Larry S. Temkin, "Being Good in a World of Need" (Oxford UP, 2022)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of NewBooks Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel.

Today, I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Larry Temkin about a wonderful book that he published with Oxford University Press. The book is called Being Good in a World of Need. It's about a topic that has always sort of occupied my mind, and there are lots of questions, lots of food for thought, and I'm really honored to be speaking to the author. The book was published by Oxford University Press, 2022, and Dr. Larry Temkin is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers.

Larry, well, thank you very much for accepting this invitation. Thank you very much for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here and talk with you. Great. Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and your background, what attracted you to philosophy, which is your area of expertise? Yeah, yeah. So you want the...

Do you want the pat on the back, how Brady I am version or the simple bare bones version? They're very different. I'll talk a little bit and then you can tell me if you want more. But so as you said, I'm Professor of Philosophy, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, or I was anyway. I'm now retired, so it's emeritus. And

My areas of specialty are moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, and so on. I will talk later about the subject of this book, but the particular subject of this book is one that I've been interested in since I was a small child, as long as I can remember.

What got me interested in philosophy is an interesting story, I suppose. I went off to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and I thought I was going to be a psychology major. The main reason I thought I wanted to be a psychology major is I was intensely interested in the Holocaust.

I was extraordinarily concerned about the Holocaust and not only the Holocaust, but I'll tie them together in a second, but the treatment of African Americans in America, the history of that, and actually the mistreatment of people all over the world just had...

burned me and I always wondered like what is it that would cause some people to put other people in the ovens what is it that would cause some it some person to put an infant in an oven because they had a great great grandfather that had uh you know a certain kind of ancestry I mean what kind of psychology would would account for that

So I went to Madison or why some people would lynch another human being because of their color, their skin or their religion or whatever it is. I mean, it's just like, you know, what causes that? And I thought I would do psychology. And if I did psychology, maybe I could try to figure out a little bit the kinds of things that lead people to do these things.

incredibly heinous activities. Often people who in other circumstances are perfectly normal, you know, people, God-fearing people, you know, family, love their family, go to church or go to mosque, go to temple, whatever it is, and suddenly they find themselves putting babies in the oven. So I thought, you know, psychology promised

The hope that we could figure out why people do things like that, and then we could figure out why they do things like that, and we could perhaps figure out what we need to change to prevent things like that from happening. So that was the original thought.

So I went to Madison and several things happened, one of which is that I took a philosophy class. The philosophy class was amazingly interesting. It was taught by a student of a philosopher named Saul Kripke. Saul Kripke is a very, very famous philosopher. And this person was his first student. It was a fascinating lecture, a very small class, 15 people. And the topics were just incredibly interesting.

But beyond that, as I was taking my psychology classes, I found myself very disappointed because at that point, this was many years ago, it was kind of the heyday of behaviorism, skinnerism and behaviorism. They were very proud of showing us

videos of how they could train by stimulus and response pigeons to peck out the Star Spangled Banner on a teeny tiny little piano. And besides the poor choice of music that they chose to teach this pigeon, I just thought they are so far from figuring out what makes some people put other people in the ovens. This is not going to satisfy why I'm interested in psychology.

Philosophy, on the other hand, offered another route to what I cared about because part of what always amazed me, as I alluded to already, is the success of Goebbels' propaganda machine. I mean, Goebbels, he runs this propaganda network in World War II in Germany, and he somehow convinces, with the figurehead of Hitler, but it was his propaganda machine that convinces all these normal people

to put children in the oven. And I always thought philosophy offered the promise that if someone gives you an argument, teaches you to reason, teaches you to think, teaches you to explore and examine premises, teaches you to question authority,

um my favorite bumper stick always has been question authority it's not necessarily disobeyed but it's questioned someone tells you to do something why figure out why and um and i thought you know someone gives you an argument and it goes step one two three four conclusion put babies in the oven or conclusion lynch someone because of the color of their skin or conclusion kill these people because they're a different religion i thought

you should be able to figure out that something's gone wrong with that argument, and it's gone wrong somewhere. So I thought perhaps philosophy could help us learn to think, learn to reason, learn to examine the arguments or claims that people make, and to question the things that are put forward, whether by your teachers or your parents or your government, to question them seriously and try to figure out whether or not they're asking you to do something which is permissible or impermissible.

And that sort of took me into philosophy, those kind of constellation of it was just really interesting. And there were really smart teachers. And and it was a possible way of trying to help make the world better. It was a perfect answer. I can clearly see why you wrote this book, Being Good in a World, which you sort of touched, which was sort of the answer that I had.

the answer to my next question was and I think you raised a lot of important points. Well, what is the use of philosophy? Why do we study philosophy? Why philosophy matters? And as I said, when I was introducing the book, the topic of the book, I didn't know even about the book, but I had been occupied by the topic of the book

the question of um you know donations to ngos or corporates or how we need to help people in need in a world that really desperately needs it especially in the past couple of years with what's happening in the middle east and uh and and i've been uh i might touch upon that later on as we speak so i'm i'm i've been relatively privileged i live in a comfortable country and i have a

But I'm an immigrant here from the Middle East, and I look at things that happened there, know people that are in need, and then I start to even feel guilty myself. And then I start thinking about questions, how can I help people? But at the same time, you know, I also have a responsibility to my family. I'm skeptical of a lot of those big corporates that...

and agencies that provide aid all great things they do but there are some arguments which you talked upon in the book but um but this is your book it's your podcast i don't want to steal the thunder let's

Let me ask you something else, and then we'll get to the arguments of the book. There I might be able to make a few comments here and there. The preface, I love the preface. You start the book with an anecdote. Dinner party. Tell us about it. Yeah, sure. So I had a dinner party in my home.

sometime back and it was a small dinner party with an amazing cast of characters as it were. I'm fortunate enough to travel in circles where I know just some incredible people. And at this particular dinner party, there were, I don't know, seven people or so. I'll see if I could remember everybody who was there, but there was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University,

An ethicist, a very distinguished figure. Her name was Holly Smith. Her husband, Alvin Goldman, was there. He's widely regarded as the world's leading, or was, sadly, he recently passed away. But at the time, the world's leading...

Epistemologist, which is the philosophers who think about the study of knowledge. How do we know what we know? And he was the most famous philosopher in the world for that topic. Another person who was there was Derek Parkwood, who at the time was widely regarded as the greatest living moral philosopher. He was my teacher, my colleague, my mentor, my collaborator. We taught many classes together. A man I admired enormously.

Another person who was there was Jeff McMahon. Jeff McMahon was my colleague at the time at Rutgers and currently holds the position of the Vice Chair of Oral Philosophy at Oxford and is maybe the leading contemporary philosopher on the topic of war and what makes killing, and under different circumstances, right or wrong or legitimate. And a billionaire,

a very interesting man named Patrick Byrne, who was widely referred to once as the most hated man on Wall Street. And that was an interesting story, how he got there, but I won't go into all those details. And now I'm saying last but not least, Angus Deaton. And Angus Deaton is one of the world's leading development economists. And Angus Deaton has won the Nobel Prize in 2015 in economics.

So that was a cast of characters. And the dinner was going, we had a wide range of conversations. It was, if I may say so, the most fascinating, interesting dinner party that I've ever been at, whether it was host or guest. I mean, nothing else has ever come close. It was just this amazing, wide-ranging discussion about a whole host of incredibly fascinating topics with really interesting observations by the various people.

But towards the end of the meal, Angus, who's a very large man and with a big personality, kind of pushed himself back to the table and started talking about the topic of a recently published book of his called

called The Great Escape. And what he basically started talking about was that maybe inequality in the world, and I had written a book on inequality, which some people have called the most important book on equality written,

And he was basically saying, you know, inequality is kind of the natural result of progress taking place at an uneven pace in different parts of the country. It's not so much to be regretted as celebrated in certain ways because you want progress to take place, but will inevitably take place at a different rate at different times in different places.

and blah, blah, blah, blah. So this conversation starts taking off about equality and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, should we celebrate it or not? And a bunch of people, Derek Parfit and...

Jack McMahon started pushing back. I was a host, so I was jumping in with two feet at this point. And they started pushing back and saying, well, even if it's inevitable that there will be initial spurts of inequality, we can work to reduce it. We have a moral obligation to work to reduce it. And then Derek, my teacher, mentor, Derek Parker, the greatest moral philosopher in the world, I thought, and many others have thought,

says, and he gives an example of Peter Singer's, the pond example. And he basically says, look, we can do something to help people in need. We have a moral obligation to do something in need if we can, if it doesn't cost us anything or it doesn't cost us very much, and we can significantly help someone who's worse off. And we can do that by contributing to organizations like Oxfam. And he had been a big proponent of Oxfam, and he and Jeff had been

been a performer of Oxfam as had I. I had been contributing to Oxfam for my entire adult life and had helped start an Oxfam meals gift program at Rice University when I taught there and an Oxfam club at Rice University and so on and so forth.

I'd actually helped raise money in my classes for many, many years where I would have students anonymously give money so it couldn't affect their grades in any way. If they chose to, after we discussed obligations to the needy, we would send that money to Oxfam or to Doctors Without Borders or anything.

And I would match anything they'd give. My wife and I would always give on our own, but I would also promise every dollar you give, I will give up to a certain amount. And over the course of many years, we raised a lot of money for Oxfam and so on. So Derek and I and Jeff were all big proponents of Oxfam and all the good that they could do.

and did do. And Jeff and Derek had recently become advocates of something called effective altruism. We can talk more about that later. A particular way of thinking about how we can do the most good to help people in need, and so on. And to that, Angus replied,

He didn't think that was right. He didn't think, in fact, that Oxfam did nearly as much good as everybody thinks they did. And in fact, he thinks that Peter Singer and others who follow them, which turned out to be, among others, people like me, who had taught arguments like Peter Singer's in my classes for every year since I started teaching, and trying to influence students to think about how we can do more good in the world, etc.,

He said, I actually think people like Peter Singer are doing more harm than good. Well, Jeff and Derek couldn't believe that. And there was this big conversation that ensued, you know, and on one side of the table literally was Angus, the Nobel laureate in economics, and the other was Jeff McMahon. And Derek, I was at the head of the table right opposite me, and this heated discussion goes on.

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Now, after that dinner, everybody eventually goes home. It's a late night. I'm cleaning up the dishes with Meg. I can't turn my brain on. I go to bed, I can't turn my brain on. And the reason is this. I have actually been concerned about the topic of what we could do to help the less fortunate in the world as long as I can remember.

I mean, you go back to when I was a child, I was collecting money for UNICEF, trick or treat for UNICEF, what we called it. I was deeply concerned about, you know, I gave money to something called Siddhartha, where it was considered to be a matter of justice, a matter of righteousness, a matter of duty, not an option, not a matter of your being generous, but a matter of duty to help people who were less fortunate than yourself.

I was raised by a mom and dad with very different political views. My mom was a flaming liberal who taught English as a second language to immigrant people, almost all people of color, because she was depraved.

keenly concerned to help people less fortunate. And a father who was very patriotic, who was a veteran of World War II, who had landed at Okinawa, and in fact was the only person who landed at Okinawa who survived the landing from his platoon. He was a Republican.

a very proud patriot, but both my mom and my dad believed that helping people in need was not a right or left issue. It was a humanitarian issue. It was something that every decent person should do. So I grew up with this thought. This is just something any decent person does. It doesn't matter what your politics are. You have to help people who are less fortunate. And I believed that my whole life. And I started teaching my very first classes

I taught topics of obligations to needy. I did it every year. Every year my entire career I was teaching that class. And the thing is this, this is a meandering a tiny bit, but it's a good story. The thing is, I had known Angus for a while.

I teach at Rutgers. He teaches at Princeton. I often got to Princeton for various things. He was often in the audience. We would often end up talking to each other. We liked each other. I respected him and he respected me. We ended up at conferences together in Geneva. We went to lunch together at Princeton or outside of Princeton. He invited me to his home. And on numerous occasions,

He had tried to tell me that people like Peter Singer and by extension, people like me, though to a much lesser degree, who spent his whole life trying to convince undergraduates that they should be contributing to organizations like Oxfam. And he kept telling me, Larry, you guys are doing more harm than good. You really don't know how aid works, et cetera. And I wasn't listening. I kept thinking, eh, no, that can't be true. You can't.

I can't be doing more harm than good by sending money to the world's poorest countries and trying to help people in need. I mean, that just can't be right. And so I'd give him all these responses and he would give me his responses. And I just did not listen to him.

hear him couldn't believe there was any chance that it was actually right. So now I'd had this conversation with him on multiple occasions in different places, different countries, and so on, and I'd always dismissed what he'd said out of hand. Then that particular night, this exchange is going back and forth, and now I'm listening to it.

And I'm listening to Derek and to Jeff McMahon, and they are saying almost word for word to Angus everything that I've said in the past. I mean, all the arguments I was dealing with, all the responses, all the pushback, they were using those same examples, those same claims, the exact same wording sometimes.

Now, normally, if I find myself in the same company as Derek Parford, in my judgment, the world's leading moral philosopher, and Jeff McMahon, this incredibly great philosopher, and we're all agreeing about the same things, I'm thinking we're right and the opponent's wrong. But this

I'm taking this kind of impartial perspective. I'm floating above the conversation. I'm listening to it. And philosophers are by nature reactionaries. You tell, not political reactionaries, but you tell me the sky is blue, I'll give you 10 reasons to believe you're wrong. I mean, whatever you tell me, I can give you a reason to doubt it, to

to question it because of this question of authority. I can tell you why you're wrong. So this time, as I'm listening to this conversation, it struck me that Derek and Jeff, who were saying all the things I always said, why did they think that?

What made them so sure they were right? What made them so confident that they were right and Angus must be wrong? And the reason it struck me as something was crazy going on here methodologically is that Angus Theta was a Nobel laureate in economics and empirical science, and he read a whole bunch of empirical data, data about what actually happens in the developing world.

And Jeff and I and Derek were quintessential examples of what we call armchair philosophers. We sit in our studies and we think really hard about topics.

And usually the topics we're thinking about, you can do from your armchair. Topics about the nature of the good, about whether we do or don't have moral responsibilities to help people in need. General views about pain is bad and why is it bad. You can do all that from your armchair. But what you can't do from your armchair is just think.

think about whether it's true or not that on the ground interventions in the world's poorest countries are helping more than hurting. That's a factual matter. And there's data on it. And you have to find that out by looking at the world, not just by thinking about what must or must not be true. So I go to bed that night and

My mind is just really, I'm going around and around and around. I couldn't sleep at all. And I find myself thinking about Peter's original Peter Sears, also a friend of mine, original pond example.

And the original pot example was very powerful, right? I'll stop it just a minute. Child's drawing in the pot. You can wade in and help him. You'll ruin your shoes and your clothing if you do. But that's not important compared to saving the child's life. So surely, you know, well, I'm decent to save the child's life. And we all said yes.

And then Peter said, well, if that's true here, it's true anywhere because mere distance doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter whether the child's an American child or a child in Biafra or Chad or Gaza. It doesn't matter. A child's a child. They're innocent. If they're dying and you can help them at little or no cost to yourself, you have a moral obligation to do it, even if it costs you something. And that seemed right. But then I found myself thinking about variations of the pond examples.

And I thought about a whole bunch of them, which we might or might not talk about. Anyways, I thought about them. By the time I fell asleep in the morning, about 7 o'clock in the morning, I had generated about 20 or 25 different examples that are variations of the pond example. And...

And it turned out that on four or five of them, of course you have to save the child. On a few of them, it wasn't clear whether you should save the child or not. It wasn't clear. And on a whole bunch of them, it was abundantly clear that you couldn't save the child. It would be wrong if you did that. And then the question was, and that was like 17 of them or whatever. The question was, is the real world more like the example Singer gave us?

Or more like these other examples I conjured in my mind. And I realized that's a factual question and I didn't have the answer to it.

And I had been invited to give something called the Uhuru Lectures, which one of your previous speakers also has given. I know Shelly K. you interviewed him. What's he give those as? Well, I'd been invited to give the Uhuru Lectures, and I was planning to give a talk on issues about global justice in health care and equality in health care. When I woke up that morning after the sleepless night and a couple hours of sleep, I realized I have to write a different book.

I have to actually think harder than I've ever thought before and do some research about the actual impact of interventions, underground interventions in many of the world's poorest countries. And that led, and that would be the topic of my inaugural lectures. And I proceeded to work on that for about six years. And I published the book we're now talking about. Fascinating. I wish there was someone there at the dinner party to record the arguments.

It was amazing. It was amazing. I can imagine that. Uh, so when you were talking about the dinner party and Peter senior, how you sort of sympathize with him, but, um,

There were also critics. Let's get to this topic of effective altruism. I'm interested to know what it is, and I think Peter Singer is a good example of effective altruism. And I'm keen to know your perspective towards that. Are you sympathetic to this approach? Are you, let's say, as sympathetic as you were before where the dinner party changed everything? Yeah, yeah, good. So in many ways, I...

So let me say what effective altruism is first quickly, just for your audience who may or may not know. Effective altruism is actually a very large amorphous group now. It's become one. But it basically is a group that says, if you want to do good, it's not enough to just write a check. It's not enough to just contribute to some organization. If you actually want to do good, you want to act good.

So it's to do the most good that you can, as it were, get the most bang for your buck. So, you know, a simple example would be if there's two different approaches to curing some disease. And one is you do some prophylactic treatment. Maybe you give someone an oral rehydration tablet that costs 15 cents or you give them vitamin A tablets.

And this will prevent them from coming down with diarrhea or coming down with malaria or coming down with something, you know, this very cheap intervention on the front end. Or you can treat them with very expensive, sometimes lengthy treatments, costing lots and lots of dollars over many years if they come down with the illness. It's crazy to be spending your money and curing the illness rather than preventing it.

Because you can save so many more lives by preventing it. And this happens all over the place. And so the question was, I mean, you know, suppose you want to do good and you can help pay for someone's dialysis treatment. And maybe that costs, let's say, $200,000. Or you can supply, again, we'll say oral rehydration tablets or vitamin A or various other kinds or malaria bed nets.

some of the poorest regions in the world. And those might, when you actually do the math, come out to, you know, $5,000 to save a life. Well, instead of $200,000 in dialysis treatments, right, to save a single life, you know, you could divide that by 5,000, whatever the number is, and save, let's say, 20,000 lives or, you know, this huge number of lives. And surely that would be better. That's a better use of the money.

So the effect of altruists, and in many ways, the father effect of altruism is Peter Singer, though there were certain other very famous people who really made it, you know, take credit for being the father for actually presenting it as a movement, as it were, people like Will McCastle and Toby Ord, often regarded as the fathers of altruism.

of effective altruism, but they followed in the footsteps of Peter Singer. They basically said, look, what you need to do if you wanted to go to the world is look for the most effective way of helping the most number of people

the greatest amount for the least amount. I mean, helping them the greatest amount with the least amount of time, effort, and money. And that's what you should be doing. And early on, the effective outdoorists thought that many of them, the best way of

helping people, you have to have the most urgent things would involve supporting international relief efforts in the poorest countries because it wouldn't cost very much the money

We always say it's a dollar or a pound or the Australian money will go a lot further in a very poor country than it would in an advanced country. It was the thinking, that's where you should spend the money. That's where a lot of innocent people die. And that's where the cost of helping them would be much less. Later on, they evolved in certain ways, have gone in other directions, and I don't so much approval. But in general, that's the idea. The idea is doing the most good you can.

for whatever investment you want to make. Now, I regard the effect of altruism and always have, as it were, as on the side of the angels in this debate. At least early on, they were concerned about the same things I was concerned about. I wanted to help the needy. They wanted to help the needy.

I actually wanted to help the needy effectively. They wanted to help the needy effectively. I mean, just a word about that. I mean, so when I was younger, because I'd always cared about helping people less fortunate, I had a much wider view of the activities that I thought were worthwhile, the things that you might do to help people less fortunate. So when I was in high school or I was in college,

I volunteered for a whole bunch of things. I would raise money for the March of Dimes, for example, which addresses in America,

birth defects, you know, young children born with various, you know, birth defects, and March of Dines would address that. Or I would raise money for the Red Cross, which, you know, would do a lot of good and a lot of different things. Or, I mean, just a whole slew of different organizations that I thought were all valuable. And these included, you know, organizations to, you know, help the environment and, you know, just lots of different things.

When I went to Oxford, I learned about Oxfam, and I was told that Oxfam, an international development relief organization, was an incredibly effective organization that stopped kids and others from dying at very little cost.

And I went through a mental change in my mind when I came back from Oxford. I was now in graduate school. All these people would come to my door and they would be raising money for good causes. And they were often good causes. You might be raising money for literature or any literacy programs, help people out to read. Or you might be raising money to help old people get meals. What we call that meals on wheels. There's lots of things you could do.

But I would often invite these people into my room and I would applaud them for their efforts and say, I'm really glad that you're out there, that you're dedicated, that you want to help people in need. But I no longer believe this is the way I want to spend my money to help people.

I want to spend it effectively. I want to help the people who are very worst off. And while it may be an unfortunate thing if you don't read so well, or even at all, it's not as bad as dying of hunger at the age of five. I mean, it was just a matter of priorities. What's most urgent? So from that point on, I was really focused on what could I do to do the most good in many ways. And that put me on the side of the effect of altruism.

And I actually, over a number of years, I lectured, for example, there were a number of effective altruist organizations. There's one called Giving What We Can. It's an effective altruist organization. It was begun by Toby Ord in Oxford.

One of my students, Nick Beckstead, launched the first chapter of doing what we can in the United States at Rutgers University. I subsequently, because I had all these lectures on foreign aid that I used to give to my students, and they were very powerful lectures and very dynamic. It was just like, you know, you give that lecture and people thought, all right, where do I sign up? What do I do to help people in need? I gave those kinds of lectures and they were very motivating. So I started to get invited to give lectures to help launch

new chapters of giving what we can and variations of that at Harvard, at Princeton, overseas in England, et cetera, et cetera. So I was very much walking in a step with the effective altruism movement at this point and helping to launch these effective altruism chapters. But I was never an effective altruist per se the way most of them were for the following reason. And we can talk more about this if you want.

The effective altruism that I knew, the leaders of the organization, came out of what we call the consequentialist tradition, the tradition of Mill and Bentham and Sidgwick and others. And Derek Harford comes out of this tradition. Shelley Kagan comes out of this tradition. And this is a tradition that says, what matters most is what happens. It's the consequences. What we want is the world to go as well as possible. And

And what's right or wrong is whatever makes the world go as well as possible.

And you can see how this kind of supports an effective altruist approach because the effective altruist approach say you want to give money as effectively as possible so as to make the world go as well as possible. That's what you want to do. It's very much a consequentialist perspective. What matters is what happens as a result of what we or others do or don't do. That's what matters. But as a moral philosopher, I've always thought there was a very narrow approach to morality.

I think morality is much more complex than that. I think in the history of philosophy, people have thought there were a number of fundamental questions

And different people have thought this is the fundamental question, or this is the fundamental question, or this is the fundamental question. So for Kant and his followers, the fundamental question is what ought I to do? And he was a kind of deontologist. He thinks there are certain actions that are right, certain actions that are wrong, independently of the consequences. So you can't kill someone, even if the consequences would be good, because...

What matters is not whether the consequences are good, but whether you're killing someone. There's a law, a moral principle from the Ten Commandments or otherwise, thou shalt not kill. That was thought to be wrong, whatever the consequences. So there's that kind of approach, what's called a deontologic approach.

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Then there were followers of people like Aristotle. They thought, no, the fundamental question is, what kind of person ought I to be? And they defended something called virtuosity.

What matters is that a person be kind and generous and compassionate and courageous and honest and trustworthy and loyal. And these are all virtues. And the crucial question is what kind of person ought I to be? I want to be a virtuous person. And then there were the consequentialists, the millions of their followers and the central kid, others. They thought, as I said, the fundamental question is, you know, what happens? How should the world go?

And I'm what's called a pluralist. I think all of these things matter and more. We need to care about what happens in the world. We need to care about what kind of person I am. We need to care about whether or not I have particular duties to myself, to my children, to others. And all of them are morally important.

Now, what I thought, and then I'll let you jump back in, is I happen to think that this is a case where all of the different moral perspectives that I cared about as a pluralist agreed that we ought to be helping people in need.

So we agreed with the effective outdoors. That's why I said we were on the side. I thought they were on the side of the angels or I was on the side of the angels because I thought from the standpoint of what we ought to do, I thought we all had duties to help people in need.

agent relative duties, I have a duty to help the drowning child in the pond. It's not just a matter of super irrigation above and beyond this and call it duty. If I don't send the child, I act wrongly. So I thought I had those duties. I also thought a virtuous person, someone who was kind, someone who was generous, someone who was sympathetic, someone who had some of these various virtues,

would naturally help people in need. If you don't help someone in need, when it would cost you little or nothing to do so, you're not a virtuous person, you're a vicious person. But I also thought what matters is what happens in the world. And I thought the world will go better if

If children don't die, rather than if I eat one more fancy meal or buy the latest X-back or have a fancy car, it's better if I have fewer sweaters and less toys and these children are saved than if these children die and I have more sweaters and eat out a lot and have lots of toys for my kids.

So I thought all three of the things I cared about, and there were other things to care about too, just talk about those three, all three of them agreed we should help the worst off people in the world. So to a large extent, I was sympathetic with the effective altruist thought that it really matters

not merely that we try to help people, but that we try to do it effectively. But in fact, as I worked on this book, I always differed from the effect of outdoors in that I don't just have consequences in mind. I have other things too that I think are really important. And it's also the case that I think in fact, the outdoors now have moved on from caring about the worst off people in the world to other concerns

And I think there's reason to have those outs and serves, but not in the way into the degree that they do. So I have now distanced myself in certain ways from the effect of altruism movement, even though I think in many respects, the things I care about, they can sign on to.

And I'm going to jump ahead here because it's almost so as the end of the book that you talk more about Angus Deaton criticism of Peter Singer's approach or effective altruism and why it does more harm than good. So I'm going to, because you've discussed all this, I think it's the best place to discuss that point of view as well. So my question has now two parts. One of them is

Angus Deaton's argument, why do you think that all these global efforts, the efforts of aid agencies, Oxfam and similar organizations to address global poverty have done more harm than good? And you also talk about Jeffrey Sachs' approach to international aid as well. So could you please expand on these two points?

thinkers approach to this? Sure, sure. So, Angus has a view which goes roughly as follows. So, I'll just say in the book, there's a lot of reasons to worry about certain underground interventions in many of the world's forest places.

men which we're going to skip talking about for now at least. But Angus's particular concern is roughly the following. When you, a charitable organization like Oxfam or Save the Children or some other organization goes into a very indefinitely poor country, they may actually do good.

There are roads that are built, there are hospitals that are built, there are schools that are built, there are electric grids that are built, there are wells that are done. And these things actually do concrete positive good. But it's his view that the single most important thing for social, political, and economic development in a country is that you have an effective government

that is responsive to the will of the people. A democracy is a good government when and only when it's responsive to the will of the people.

A poor government, a dictatorship, a monarchy is a bad government when it ignores the interests and will and desires of the people and promotes its own agendas. It can be a good government if it's genuinely responsive to the will of people. Now, when you think about what a government is responsible for on a large scale, it profoundly affects almost every aspect of society.

a citizen's life. The government sets the agendas and the policies that impact, you know, what kind of educational system there is, what kind of health system there is, what kind of infrastructure there is, energy and roads and so on and so forth. And

It impacts the work. It impacts relations with other countries. It impacts whether you're going to war or not with other countries. It impacts whether or not you're subjugating minorities in your country, and so on and so forth. I mean, it's impossible to exaggerate the extent to which a government's

A government influences the lives of their citizens and the people living within that country, not just citizens. You can't exaggerate it. The finger is, as it were, in every aspect of human life, more or less, not literally every, but massively important ones.

And Angus's view is that you can't have substantial, significant, social, political, maybe even moral, but economic development without a good government, without a government that is responsive to the people and their concerns. And what he thinks

is that when lots of aid flows in from overseas into countries that are desperately poor, it often has an indirect impact on weakening the responsiveness of the government to its citizens. And it has this impact in a variety of ways.

Some of which I'll talk about in one second. But one of the striking things that economists have come to recognize over the last some number of years now is what's often called the resource curse. People

People often just assume that a wealthy country like the United States is wealthy because it has these rich natural resources. And poor countries, we think Sudan or Chad or something, they're poor because they don't have rich natural resources. That's just the kind of a priori intuition many people have. But it turns out if you actually look at the empirical data, in many of the poorest, in many of the countries of the world where people are worse off, there are rich natural resources.

thousands of natural resources. And one of the reasons why people end up poorly off despite living in a country of rich natural resources is what's called the resource curse. This money, these natural resources which are there, can be used by whoever manages to take control of the country. And that incentivizes warlords and tyrants and gangsters in essence to

to fight for control of the resources, to fight control of the country, and that gives rise to civil unrest and ongoing wars that take tons and tons of lives and that harm people immeasurably. And this happens again and again and again in countries all over the world. I recently read an article just two days ago about how the ongoing war in

in Sudan is a fight for the gold resources in Sudan. And you can repeat this. I mean, there's case after case after case. Many of the worst situations in the Middle East where there are who gets to control the oil resources, right? Because if you have control of the oil resources, and then the thing to note is when you have control of these resources, you can pay off the members of your sect

You can make life good for them. You can give them the government jobs. You can give them the non-government jobs. You can control the police. You can control the army. And when you have control of the police and the army, you don't have to worry about the citizens.

It's also the case that if outside money is pouring in to help the worst off people in the world, in a country, the governments of those countries can in essence say, well, I have this deal kind of with these outside organizations that they're going to take care of you. And if they don't take care of you, you're not doing so well. It's not my fault because I'm ignoring your interest. It's their fault because they're not doing enough. They should be doing more to help you.

you. So you get this sense in which you're kind of independent if you have control over these resources. You don't really need to depend on the people of your country because you have resources to hire the police, to hire the army, to hire and feather the nest of your followers. And that enables you to stay in power. And that enables you to commit all sorts of atrocities to promote your agenda. And that's bad. And

And now, one of the things that Angus sees

is that when money pours in from literally tens of thousands of different aid organizations and tons of different UN organizations and multitude of different numbers of nations to help a needy country, that is a resource. And that's a resource that can be fought over. And that's a resource that people in power can take advantage of to buttress their positions

And to enable them to advance their agendas independently of whether that's the agenda that the people want or whether that's the agenda that's good or bad for the people. And so that helps. And then the claim is, his claim is, over and over and over again, when lots of outside aid pours in, it undermines.

the democratic or even non-democratic responsiveness of the government to its citizens. And when you think about how crucial that is for the social, political, and economic development of the country, that even if there are good things that your charity has done, you built the roads, you built the hospital, you dug the wells, those are swamped in magnitude by the negative indirect effects

that your actions together with everybody else's have on the responsiveness of the government with citizens. That's basically the form of the argument. I think it's very powerful. I think it really needs to be considered much more than it has been. And there's two things I want to add to it. First, I'm going to give a concrete example and I want to add a theoretical piece to this, which is very important.

So the concrete example is the case of Syria. So Assad, I'm just going to pick this one because it's a short podcast. I'm going on a long time, but you know. So the case is Syria.

So there's a civil war, Syrian civil war. There's 13 million Syrians displaced as a result of that war, 7 million externally, 6 million internally, more than 500,000 civilians in Syria, most of them innocent, are killed during the Syrian civil war.

Assad, of course, is a perpetrator of many of the actions that are going on. He gases his own people. He uses mustard gas. He uses chlorine gas, a series of gases that he uses that are deadly on his own people. Now, people see the disaster that's going on, the massive humanitarian crisis in Syria, and they want to do something about it.

They want to help. They want to help all the people who have been displaced, who are hungry, who don't have jobs, whose homes have been destroyed because of the Civil War. And so people pour money into the country to help. One of the groups that poured money into the country to help and has continued to do so is the United Nations.

The United Nations has at least seven different United Nations organizations that have a role to play in trying to help displaced persons, hungry people, the World Food Program, the Human Rights Commissioner for Refugees, blah, blah, blah. There's seven different organizations at least. All of them want to help people in Syria for good humanitarian reasons. There's good reasons to want to help them.

But the United Nations has this interesting policy because it's an international organization. It recognizes that any aid that it offers has to go through the government, has to be approved by the government, has to go through the government. And they have a rule as the United Nations, they have to exchange their money at the rate set by the government.

So Assad literally just set the rate of exchange at twice the actual value. So Assad was able to artificially set the exchange rate, the official exchange rate, from external dollars into local currency. And he did this in a way that basically allowed him to reap 51 cents in U.S. dollars out of every dollar that was spent there.

And what that meant is when the United Nations spent $200 million to help the poorest, displaced, hungry people ravaged by the civil war in Syria. In fact, Assad skims $100 million off the top, which he can then use to perpetuate these horrible, heinous acts against his own citizens.

So this is kind of one of the ways in which external funds that go in can be captured by a corrupt government, by a totalitarian government, by a tyrant. And it has devastating consequences, in this case, for his very own people. And in many cases, this money ends up flowing into the hands of people who not only harm their own citizens, but harm other citizens in other countries as well.

neighboring countries. So it's very bad. Now, that was one example of a practical point where this kind of thing has gone on very recently, still goes on. The theoretical point, which is important, which I think most people do not understand when I lecture on this, when I talk with the effective outdoors, they always give me these responses and they miss the big point. And it's the point that I think in talking with Angus, I don't see...

I don't even think Angus himself fully appreciated the importance of this point. Many effective altruists who know that there have often been very negative consequences from aid interventions respond by saying something like this,

Well, my particular favorite aid agency surely does more good than harm. And then they point out all the good it does and don't see all the, you know, don't see the harm. And they think if the harm is, you know, not very significant and so on and so forth. But you cannot assess

as it were, the effectiveness of aid interventions by looking at them one at a time. You have to look at them globally. You have to look at them from the, as it were, not the ground level, but the 10,000 foot level. It's a very complicated story, but we have learned in philosophy that it's possible for each person to act in their own best interests. This is the so-called famous Prisicilemas.

but that collectively they end up worse off even in self-interested terms, even if each of them on each individual occasion has done what's best for himself on that occasion. I might do what's best for me. You might do what's best for you. But the result is that we together have done worse than we would have if we hadn't done what was best for ourselves.

Derek Parfit showed the same thing can happen morally. I can act rightly by the likes of my moral theory. You can act rightly by the likes of your moral theory. But we together might be acting wrongly by the likes of that very same theory. Now, I believe what I show distinctively in this field is that that kind of dilemma, that kind of conflict between the individual and the collective,

can arise even for consequentialist theories like utilitarianism. It can be that I can promote the best outcome. You can promote the best outcome. But together, we will have produced a worse outcome than if we hadn't done what we did. Now, if that's the case, there could be a conflict between what's individually right and what's collectively right.

And this is complex. You maybe want to read the book. The students who are reading the book-- I mean, listeners, not students-- want to read the book to see the argument. But I think this happens. And I think that what Angus was onto is, even if it was true-- which he doesn't think it is-- but even if it was true that each individual aid intervention

does all this concrete good and only this kind of nebulous, indirect, slightly lessening of the responsiveness of the government to its citizens, well, surely it's right to save some lives, even if it costs a teeny tiny bit of less responsive to the students.

Sorry, to the citizens. But if now we're talking not one or two aid interventions, but tens of thousands of aid interventions, which is what the real world is in the world's fourth countries.

Now the cumulative effect of lots of teeny tiny undermining of the responsiveness is a major undermining of the responsiveness, right? Just like lots of individual grains of sand by themselves don't amount to anything. But if you have thousands of them, you have a giant heap. So this is a very real problem. You have to look at this issue, not does my particular organization do more good than harm?

But do we collectively do more good than harm when we're involved with these on-the-ground interventions? And the answer, I fear, may very often be no. I want to add one more thing here, and then you'll jump back in. When I say this, I'm really concerned mostly with a particular subset of cases and countries where people are in need. These tend to be the world's poorest countries.

countries, where an infusion of outside aid has a disproportionate impact on the overall economic GDP, as it were, of the country or the government expenditures. Lots of aid that pours into a country like China or India with their massive GDPs will have almost no impact on the responsiveness of the government to its citizens.

but lots of aid that pours into a relatively small country with relatively low or significantly low actual GDP. In that case, the same influx of aid could have a disproportionately large impact on the government and its responsiveness to the citizens. So my worry here is not in general you couldn't help people in need.

but that helping people in need will be much harder to do without significant damage in many of the places where the need is greatest, some of the poorest countries in the world.

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I think you raised a lot of important points. I have been occupied with some of these questions. One example that I can give is that in my country, my home, my home country, when there's a flood,

the government is really ineffective because they know people would they're super kind people lots of them they start mobilizing organizing collecting aids and this and they even use their own trucks to send all the aids to the victims of flood and earthquake and this has happened several times over the past few years in my country but whenever another natural disaster happens then you don't really see any let's say government aid agency there

and they're supposed to be there, they're supposed to help, but you don't really see them because the government is sort of complacent. Well, people will look after one another.

And this has always been my back of my issue, let's say, with people starting mobilizing to help, which is a moral dilemma, as you mentioned. And the example of CERO, I guess, was a very, very powerful one that it sort of perpetuates. And this is also part of the argument in your book that all these aid agencies sort of the unintended consequences that it perpetuates the conditions of poverty, the corruptions, it enables corruptions.

Not to say at least anything about the corruption that might go on even in those very agencies that are based in these countries. I have another question. There is another aspect of, let's say, the negative side of, let's say, all these donations that I had never thought about, but it's in the book again. This is brain and character drain. I really like that phrase in the book.

Can you tell us what that means? What do you mean by brain and character drain as a consequence of agencies trying to address global poverty? Yeah. This is something which, to my knowledge, nobody else has called attention to in this domain. It hasn't been called attention to in the domain of global health.

which is where I was first introduced to it. But of all the articles and books that I've read over the years, which are now many, about global aid efforts, nobody has raised this worry. So when you talk about how much good have you done, aid organizations and others trumpet all the good that they've done by paying attention to, you know, look, I saved this many lives, I did this, I did this. But they're not looking for any negative consequences elsewhere in the system.

They're not looking for them. And often, sadly, if they see them, they cover them up. And we can talk about that later if we choose to. But right now, we're talking about the brain drain and the character drain. So if you're an aid agency and you go into a country, you believe in what you're doing. You want to make the best

that best difference that you can for whatever you're trying to accomplish, whether it's improved agriculture, whether it's schools, whether it's a combination of schools, jobs, treatment of women, you're really concerned and you believe in what you do. So a lot of times when you're doing this, you believe rightly that you need to work with people on the ground. You often can't get a lot of outsiders to come in and fill these jobs. So you want to hire locally.

Well, if you want your organization to be a success, you'll want to hire the very best people that you can from the local communities.

And you want people who are smart. You want people who are good communicators. You want people who are virtuous. You want people who are dependable and reliable and honest, because that's the way your organization is going to be as effective as possible. Now, there's going to be a lot of other organizations that also want to hire these people. They want to hire people who are dependable and honest and reliable and smart and really good at what they do. So this will be a bit of a bidding war.

But since most of these international aid organizations are coming from overseas, they're coming from, you know, wherever, England, Canada, you know, the United States, other places,

Their donors are very generous and they have a lot of money so they can offer salaries and working conditions and fewer hours that are far above often what the local salary schedule would be for something. So people are going to want those jobs. Those are plum jobs. They're going to attract people to those jobs.

So there's going to be, you're going to hire people and you're going to offer them these great working conditions and these great salaries and these people are going to come in. And as a result, you're going to have really talented people and honest people, virtuous people working for your agency. And that's going to make your results really good in terms of what you promised the donors you were going to do. Fewer people are dying of AIDS. More people are completing school, et cetera, et cetera.

But what nobody ever asks is, where did those people come from? What would they have been doing if they weren't working for your organizations? And in the world's poorest countries, what you desperately need are engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, civil servants who are working in the government

who are smart, who are effective, who are hardworking, and who are honest, reliable, dependable, not corrupt. Now, many of these people could work in the government, say, you know, on engineering projects and so on and so forth, and be honest and effective and hardworking and be paid a very small amount.

Or they could go work for your aid agency. Well, they'll have every reason for their own sake and that of their families to work for the aid agency. That's going to suck, what I call it the brain drain. It's going to suck. These highly talented, highly smart, people of high character, out of these positions in many cases, they'll

that are absolutely essential for social, political, and economic growth. And who's going to fill the void when they come out? Well, by hypothesis, in all likelihood, people who are less talented, less effective, and maybe less honest and reliable than dependable, maybe more prone to corruption and so on. And this can have a devastating effect. These jobs will just not be done at the level they once were.

Now, people have seen this in the global health field when you go in and you hire up all the doctors in the region to help prevent AIDS. But that doctor that you hired who might be really good and might help you have fewer AIDS deaths,

might literally have been the only doctor in the clinic for five villages where they're not only treating AIDS deaths, but they're treating every other manner of disease that the citizens of those villages face. And they're not there anymore. And that's a harm.

And people in the global health field have recognized that that's a possible very real harm. But people haven't put two and two together. That same possibility can happen in the field of development aid. And the thing to bear in mind, again, is it's not a case of one intervention or two interventions or three interventions. You have thousands of aid groups on the ground in the world's poorest countries.

And they all want talented, hardworking, dependable people working for them. When those thousands of people start working for the international aid agencies, they're not available.

to continue to do the work that the government and the people need done at the level it needs to be done. There's a kind of siphoning off of these high quality, high character people. And in countries where there isn't necessarily a lot of education, there aren't thousands of people waiting in the wings who will be every bit as educated, every bit as effective, every bit as talented, every bit as smart, every bit as honest.

They're just not there. And so these are real costs.

And they have to be entered into the equation. When you're asking the question, am I doing more harm than good? You at least have to consider the question of what else is going on in the system when you hire these people. And so to my knowledge, nobody has bothered asking that question. I think it's an important question to ask. And I think another aspect, sorry, go ahead. I just want to give a, I mean, you can edit this out if it doesn't seem important enough to add, but I

I feel something like this often goes on in another context where people don't pay attention to it. I'm just going to state what it is. So I find it fascinating that one of the arguments people often give against affirmative action programs of various forms

is that when you put a less talented person into medical school or business school or whatever it is, and this more talented person doesn't get the spot to which they were entitled or should have gotten instead, that's going to lead to inefficiencies because you're going to have slightly less good doctors or lawyers than you otherwise would have had. Okay. So lots of complex issues going on in the question for reaction, but suppose that's true.

That's only looking at one piece. The other piece is, where are these people who were going to go to law school, these supposedly very talented people, more talented than people who actually get in because of a reaction, where else do they go in the system?

Where does this person who was denied a position at Harvard Law or Stanford Medical School, what else do they decide to do with their lives? Suppose they say, ah, fuck it. I'm going to become a teacher. Now suddenly you have this really talented, really smart, supposedly by hypothesis, person who could have gone to Harvard Law School going into teaching. Teaching is this incredibly honorable profession.

That is so valuable in so many ways where you can impact young lives and young minds. Do we really need another super high qualified Harvard lawyer? We have a lot of those already.

I'm not so sure that a slightly less qualified person coming out of Harvard Law is going to do more damage to our society than a super highly talented person who might have gone to law school for the money, but ends up doing something entirely different, might actually end up contributing more money.

as a result. And this is a kind of brain drain in an opposite direction, but it's a similar kind of point. People always just look at one piece of the equation and they say, what's the local impact of a slightly less qualified person taking the job of a more qualified person? And they say inefficiencies.

Well, there's inefficiencies here, but it might be much greater efficiency here. And the difference between the much greater efficiency here and the less efficiency here might tilt the balance in the opposite way that people who are criticizing this may think. And that's all I'm saying. I don't have the empirical data to prove one way or the other that this particular feature of brain drain and character drain is on balance worth.

But it's certainly something we have to pay attention to when assessing the overall impact of policies at a global level. And nobody does. Just nobody does. And I think another aspect of it, and I don't, again, like you, I don't really have the empirical evidence, but again, there are anecdotal evidence that people from these poor countries who work for international aid organizations such as Red Cross, UNICEF, UN,

they get this really incredible work experience with a multinational organization and that's to them that's like a gateway to out of that country they can get a well work wizard to work in other parts of the world and then to work in in in develop developing countries which is all fine but it's also part of the unintended consequences of that brain drain that you mentioned because i imagine in a country like yemen syria

So the talent pool might be so limited. And of course, all those organizations won the best of the best, as you mentioned. And for all the right reasons, I might have done the same thing. They would try to leave the country to have a better life. Everybody's entitled to that. But that's also a consequence for the country as well. That's right. Yeah. There is another question that I'd like to ask.

Another question, which again had occurred to me before reading your book, but I really didn't think about it like long and hard.

There is this with all these foreign agencies working in these organizations and sometimes I've seen on social media, for example, the people who work in these agencies or, for example, based in an African country, they have their own. That's a Christmas party, their own bar, their own community. It's sort of like separate from the local community that they're supposed to help.

expat community whatever it's called and it sort of reinforces some maybe racial stereotypes it might reinstate some form of new colonialism it might undermine the autonomy of the country that's an aspect you discuss in the book so do you think that these

Foreign agencies also, maybe another unintended consequence is a new form of colonization or racial hierarchy. Yeah. So I do think there are serious worries of this kind. There are certainly, when you read the AIDS critics, there are many people who point out

Just the sort of thing you're describing. All these aid workers come in and they drive these big fancy Humvees through the countryside and they stay in these expensive villas where they drive up the price of the real estate because they're getting all these pride villas and so on and so forth, which has adverse effects on the local communities. They often stick to themselves. This kind of thing that you're describing is very often true.

described by eight critics is a very real thing that goes on. There's also just always the worry that when you go into a different country, even when you have, as it were, the best of intentions to try to help people, it's hard not to have these elements that enter into the relationship, which are ugly at best and morally offensive.

disreputable at worst. It's hard not to go in thinking you have a problem, you're weak, you're needy, you can't solve it for yourself.

solve it for yourself. We can do it. We, the benighted Westerner, right? You know, with, with our greater knowledge and our greater expertise and our greater, you know, resources, we know what you need. We know how you need to do things differently. We'll take care of it. It's mass of the, you know, noblesse oblige that Rudyard Kipling and others talked about and believed in under the British empire. You know, uh, these, uh,

poor citizens that are, you know, backward and primitive and ignorant and maybe even barbaric or savage. And people come in and

Maybe it's not a racist attitude per se, but we do think our lives are better. Yours are worse. Our way of life is better. Yours is suspect. What you do is actually wrong. And we do this again and again and again when we go into other countries. And I mean, when you think about the things that Westerners often criticize in other countries and that they want to change,

And they say this is a change for the better. It's reasonable to ask by whose lights?

And in some cases, I think the change is for the better. But even if it is for the better, it carries with it these tinges or sometimes more than tinges of failing to respect the autonomy, failing to respect the other people, failing to respect their culture and their tradition and the things they care about. And I list a whole bunch of things that people want to change. You know, they want to change Sharia law, you know.

they, they want to not allow someone to be stoned to death because they're an adulterer. I get that feeling. I don't want someone to be stoned to death by, you know, because they're an adulterer, but that's their culture. My culture is differently. They want to change, you know, a fantasize. They don't want people killing baby girls anymore. I,

get that i don't want people killing baby girls anymore either but you go in and you say you have to change this you're basically saying we don't respect you we don't think we you're engaging these practices female circumcision circumcision they're barbaric they're backward there's a failure to take seriously the fact that just because their views are different than ours

doesn't mean they're wrong. Or even if they are wrong, they're the ones who have to learn to deal with them. They're the ones who have to change them. We can't come in as the outsiders, you know, the white saviors, the white knights riding the steed, going to make the world better by our lights. So, yes, I'm not the first person to make this observation by any means, but there are many people who think that, you know, the old attitudes of,

colonialism and so on, re-rise under the guise of we're trying to help you. That's what people used to say. We're going into India. We're trying to help you. And then we massacre. Now I mean the Brits in this particular case, but we massacre the locals because they don't like the changes that we're making for their sake. Yeah, I don't know. Are we making for their sake? Right.

for ours. And even if we're making them for their sake, they're the ones that choose to make those decisions for themselves. It's not up to us to choose for them. So I think that's a serious worry. And this gets again to this issue, the pluralists

If you're just a consequence of this, you say, well, I have to do whatever makes the outcome best. And if I could stop young women from being mutilated, female circumstances, that's a better outcome than if I step on someone's toes, someone might say. But

But there's more to being good in a world of need than just doing the most good. There's treating people with respect. There's taking their own views seriously. There's allowing them to make decisions for themselves and their culture and their family and recognizing that those decisions aren't ours to make, much less voiced upon. So, yeah, it's a very real thing.

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Yeah, and it also reminded me of another thing when you were speaking. Again, I read it some years ago that aid workers, for example, an Australian, American, British aid worker was deployed to Australia.

The country in Africa or Yemen is more or less paid the same money he's paid in the States or in Australia, but a local worker doing exactly the same job or even more is paid more or less the same salary, maybe a little bit more. That is standard in Yemen, say. And

which is pretty, might be better than the average salary in that country, but still that person says, I'm morally speaking, from a moral perspective, I'm doing the same job even more. And then Stan, why that guy has a family, say, in the States and he has to make the money, that's a valid argument, but I guess you're a philosopher, you can problematize it better than I do. That's another sign of the aid. Yeah, no, this is a classic case and this kind of thing goes on all the time. But

There's that argument, equal pay for equal work. And then there's also the argument of, well, and this is, you know, these are classic issues that are related to the topic of capitalism and other things. They're also related to topics of, you know, racism, prejudice, and so on and so forth. But sometimes it's just the question of, you know, what do you have to do to incentivize

someone from the United States to go work in Chad or the Sudan where they don't know the language, they don't know the culture, they're going to be alone, blah, blah, blah, blah. They don't have their family with them, maybe, blah, and so on. What's it going to cost to incentivize them to go there? And it might be a lot.

You might not be able to get a doctor who is trained in the United States to go to Chad if you don't pay with a lot of money. But someone who's on the ground locally, who doesn't have a lot of other options or a lot of other alternatives, right?

has family there, lives there already, doesn't have the option of going somewhere else, you can pay them a lot less to get them to do the work. So this is the capitalist thought of what does it take to bring this guy here, or gal, I use guy generically, and if they will contribute significantly, then we might just have to pay them more, but we don't have to pay this person more, so

Why pay more than you need to? But this is, of course, just one of the many problems of capitalism. It doesn't pay people equally for equal work. It pays people according to what it needs to pay them to draw their talents out of them.

And actually, I should say, not even that. It often way, way, way, way overpays what it needs to draw the talents out of them in ways that are obscene, absurd, ridiculous, immoral. I mean...

Elon Musk went from being worth $25 billion a couple of years ago to being worth $400 billion today. Yeah, he's a very smart guy, a very talented guy. He's bringing things to the world that are worth having, but he would have brought them to the world if the most he could make his entire life was a mere $500 million.

He's not going to sniff at $500 million, but because of the way capitalism works, he's going to end up being $400 billion as of today or yesterday or whatever it was a week ago. It's totally crazy the remuneration that this enabled under capitalism, but it's wholly unnecessary. Yeah.

I'm going to ask one final question because you're a philosopher, you problematize things. I'm sure there are a lot of goodwill, genuinely goodwill people who donate to organizations, to different organizations and certainly you don't want to discourage them and they might be listening to this interview and say, okay, so I'm going to stop donating. I'm going to ask a very dumb question. If you forgive me, what is our moral and civic duty now? I will give you my own personal perspective. I,

Just a few months ago, I donated to an international organization that would help children in Gaza because I didn't know anyone there. A few years ago, I knew of a person in Afghanistan who was scammed for $1,000, which was his whole life saving. And to me, just paying $100 wasn't a big deal.

and there was a GoFund account, I helped that person and I knew the person who had organized that fund. So I knew that it would go directly to that person. I'm from Iran myself. I know a lot of non-for-profit organizations who help kids.

I send money to my family and they give to those people directly. But I'm generally skeptical of international organizations. I try to stay away from them as much as I can and pay directly to the needy, apart from situations where I can't help, like Gaza that I told you. But now what is our moral and civic duty if we have that money and we want to help the needy? How should we do that?

And so I want to say a couple of things here. So I wrote this book because I was deeply troubled by this conversation that went on around my dinner table. And I thought, oh my gosh, I've been living my life a certain way. I mean, for 40 years, 50 years more. Is it possible I've been acting wrong now this time? So I plunged myself into this and read a whole lot of books and really thought, tried to think hard about this and so on. I have not changed my view at all

I'm not going to use the word civic duty here. It's just terminological. But the way I use the notion of civic duty would be more connected to the particular responsibilities that I have to my fellow citizens and to my country. That's just how I use it. It's okay to use it differently. So I wouldn't use civic duty.

But I do think it remains true. I haven't changed my view about this, that we have a moral obligation to help those in need wherever and whenever we can. If the sacrifice isn't too great, it's not, I mean, I'm not saying that we have to, you know, you know,

work ourselves down to where as badly off as they are, the people we're trying to help. But I do think, you know, we have the right as aware the prerogative to look out after ourselves, our children, we only have one life to lead. It's okay if your life is a life that's flourishing in many respects, even while many, many people are suffering. Nevertheless, I

I think it's unfair and unjust when some people are worse off than others through no fault or choice of their own. I think it's typically wrong to ignore the plight of the needy. I think we have to find ways to help. And that conviction has not changed one iota. For all the reasons I'm doing, the fundamental conviction, but the ways that we can help effectively now without violating certain kinds of deontological concerns,

that are involved. For example, if we help fund a tyrant, a despot, someone like an Assad,

And that money goes towards brutal sectarian violence, civil wars, gassing your own people. We've played a hand in that if we know that this is going on. I mean, if we're ignorant of it, that's one thing. But when we know that we're dealing in a country where there are leaders that are corrupt and so on who will find a way of...

getting their hands a part of the money and will often use this to reach heaven. It's on themselves and their neighbors, their citizens and their neighbors. And I think we're partly complicit in the harms that are done. And there are strong deontological objections to doing that. So what we need to find are ways of helping people in need that don't come with all these significant downsides.

And I want to say several things about that. There are many, many ways that one can try to help people in need that don't involve on the ground assistance in desperately poor regions that are governed by despots. I mean, there are ways that you could do it. I do think that there's a kind of two, I'll say three things and then I'll stop. I mean, there's so much that can be said here. But the first thing to say is that humanitarian crises

will always put a certain claim on us.

to respond to the urgency of now, even when all these worries are there. But you just have to think hard about if there's a humanitarian crisis here and a humanitarian crisis here, and these have some of these worries and these don't have some of these worries, and you only would have to contribute $10,000 or $20,000 or $5,000 or $500, whatever it is, $50, maybe you should send it here where we don't have these extra worries rather than here.

I'm a firm believer that it isn't poor countries that we want to help, it's poor people that we want to help. We want to help individuals that are badly off wherever they are. So it may well be, although for most of my life, I always prioritize sending money to the world's poorest countries,

hoping it would get to the poorest people in the world's poorest countries. I'm now looking for places and opportunities to help people who are very badly off, but in countries that are not ruled by despots.

And where I don't have to worry about some of these worries, I don't have to worry about the government becoming unresponsive to the interests of its citizens because of my donations and others like mine. And so I do think that we collectively, political citizens of the world, people like yourself, me, others, need to try to get our leaders and our representatives to change the rules of the international rules.

so that they no longer favor the richest and the most powerful countries, which they currently do. The World Bank, the International Monetary Foundation, all these various different organizations, they have this huge sway. They have these very laudable goals in their title, but they're actually controlled by the world's seven richest, most powerful countries. And that's the bottom line. And basically, the decisions that are made, like, for example, the rule of effectiveness that says whoever controls the resources in a country

can determine what to do with them. Well, that's an absolutely horrible rule for the people of poor countries because people come in, they sell them to rich corporations at a discounted rate, and they keep the money for themselves rather than their people. So who does that benefit? It benefits the tyrants, and it benefits stockholders in the companies that are doing the oil deals. It benefits the rich people. It benefits the rich countries. Right now,

international law, caftan law, all these various other laws, drastically tilt the playing field in favor of the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries and the biggest corporations. And not only be trying to get our governments and our leaders and others to even the playing field, we should be trying to get them to tilt the playing field in the other direction to help the poorest people in the poorest countries.

when trying to make a change. And I will say, for example, in the United States, it's very hard because both parties trumpet some version of America first. I mean, both countries, you know, Trump, make America great again. But Biden, similarly, I'm not saying they're equally good or equally bad, but

Biden similarly says we have to bring back all these jobs from Mexico to the United States. Well, I understand why as a politician in the United States he says that, but the people he's trying to help in the United States are much better than the people who he wants to bring the factories back in from many of these countries where the people in those factories are being paid less.

terrible wage, but for them a living wage that they never otherwise would have had. I think that's actually a bad thing. We should be trying to get our politicians to think differently about that. But now, the last comment about this then. But then what else can you do? I like what you said. When you know people who

who are actually directly overseeing how the aid is being spent, and you know it's going directly to someone who you know is in need, that you can help. Then by all means do that. I mean, that's a lot of gold. Now, just to be aware, as you just said about your friend who was scammed,

I mean, in the world of the internet age, you have all sorts of people who will send you pleas, tell you, you know, in essence, I'm a desperately poor person. I'm a victim of, you know, rape as a weapon of war. I'm blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you send me this, you can help me, et cetera. And where does that money actually go? Too often we don't know.

But if you know someone who actually knows where that's going, that's like one of the most effective things you can do. Another thing you can do is because I don't just care about how much good you do. I care about what kind of a person you are. You can personally get involved in shareable activities that help people. Habitat for Humanity, you can help with that. But the last thing is I now increasingly, since writing the book, give to more local food banks,

in a number of different cities in the United States, in New Jersey, but also in Florida, but also in Texas, but also in California, where I think there's significant need. And I don't have to worry about some of these indirect effects that take place in Chad or Sudan or in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the other thing I do, which I care about a lot, is

is try to give more to aid organizations, for example, in my own country that aid migrant workers, that aid refugees, that aid immigrants.

who face terrible problems, are coming from terrible situations, and if I can aid them, help them get adjusted, and they will often be able to send money back as a result to the people in the countries they come from where they know where it's going, I think this is a way of doing good in a country where I'm less concerned about some of these other worries.

So I think there's a number of things one can do on a number of fronts. I continue to give to humanitarian aid, purely humanitarian aid, even where bad things might happen, but the aid is so urgent. I think I have to work, we have to work to try to get our governments to take a more global perspective and to change the rules that make it

incentivize the resource curse, make that come into play. We need to change those rules and then more directly, if you can give directly to someone, if you could personally be involved in general activities, that that's valuable. And if you could give to organizations in countries with stable governments and large GDPs, as it were, that won't be unduly influenced by a flow of money that will help immigrant populations, help refugees,

help, for example, the victims of human trafficking. These, I think, are all desirable and don't carry the same risks and worries as some of the on-the-ground international development agencies in the world's poorest countries.

Dr. Larry Temkin, thank you very much for this engaging discussion. You've raised a lot of important points, a lot of food for thought. And personally, I'm going to take a more critical stance, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop donating to people or countries that are deserving of that.

Thank you very much for this discussion. I wish I had time to speak more. This is just such a fascinating book. There are lots of important issues and what we discussed in this short podcast was just scratching the surface. I do strongly recommend to people to read the book, engage with the ideas and think critically about the points raised in there.

The book we just discussed was Being Good in a World of Need, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Thank you very much, Larry. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.