to
00:35:06.960
The fact that that's, you're using that as a means doesn't seem relevant.
00:35:10.980
And the reason I actually quite like this thought experiment is it really shows what a morally
00:35:17.780
That actually the situation we're in right now is, is that there's a burning building.
00:35:21.380
It's just that it's behind you rather than in front of you and that there is that those
00:35:24.720
hundred children whose lives you can potentially save that are behind you and the, and not
00:35:31.100
And so I think like what Giles was wanting to say was that, oh, isn't this very uncompassionate?
00:35:37.620
Um, but actually I think this is just far more sophisticated compassion.
00:35:40.940
The understanding that, um, there are people on the other side of the world who are, whose
00:35:48.100
lives are just as important, who are just as in need of someone who's right in front
00:35:52.360
of you, you know, that shows a much more sophisticated, much more genuine form of compassion than just
00:35:57.840
simply being moved by whatever happens, uh, happens to be more salient to you at the time.
00:36:03.060
And so, yeah, it's like a conclusion that show, like it's a weird conclusion, but the weirdness
00:36:09.600
comes from how weird the world is, how morally unintuitive the world we happen to find ourselves
00:36:13.840
is in, which is that like, yeah, save the painting and morally speaking, save the painting and
00:36:22.040
Um, having said that, of course, I wouldn't blame someone.
00:36:23.920
And I think like, again, as we talked about in terms of natural human psychology, it's like
00:36:28.500
perfectly natural to save the person who's right in front of you.
00:36:34.080
But if we're talking about moral philosophy and what the morally correct choice is, then, um,
00:36:38.940
uh, I think you just have to say, have to save the hundred.
00:36:45.520
And the decision to save the Picasso strikes us as so strange.
00:36:50.440
Those are two, I think two sides of the same coin.
00:36:53.600
I mean, you wouldn't blame them because you're acknowledging how counterintuitive it is to
00:37:00.880
And so you're, you're really putting the onus on the world, on the situation, on all the contingent
00:37:05.920
facts of our biology and our, our circumstance that causes us to not be starkly consequentialist
00:37:17.300
So my concern there is that that's not, I mean, one of the reasons why I don't tend to
00:37:23.260
call myself a consequentialist, even though I am one, it's because for me, consequentialism
00:37:28.440
or historically consequentialism has been so often associated with just looking at the
00:37:34.860
numbers of bodies on both sides of the balance.
00:37:37.140
And that's how you understand the consequences of an action and judge its, its moral merits,
00:37:44.220
And, and, and Gile, and you just acknowledged that there was more to it than that, but you
00:37:48.060
weren't inclined to put those consequences also into the picture.
00:37:52.960
So like the question of whether you could live with yourself, right?
00:37:56.240
And that's, I think that's the spectrum of effects certainly includes whether you could
00:38:02.440
And it includes, to come back to the, the moral paradox here, it also includes what kind
00:38:08.360
of person you would have to be in order to grab the Picasso and not the child.
00:38:15.580
Given all of the contingent facts we just acknowledged, given how weird the world is, or given how not
00:38:21.900
optimized the world is to produce a person who could just algorithmically always save a hundred
00:38:30.000
lives over one every time, no matter how the decision is couched, we can even make the situation
00:38:37.560
So, you know, I have, I have two daughters, I don't have a Picasso on the wall, but certainly
00:38:42.160
I have something that could be sold that could buy enough bed nets to save more than two lives
00:38:49.520
So the house burns down tonight, I have a choice to grab my daughters or grab this thing, whatever
00:38:56.340
And I reason thusly, having been convinced by you in this podcast, that saving at least
00:39:03.040
three lives in Africa is better than saving my two daughters.
00:39:06.120
And it's only a contingent property of my own biology and its attendant selfishness and
00:39:13.980
my, you know, the drive toward kin selection and all the rest that has caused me to even
00:39:19.380
be biased toward my daughter's lives over the lives of faceless children in Africa.
00:39:25.160
So I'm convinced and I grab the valuable thing and sell it and donate it to GiveWell and it's
00:39:33.140
And so I think even you, given everything you believe about the ethical imperative of
00:39:40.240
the singer style argument, would be horrified and rightly so that I was capable of doing
00:39:50.980
That horror, or at least that distrust of my psychology, I think summarizes an intuition we
00:39:56.540
have about all of the other consequences that are in play here that we haven't thought much
00:40:02.740
And again, this is a very complicated area because I see that, I don't know if you know
00:40:06.560
about my analogy with the moral landscape where we can have various peaks of well-being.
00:40:11.900
I could imagine an alternate peak on the moral landscape where we are such beings as to really
00:40:18.280
care about all lives generically as much as we care about our own children's lives.
00:40:23.940
So I feel I love my children, but I actually also feel the same love for people in Africa
00:40:30.620
I've never met and it's just as available to me and therefore my disposition not to privilege
00:40:36.560
my children is not a sign of any lack of connection to them.
00:40:41.240
It's just, you know, I'm, you know, the Dalai Lama squared.
00:40:44.700
I've got that, you know, the Bodhisattva of compassion and I've got that connection everywhere.
00:40:48.620
So I grabbed the Picasso and I can feel good about saving more lives in Africa.
00:40:53.200
But my concern is that let's, let's just acknowledge that is another peak on the moral landscape.
00:40:58.720
But between where we are now, where we love our children more than, than those we haven't
00:41:04.520
met and would be, would view it as an act of pathological altruism to let them burn and
00:41:11.500
just grab the Picasso based on our knowledge that we could do more good with it.
00:41:15.060
If we wanted to become the, the Dalai Lama style altruist, there may be this uncanny or
00:41:22.460
unhappy valley between these two peaks that we would have to traverse where there is some,
00:41:27.140
there would be something sociopathic about an ability to run this calculus and be motivated
00:41:36.940
So one thing, yeah, I want to say it's like, I also don't describe myself as a consequentialist.
00:41:43.600
I think, um, the correct thing to do is to, in a moral decision is have a kind of variety
00:41:50.680
My PhD was on this topic, um, have a variety of moral lenses and take the action.
00:41:54.600
That's the best kind of compromise between the competing moral views that seem most plausible,
00:42:00.240
some of which are consequentialist, um, others might be non-consequentialist.
00:42:04.500
Um, and I do think that the case, you know, there's, and I just emphasize consequences because
00:42:10.360
everyone should agree that consequences matter and that they're very neglected, um, in terms
00:42:15.000
of the impact that we can have in the world that we're in.
00:42:17.860
And so I think the case where you've got special obligations, it's a family member or daughter
00:42:22.860
or child or a friend is, is very different from the question when it's just, um, strangers.
00:42:28.840
I think it's at least a reasonable moral view to think, I just do have this special obligation
00:42:33.820
to my friends and certainly very deep part of common sense to think I do have a special
00:42:40.320
And if I can save my child, even if it was, they were right in front of me, I can save
00:42:52.720
Um, although maybe we should just plant a flag there.
00:42:57.480
You know, I don't know what special obligations actually consist in apart from some argument
00:43:03.800
that one, that we just were hardwired that way and it's, it's hard to get over this hard
00:43:08.960
wiring, but two, we are better off for honoring those obligations.
00:43:13.920
And so it does resolve to consequences in some way.
00:43:16.880
If our, if our world would be much better, if we ignored those, those, those hardwired obligations
00:43:23.060
or a sense of obligation, then I think we, there's an argument for ignoring them.
00:43:29.280
But then the second question, which is very important, um, taking us back to the Picasso
00:43:33.620
is this, and this is a way in which, uh, moral philosophy can often be kind of very confusing
00:43:40.240
to people who don't do it is that moral philosophers do engage in these thought experiments where
00:43:45.480
they say, oh, well, put aside all of these other considerations that are normally irrelevant.
00:43:49.540
And then they expect you to still have a reliable intuition, even in this very, very strange,
00:43:55.380
And so I do think in the case of when you are bringing back factors, like, am I actually
00:44:02.140
How am I going to like, think about myself when I like hear like this child screams in
00:44:06.380
my, like late at night, every day, of course, that's incredibly relevant.
00:44:10.780
And then similarly, I think again, the kind of philosopher tends to focus on what acts are
00:44:16.120
Whereas in terms of the life decisions we make, biggest decisions tend to be more like, what's,
00:44:21.740
what person should I be, what are my big projects?
00:44:24.700
Um, and I think cultivating in yourself the sort of, to become the sort of person who's
00:44:29.840
empathetic enough that you won't in this situation simply do the calculations and just go and save
00:44:38.400
You know, I think that might well be right, that you're just going to be a person that'll
00:44:41.860
do more good over the long run, um, if you don't do that.
00:44:45.980
That's why it's kind of, uh, a subtle case where again, you want to distinguish between
00:44:52.160
And the best character to have might, um, is plausibly one that means you do the long
00:44:58.420
So let's just, I don't want to interrupt you if you had much more you wanted to say there,
00:45:02.200
because every one of these points is so interesting, but this has been my, my gripe with certain
00:45:08.060
caricatures of utilitarianism or consequentialism, which is so, so the idea that if you can sacrifice
00:45:14.280
one to save five, well then you should, you know, you go into your doctor's office for
00:45:17.900
a checkup and he realizes he's got five other patients who need your organs.
00:45:21.300
So they just grab you and, and steal your organs and, and you now are dead.
00:45:25.800
But if you just look at the, the larger consequence of living in a world where at any moment, any
00:45:33.420
of us could be sacrificed by society to save five others, none of us want to live in that
00:45:41.100
And so you have to grapple with a much larger spectrum of effects when you're going to talk
00:45:49.200
So you just, you just acknowledged one here, whereas that to be the kind of person you want
00:45:54.800
to be, who is really going to do good in the world and to be tuned up appropriately to,
00:45:59.000
to have the right social connections to other human beings.
00:46:02.160
You may in fact want to be the kind of person who privileges love of one's friends and family
00:46:09.400
over a more generic loving kindness to all human beings.
00:46:14.660
Because if you can't feel those bonds with friends and family, that has moved enough, enough
00:46:20.760
of the moving pieces in your psychology so that you're not the kind of person who is going
00:46:24.580
to care about the suffering of others as much as you might.
00:46:28.340
So another example of this is a number of people I know, often a consequence of this
00:46:35.900
mindset, with respect to their dietary choices, just to kind of acknowledge that, you know,
00:46:43.780
And, you know, animals have real, like non-human animals have real moral status that we should
00:46:48.160
respect and won't eat some very bad forms of meat, like factory farmed chicken on that
00:46:53.700
But for something like beef or lamb, the animals, I think, just have reasonable lives, not amazing
00:47:00.040
lives, but lives that are definitely worth living better than if they, for them, if they'd
00:47:04.420
You actually think that's true of factory farmed beef or just, or you're now talking about
00:47:12.060
I mean, it's harder to factory farm a cow in the way that you can.
00:47:14.580
You can't treat them nearly as badly as you can a chicken, but as for like, which animals
00:47:20.060
have lives that are worth living or not, it's a really hard question.
00:47:23.000
But there are at least some people who will kind of justify eating that sort of meat because,
00:47:27.600
you know, what you're doing by buying that meat is increasing the demand for a certain
00:47:31.400
type of meat that then means that more animals of that type come into existence.
00:47:37.200
So the question is, well, who's it bad for then?
00:47:39.300
It's not bad for the cow you're eating because that cow's already dead.
00:47:42.360
It's not bad for the cow that you bring into existence because it wouldn't have existed
00:47:47.700
But then I just like, I can't imagine in my own case, psychologically believing both that
00:47:54.100
animal suffering is incredibly important and, you know, you should care a lot about animals
00:48:02.560
It just, I don't think it's a psychological possibility for me.
00:48:06.840
I mean, another case given by, first given to me by Derek Parfitt is, you know, your
00:48:13.620
grandmother who you love very much, you've got a very close relationship with her.
00:48:17.960
When she dies, you just throw her in the garbage.
00:48:23.500
You know, it's not bad, not bad for her because she's no longer with us.
00:48:26.200
Um, but again, it just seems like there's this, as a matter of human psychology, doing that
00:48:32.100
is very inconsistent with what seems like genuine regard for, um, that person.
00:48:40.100
So it's easy to cash that intuition out again in the form of consequences, in my view, which
00:48:47.860
is, yes, it's not bad for your grandmother because she's presumably not there to experience
00:48:53.280
anything, but the sense that there's something sacred about a human life or the sense that
00:48:59.080
one's love of a person needs to be honored by an appropriate framing of their death, that is good
00:49:10.460
And if we just chucked our loved ones in the trash, that would have implications for how
00:49:17.080
And how we feel about them is the thing that causes us to recoil from treating them that
00:49:23.840
And this is going to become more and more pressing.
00:49:26.860
These kinds of seemingly impractical bounds of philosophizing will become more and more
00:49:32.020
pressing when we can really alter our emotional lives and moral intuitions to a degree that is,
00:49:40.960
So just imagine you had a pill that allowed you to just no longer be sad, right?
00:49:47.060
So like, this is the perfectly targeted antidepressant that has no other downside, no other symptoms.
00:49:53.500
You know, pharmacologically, we may in fact get that lucky, maybe not.
00:49:56.740
But imagine a pill that just, if you're grief-stricken, you take this pill and you are no longer grief-stricken
00:50:04.980
Now, your child has died or your mother has died and you're in grief, then the question
00:50:15.200
You know, now, would it be normative to 30 seconds after your child has died, right?
00:50:21.660
In fact, you may still be in the presence of the body to just pop that pill in a sufficient
00:50:29.900
I think most of us would feel that that is some version of chucking your grandmother in
00:50:37.920
I mean, what does love mean if you don't shed a tear when the person you love most has died?
00:50:46.160
But finding what is normative there is really a challenge.
00:50:50.820
I don't know that there's any principle we can invoke or that we're ever going to find
00:50:54.780
that is going to convince us that we have found the right point.
00:50:57.720
But whatever feels comfortable at the end of the day there, I think, is encapsulating
00:51:04.380
all of the consequences that we feel or imagine we would feel in those circumstances.
00:51:10.040
And a loss of connection to other people is certainly a consequence that we're worried
00:51:15.820
And also, just if you never felt sadness that your child injured your death to your child,
00:51:21.860
like, I'm sure humans, as a matter of fact, would therefore take fewer steps to protect
00:51:27.380
their children and so on, there'd be a whole host of, I think, very bad consequences from
00:51:33.580
And yeah, in terms of the general framing, I agree with you in terms of frustrations at
00:51:39.560
consequentialism where they create these cases where all sorts of real-world effects are just
00:51:46.040
I mean, this is true for the question of how much to give as well, where in these debates,
00:51:51.700
it's normally imagined that there is just this superhuman person who could just give
00:51:55.480
all of their income to the lowest level and then not have any other areas of their life
00:52:02.960
I mean, I think if someone thinks, well, I should give 10% because if I give more, then
00:52:10.340
And I'm like, yep, you should be really attentive to your own psychology.
00:52:13.780
And that's like a really important consideration, whereas that's the sort of thing that in arguments
00:52:19.960
about consequentialism, for some reason, the critics and sometimes the proponents tend to
00:52:24.940
miss out, tend to be very kind of simplified views of the consequences.
00:52:30.260
Again, the problem comes back to the singer side of this conversation, which is if you're
00:52:35.980
only giving 10%, then you are still standing next to the shallow pond.
00:52:42.060
It is one of those slippery slope conditions where you're just, once you acknowledge that
00:52:47.660
there's this, the juxtaposition of your casual indulgence of your wants, any one of which
00:52:57.060
is totally dispensable, you could sacrifice it and your life would be, you'd be no worse
00:53:02.400
off alongside the immediate need of someone who's intolerably deprived by dint of pure bad
00:53:11.840
I mean, your privilege is a matter of luck entirely.
00:53:16.860
And all of the variables that produce it, no matter how self-made you think you are, you
00:53:24.320
You didn't pick the society into which you were born.
00:53:26.980
You can't account for the fact that you were born in a place that is not now Syria, fractured
00:53:38.660
He can take absolutely no responsibility for his intelligence, his drive, the fact that
00:53:42.500
he could make it to America, and America was stable, and he did it in a time when there
00:53:46.780
was immense resources to help him do all the stuff that he's doing.
00:53:51.200
And so, again, you're still at the pond, and it feels like the conversation you would want
00:53:58.880
to have with the person who says, well, if I give any more than 10%, it's going to kind
00:54:02.760
of screw me up, and I'm not going to give much, and I'm not going to be happy, I'm not
00:54:07.280
It sounds like there's still more Peter Singer-style therapy to do with that person, which is,
00:54:14.140
well, listen, come on, 12%, 14%, that's really moving you into a zone of discomfort, and there
00:54:20.580
is no stopping point short of, well, listen, I could make more money if you would let me
00:54:28.300
get on an airplane now and fly to the meeting I'm now going to miss because I don't have enough
00:54:33.240
money for a ticket, and then you begin to invoke some of the, I think you call it, earning
00:54:38.840
to give principles, right, so which we can talk about, but unless you're going to bring
00:54:42.940
in other concerns there where you can just, you can be more effective at helping more
00:54:47.300
drowning children in shallow ponds, you don't have an argument against Singer.
00:54:52.720
Yeah, I think, so there's a distinction in consequentialist ethics between what gets called
00:54:59.180
actualism and possibilism, and so supposing you have three options, you can stay home
00:55:06.900
and study, you can stay home and watch the feed, and you can watch the feed.
00:55:11.500
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