Peter Singer: altruism

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically
by Peter Singer
Published 1 Jan 2015

Chapter 15 includes material that was previously published in “Preventing Human Extinction,” coauthored with Nick Beckstead and Matt Wage and available at: www.effective-altruism.com/preventing-human-extinction. A fuller statement of the argument about the roles of reason and emotion in motivating altruism can be found in chapter 2 of Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, The Point of View of the Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Peter Singer University Center for Human Values, Princeton University & School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne PART ONE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM 1 What Is Effective Altruism? I met Matt Wage in 2009 when he took my Practical Ethics class at Princeton University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singer, Peter, 1946– The most good you can do: how effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically / Peter Singer. pages cm. — (Castle lectures in ethics, politics, and economics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-18027-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Altruism. 2. Ethics. I. Title. BJ1474.S56 2015 171’.8—dc23 2014035965 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface Acknowledgments ONE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM 1What Is Effective Altruism? 2A Movement Emerges TWO HOW TO DO THE MOST GOOD 3Living Modestly to Give More 4Earning to Give 5Other Ethical Careers 6Giving a Part of Yourself THREE MOTIVATION AND JUSTIFICATION 7Is Love All We Need?

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Hare, “Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism,” in R. M. Hare, Essays in Ethical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 219n. 13. Anonymous comment made in a discussion forum about earning to give on Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics online course, April 2014. 14. It is possible to value equality for its own sake and still be very supportive of effective altruism. Philosophers who are sympathetic to some form of egalitarianism and also supportive of effective altruism include Nir Eyal, Thomas Pogge, Larry Temkin, and Alex Voorhoeve. 15. See Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 16.

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
by Paul Bloom

Paul Brest complains about Paul Brest, “Forum: Logic of Effective Altruism,” https://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/paul-brest-response-effective-altruism. Catherine Tumber discusses Catherine Tumber, “Forum: Logic of Effective Altruism,” https://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/catherine-tumber-response-effective-altruism. Singer has less patience Peter Singer, “Forum: Logic of Effective Altruism, Reply,” https://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/peter-singer-reply-effective-altruism-responses. 106 One of the most thoughtful Elaine Scarry, “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, eds.

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(New York: Macmillan, 2010). 100 “empathy of foreigners” Thomas Fuller, “Cambodian Activist’s Fall Exposes Broad Deception,” New York Times, June 14, 2014. 102 “Effective Altruism” Kathy Graham, “The Life You Can Save,” Happy and Well, May 27, 2013, http://www.happyandwell.com.au/life-save. “they don’t understand math” Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, 87. As Jennifer Rubenstein put it Jennifer Rubenstein, “Forum: Logic of Effective Altruism,” Boston Review, July 6, 2015, https://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-effective-altruism/jennifer-rubenstein-response-effective-altruism. 103 Not everyone is a fan See the commentators on Peter Singer, “Forum: Logic of Effective Altruism,” Boston Review, July 6, 2015, https://bostonreview.net/forum/peter-singer-logic-effective-altruism.

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Slovic discusses Paul Slovic, “If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act: Numbing and Genocide,” Judgment and Decision Making 2 (2007): 79–95. 91 “a man of humanity” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com, 2010), 94. 92 literature, movies, television See also Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013). 93 “Will the world end up” Walter Isaacson, Time essay, December 21, 1992, cited by C. Daniel Batson, Altruism in Humans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 198. “[s]tick-limbed, balloon-bellied” Philip Gourevitch, “Alms Dealers: Can You Provide Humanitarian Aid Without Facilitating Conflicts?” The New Yorker, October 11, 2010. “disaster theory” For example, Enrico Louis Quarantelli, ed., What Is a Disaster? A Dozen Perspectives on the Question (London: Routledge, 2005). 96 consider Peter Singer’s example Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 6. 99 “warm glow” givers Ibid., 5.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

If the last flight of the evening from Phoenix to Chicago gets canceled and you have a 7:00 a.m. meeting in Chicago the next morning, you’re drawing dead to make it on time unless you have a friend with a private jet. Drowning child: A parable proposed by Peter Singer that asks us to consider whether we would get our suit dirty to save a drowning child in a shallow pond. Since it’s obvious that the answer is yes—the child’s life is more valuable than our suit—Singer uses it to encourage altruistic thinking under the construct of utilitarianism. Dystopia: The opposite of a utopia, a profoundly bad world. EA: See: effective altruism. E/acc: Effective accelerationism, a loosely defined and sometimes trollish movement (the name is a play on effective altruism) that advocates for pushing forward on AI because the risks are either overstated or outweighed by the benefits.

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,” The Humane League, January 6, 2021, thehumaneleague.org/article/factory-farming-animal-cruelty. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT player Dan Smith: “About Double Up Drive,” Double Up Drive, doubleupdrive.org/about. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT emotionally laden societal conventions: Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, Kindle ed. (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 2015), 78. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT produced through inbreeding: Shirley Davis, “Incest and Genetic Disorders,” Trauma-Informed Blog, https://cptsdfoundation.org/trauma-informed-blog (blog), April 4, 2022, cptsdfoundation.org/2022/04/18/incest-and-genetic-disorders.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Usually but not always: In Scott Alexander’s survey of Astral Codex Ten readers, 74 percent of people who identify as EAs say they lean toward consequentialism—the branch of philosophy from which utilitarianism derives—versus just 26 percent of non-EAs. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Famine, Affluence and Morality”: Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229–43, jstor.org/stable/2265052. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a drowning child: dphilo, “Peter Singer’s Drowning Child,” Daily Philosophy, November 24, 2020, daily-philosophy.com/peter-singers-drowning-child. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT his later writings: Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the Harvard endowment: “Financial Report Fiscal Year 2022,” Harvard University, October 2022, finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy22_harvard_financial_report.pdf.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill
Published 27 Jul 2015

On the basis of his arguments, we both made commitments to donate everything we earn above £20,000 per year—about £1 million pounds each over our careers, or 50 percent of our lifetime earnings. Because we were putting so much of our own money on the line, the importance of spending that money as effectively as possible seemed imperative. Peter Singer has since become a powerful advocate for effective altruism: see The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2015). (the number of hours you typically work in your life): If you work forty hours per week, fifty weeks a year for forty years that’s exactly 80,000 hours.

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Will MacAskill, a leader of the effective altruism movement and a rising star in philosophy, now displays his talent for telling stories that pack a punch. This must-read book will lead people to change their careers, their lives, and the world, for the better.” —Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University and author of Animal Liberation and The Most Good You Can Do “Humanity currently spends more money on cigarette ads than on making sure that we as a species survive this century. We’ve got our priorities all wrong, and we need effective altruism to right them. If you want to make a real difference on the biggest issues of our time, you need to read Doing Good Better.” —Jaan Tallinn, cofounder of Skype, Kazaa, and MetaMed “MacAskill leads his readers on a witty, incisive tour through the ideas and applications of effective altruism, which seems increasingly poised to become a dominant social movement of the twenty-first century.”

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Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Version_1 To Toby Ord, Peter Singer, and Stanislav Petrov, without whom this book would not have been written CONTENTS PRAISE FOR DOING GOOD BETTER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION INTRODUCTION Worms and Water Pumps: How can you do the most good? ONE You Are the 1 Percent: Just how much can you achieve? PART ONE THE FIVE KEY QUESTIONS OF EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM TWO Hard Trade-offs: Question #1: How many people benefit, and by how much? THREE How You Can Save Hundreds of Lives: Question #2: Is this the most effective thing you can do?

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
Published 3 Mar 2009

William T Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel Burghart, “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations,” Science, vol. 316, no. 5831 (June 15, 2007), pp. 1622-25. 24. For more information about Henry Spira, see Peter Singer, Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement (Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). ABOUT THE AUTHOR PETER SINGER was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, La Trobe University, and Monash University, and has held several other visiting appointments.

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In 2005, Time magazine named him “One of the 100 most influential people in the world.” Singer is married and has three daughters and three grandchildren. His recreations, apart from reading and writing, include hiking and surfing. Copyright © 2009 by Peter Singer All rights reserved. RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singer, Peter The life you can save : acting now to end world poverty / Peter Singer p. cm. Includes index. eISBN: 978-1-58836-779-2 1. Charity. 2. Humanitarianism. 3. Economic assistance. 4. Poverty. I. Title. HV48.S56 2009 362.5—dc22 2008036279 www.atrandom.com v3.0_r1

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ALSO BY PETER SINGER Democracy and Disobedience Animal Liberation Practical Ethics Marx Animal Factories (with James Mason) The Expanding Circle Hegel The Reproduction Revolution (with Dean Wells) Should the Baby Live? (with Helga Kuhse) How Are We to Live? Rethinking Life and Death Ethics into Action A Darwinian Left Writings on an Ethical Life Unsanctifing Human Life (edited by Helga Kuhse) One World Pushing Time Away The President of Good and Evil How Ethical Is Australia? (with Tom Gregg) The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason) To Renata, without whom … Contents Preface THE ARGUMENT 1.

The Price of Life: In Search of What We're Worth and Who Decides
by Jenny Kleeman
Published 13 Mar 2024

Money donated to the families of those killed in terrorist attacks might buy the donor a sense of personal participation in having done something to make an unthinkable tragedy a little more tolerable, but it could make more difference to the human good if spent elsewhere. Emotional giving is ineffective altruism. Give with your head, not your heart; give to maximize the good you can do for the greatest possible number. Strangers overseas matter as much as our neighbours, future generations are just as important as people already alive today, and the lives of sentient animals are valued equally to human lives. Spend as much as you can, to save as many lives as possible, and the good that you do can be objectively measured. And bettered. The grandfather of the EA approach is the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. His 1975 book, Animal Liberation, says that we should care equally about any being that has the capacity to suffer, even if we can’t see them, even if they are not human.

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While they are never physically far from their possessions, many of them aren’t really here at all. Every year, hundreds of homeless people die on the streets of this city; the leading cause of death is overdose, followed by suicide, homicide and chronic medical conditions. To use philosopher Peter Singer’s analogy, the ‘drowning child’ in the Bay Area is the woman sleeping rough on the pavement outside your office, and the people who work at OpenPhil and GiveWell walk past her every day. While OpenPhil has an area of focus it calls ‘land use reform’ – which it says seeks to ‘reduce the harms caused by excessively restrictive local land use regulations’ that can lead to higher rents – it’s about making it easier to build properties and promote economic growth, and not helping rough sleepers specifically.

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Then Will tells me about meeting the computer scientist-turned-philosopher Toby Ord, and his eyes sparkle. ‘Toby had been thinking for many years about the problem of global poverty. He had planned to give away most of his income, and had been taking the ideas of cost-effectiveness very seriously.’ There was an energy and optimism to Toby that drew Will in, he says. ‘With Peter Singer, the framing was always obligation – that you are acting wrongly unless you do this. Whereas Toby was very upbeat.’ Will switched to study ethics, and in 2009 he and Toby launched Giving What We Can, a campaign to encourage people to donate at least 10 per cent of their income to charity. ‘How many people have signed the Giving What We Can pledge today?’

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
by Michael Lewis
Published 2 Oct 2023

You can feel how horrific it is. There’s not much you can control as a kid, but I could control this.” By high school he was reading Peter Singer and on a moral journey that his parents regarded as faintly ridiculous. “My parents’ attitude was, No one cares about this stuff; that must mean there is nothing to care about. The truth is, I stopped talking about it, because they’d just leave the dinner table.” They’d been especially bewildered by their son’s turn toward effective altruism in college. “They thought giving away things is insane,” said Nishad. Maybe for this reason, Gabe’s parents, Joe and Barbara, had become important to Nishad.

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MacAskill belonged to a small group inside Oxford that had embraced ideas hatched long ago by an Australian philosopher named Peter Singer. He wanted Sam to join him for coffee, then attend a talk he was about to give down the road at Harvard. Just then Sam was maybe the least likely person in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to voluntarily attend a talk by some random academic. But the fact that this professor had sought him out (signaling, to Sam, a justifiable lack of self-­importance), coupled with the mention of Peter Singer’s name, caught his attention. Peter Singer was at least partly responsible for the ideas Sam had about what to do with his life.

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He was brought up as a utilitarian by his parents, two Stanford professors, is serious, dedicated, and committed to doing good, and seems really smart and sensible too (i.e. takes some of the weirder ideas seriously, but isn’t fanatic about them). He’s thinking about earning to give or going into politics. Sam was only a step behind the first people responding to this new call to arms. That fall of 2012, a student of Peter Singer’s at Princeton had just become the first college student, to Singer’s knowledge, to take a job on Wall Street for the express purpose of making money to give away. His name was Matt Wage, and he’d been hired by Jane Street Capital. In the presence of strange new games, the relevant thought processes just seemed to come to Sam.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do
by Richard Robb
Published 12 Nov 2019

The woman saving her husband is acting outside of a purposeful calculation, while the mother can be modeled in terms of her preferences. The Rotten Kid Theorem involves observed care for a limited number of people. Another type of observed care, effective altruism, encompasses multitudes. It stems from concern over the well-being of everyone in the world, often including animals. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, a prominent advocate of effective altruism, abides by the principle that people who live in rich countries are morally obligated to support charities that aid the global poor. He equates spending on luxuries when some people are starving to letting a child drown because you don’t want to muddy your clothes.5 Effective altruists don’t give more to people geographically close to them than to those far away.

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Rather than purposeful, this category of altruism is spontaneous and for-itself. A Taxonomy of Altruism We can distinguish five main categories of altruistic behavior: (1) selfish altruism, when an individual appears to subordinate his interests while actually promoting them; (2) manners and ethics, when an individual observes social norms or adheres to established moral principles; (3) care altruism, when one person cares directly about the well-being of another; (4) mercy, when a person performs a sporadic altruistic act that defies rational explanation; and (5) love altruism, which describes acts that transcend all preferences and do not stand in relation to them.

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But an experiment conducted in poor villages in India with pots of up to 160 days’ wages found that higher stakes lead to more lopsided splits in favor of the allocator and less frequent rejections: as the price (to the allocator) of fair play and (to the receiver) of punishing unfairness went up, players tended to prioritize wealth maximization.3 Care Altruism Bona fide care for someone else’s well-being results in utility functions that are, in economics jargon, “interlocking.” If a child’s well-being is a direct input into her parent’s well-being, then the parent demonstrates what I’ll call care altruism; she desires that the child be happy. This can, but does not necessarily, work in both directions. Parents may or may not care about their children, and children may or may not care about their parents. Care altruism can be split into two categories. In observed care altruism, the income of the benevolent person (the one who cares) is sufficiently high and the care is sufficiently intense that action results.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2002

Norton, 1978). 27 On this point, see Arnhart (1998), pp. 119–120. 28 If one looks at Locke’s sources on infanticide, they fall into the category of the exotic travel literature that was produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to astonish Europeans with the strangeness and barbarity of foreign lands. 29 Peter Singer and Susan Reich, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review Books, 1990), p. 6; and Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). 30 This is a point originally made by Jeremy Bentham, and reiterated by Singer and Reich (1990), pp. 7–8. 31 See John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). 32 Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 194–202. 33 Ibid., pp. 64–65. 34 Peter Singer (in Singer and Reich, 1990) makes a bizarre argument that the case for equality is a moral idea in no way dependent on factual assertions about the actual equality of the beings involved.

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There is today around the world a very powerful animal rights movement, which seeks to improve the lot of the monkeys, chickens, minks, pigs, cows, and other animals that we butcher, experiment on, eat, wear, turn into upholstery, and otherwise treat as means rather than ends in themselves. The radical fringe of this movement has on occasion turned violent, bombing medical research labs and chicken processing plants. The bioethicist Peter Singer has built his career around the promotion of animal rights and a critique of what he calls the speciesism of human beings—the unjust favoring of our species over others.29 All of this leads us to raise the question posed by James Watson at the beginning of Chapter 7: What gives a salamander a right?

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Membership in one of these groups does not guarantee that one’s individual characteristics will be close to the median for that group (I know a lot of individual children who would vote more wisely than their parents), but it is a good enough indicator of ability for practical purposes. What an animal rights proponent like Peter Singer calls speciesism is thus not necessarily an ignorant and self-serving prejudice on the part of human beings, but a belief about human dignity that can be defended on the basis of an empirically grounded view of human specificity. We have broached this subject with the discussion of human cognition.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 13 Mar 2012

Shweder 1991, p. 5. 30. I have been involved in a dispute about this claim. I have collected materials relevant to the controversy at www.JonathanHaidt.com/postpartisan.html. 6. TASTE BUDS OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND 1. Examples in philosophy include Jeremy Bentham, R. M. Hare, and Peter Singer. In psychology, morality is often operationalized as altruism or “prosocial behavior.” It’s about getting more people to help more people, ideally strangers. Even the Dalai Lama defines an ethical act as “one where we refrain from causing harm to others’ experience or expectation of happiness” (Dalai Lama XIV 1999, p. 49). 2.

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Primatologists have long reported acts that appear to be altruistic during their observations of unconstrained interactions in several primate species, but until recently nobody was able to show altruism in a controlled lab setting in the chimpanzee. There is now one study (Horner et al. 2011) showing that chimps will choose the option that brings greater benefit to a partner at no cost to themselves. Chimps are aware that they can produce a benefit, and they choose to do so. But because this choice imposes no cost on the chooser, it fails to meet many definitions of altruism. I believe the anecdotes about chimp altruism, but I stand by my claim that humans are the “giraffes” of altruism. Even if chimps and other primates can do it a little bit, we do it vastly more. 31.

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But one of the most important insights into the origins of morality is that “selfish” genes can give rise to generous creatures, as long as those creatures are selective in their generosity. Altruism toward kin is not a puzzle at all. Altruism toward non-kin, on the other hand, has presented one of the longest-running puzzles in the history of evolutionary thinking.13 A big step toward its solution came in 1971 when Robert Trivers published his theory of reciprocal altruism.14 Trivers noted that evolution could create altruists in a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other individuals and then limit their current niceness to those who were likely to repay the favor.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

As we talked, I noticed Bankman-Fried scratching a medicinal-looking patch on his arm. I thought it would be impolite to ask what it was. But he relaxed as we started talking about how he’d decided to become a hyperaggressive capitalist. His inspiration was an Australian moral philosopher named Peter Singer. In 1971, Singer, then a student at the University of Oxford, began posing a deceptively simple ethical question: If you walked by a child drowning in a shallow pond, would you stop to pull her out, even if it would muddy your clothes? If you’d rescue the kid—and who wouldn’t?—Singer would argue that you have no less of a duty to save any other child, if you have the means to.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Katy Perry: The party was at the house of Michael Kives, a well-connected former Hollywood agent. The next day she told her 154 million followers on Instagram, in an unsolicited endorsement, “im quitting music and becoming an intern for @ftx_official ok.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT If you walked by a child drowning: Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229–43. Singer notes in the paper that he wrote it in 1971. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the acknowledgments of her 2020 book: Barbara H. Fried, Facing Up to Scarcity: The Logic and Limits of Nonconsequentialist Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), xv.

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Then, in late 2017, he quit Jane Street, moved back to California, and took a job as director of business development for MacAskill’s Centre for Effective Altruism. He said that his idea was that he could play an important role in getting the movement off the ground. But another possibility also caught his eye—one that would pull him right back into trading within a few weeks. By then, crypto was in the middle of its first boom: the scammy initial coin offering craze. The prices of Bitcoin and hundreds of other recently created coins were spiking wildly. The CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism, Tara Mac Aulay, had been playing around with trading strategies in her spare time.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

Family love—the cherishing of children, siblings, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and cousins—can evolve. This is called nepotistic altruism. Altruism can also evolve when organisms trade favors. One helps another by grooming, feeding, protecting, or backing him, and is helped in turn when the needs reverse. This is called reciprocal altruism, and it can evolve when the parties recognize each other, interact repeatedly, can confer a large benefit on others at small cost to themselves, keep a memory for favors offered or denied, and are impelled to reciprocate accordingly. Reciprocal altruism can evolve because cooperators do better than hermits or misanthropes.

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Customs that were common throughout history and prehistory—slavery, punishment by mutilation, execution by torture, genocide for convenience, endless blood feuds, the summary killing of strangers, rape as the spoils of war, infanticide as a form of birth control, and the legal ownership of women—have vanished from large parts of the world. The philosopher Peter Singer has shown how continuous moral progress can emerge from a fixed moral sense.18 Suppose we are endowed with a conscience that treats other persons as targets of sympathy and inhibits us from harming or exploiting them. Suppose, too, that we have a mechanism for assessing whether a living thing gets to be classified as a person.

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And it is incapable of stipulating the suite of values and customs that appear to be necessary for a democracy to function in practice. Acknowledging the relative success of constitutional democracy does not require one to be a flag-waving patriot. But it does suggest that something may have been right about the theory of human nature that guided its architects. The left needs a new paradigm. —Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left (1999)43 Conservatives need Charles Darwin. —Larry Arnhart, “Conservatives, Design, and Darwin” (2000)44 What’s going on? That voices of the contemporary left and the contemporary right are both embracing evolutionary psychology after decades of reviling it shows two things.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture
by Antonio Damasio
Published 6 Feb 2018

What is certainly different and “modern” is the fact that when we encounter a problem that can be resolved with or without an altruistic response, we now can think and feel through the process in our minds and can, at least in part, deliberately select the approach we will deploy. We have options. We can affirm altruism and suffer the attending losses or withhold altruism and not lose anything, or even gain, at least for a while. The issue of altruism is through and through a good entry into the distinction between early “cultures” and the full-fledged variety. The origin of altruism is blind cooperation, but altruism can be deconstructed and taught in families and schools as a deliberate human strategy. As is the case with several benevolent and beneficent emotions—compassion, admiration, awe, gratitude—altruistic behavior can be encouraged, exercised, trained, and practiced in society.

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After World War II, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the closest we have come to a desirable but so far unwritten international law, conferring the same rights to all humans; violations of those rights, in some parts of the world, can be brought before international tribunals as crimes against humanity. Humans are obligated to other humans and maybe one day they will also be obligated to other living species and to the planet they were born into. This is real progress. The circle of human concerns has definitely enlarged, as Amartya Sen, Onora O’Neill, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, and Steven Pinker, among others, have noted.6 But why are we witnessing the weakening or collapse of the very establishments that have made these advances possible? Why have things gone wrong, once again, in humanity’s progress in ways that disturbingly resemble the past? Can biology help explain why?

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Manuel Castells, Communication Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2015). 6. Amartya Sen, “The Economics of Happiness and Capability”; Onora O’Neill, Justice Across Boundaries: Whose Obligations? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Nussbaum, Political Emotions; Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). 7. See Haidt, Righteous Mind. 8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents: The Standard Edition (New York: W.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Apr 2015

There’s no shortage of media or academic articles that help to reify this belief. A 2015 article in Maclean’s suggested, for example, that Bill Gates’s ‘tight focus on concrete measures and defined results’ distinguishes his work from earlier, government-sponsored aid and welfare programmes.56 The most influential academic to emphasize this perception of the foundation is Peter Singer, a controversial Australian philosopher who has praised Gates and Warren Buffett for being the ‘most effective altruists in history’. During a TED talk in 2013, Singer pointed to a screenshot and said, ‘This is the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, “All lives have equal value”.

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.: and the Commodity Exchange Act, 211; and gaining control of charity sector, 109; and imposition of position limits for stock market, 212; and social duty to extend government aid, 110 Rotary International, 154, 157 Rothstein, Jesse, 141 Roy, Arundhati, 229 Roy, Sanjit “Bunker”, 67, 68 Sachs, Jeffrey, 38–9 Salmon, Felix, 16–7 Schaffer, Harwood, 221–2 Schambra, William, 136–7 Schmidt, Eric, 64, 242 Scott, James, 239, 240, 241 Scott, Lee, 67 Shah, Sonia, 160, 168 Sherman, John, 45–6 Sherman Antitrust Act, 45, 53 Shiva, Vandana, 229 Skoll, Jeff: and eBay, 63; and philanthropy, 63; and Skoll World Forum, 63–5, 86–7, 112; and social entrepreneurship, 65, 68–9, 86–7 Skoll Foundation, 65, 66, 69 Smith, Adam: and concept of the invisible hand, 16, 17, 37; and need for government regulation, 94; and patents, 179; political economy of, 90; and trade restrictions, 200 Soros, George, 9, 21, 214; and 2012 Skoll World Forum, 63; and funding a pro-immigration platform, 24; and investment in commodities indices, 213 South Africa, 188, 189, 191 Spencer, Herbert: and idea of noninterference of government, 49; and social Darwinism, 48–9 Standard Oil: Department of Justice suit against, 4, 54; and Supreme Court’s decision to split up company, 53 steel industry, 43, 49, 50 Stuckler, David, 174, 224, 228 Sun Oil Company, 59–60 Tanzania, 82, 205 Tarbell, Ida, 54–5 taxes: and avoidance of by Vodafone, 82, 84–5; and charitable donations, 84–5, 230–1; and corporate taxes, 110; and double exemption, 85; and double taxation, 84–5; and Nick Hanauer’s talk on tax measures, 108–9; and public’s subsidy of philanthropy, 232–4; and tax breaks for organizations, 27, 94, 228, 229, 230–1, 243; and tax codes, 8; and tax-free bonds, 110; and tax incentives for philanthropic foundations, 23, 230, 232–3, 241; and Tax Reform Act of 1969, 62, 232–3; in the United States, 107 Tea Party movement, 198, 200, 243 TED (Technology Entertainment Design) events: and Chris Anderson, 108–9; and cost of, 64, 65; and entrepreneurs, 14; and Peter Singer, 146 Thatcher, Margaret, 111–2, 238 Theil, Peter, 242–3, 245 think-tanks, 61, 106–7, 109, 238 Tucker, William Jewett, 11, 14 UNICEF, 154, 157 United Kingdom: and austerity cuts, 74–5; and Big Society Capital bank, 74; and Big Society initiative, 74–6; and Cameron’s spending cuts for nonprofit sector, 74–5; and Conservatives, 111; and Department for International Development, 81, 82; and difficulty with war veterans’ compensation, 76; and dignity of receiving aid from government, 75; economy of, 171; and food prices, 210; and funding for Vodaphone’s M-PESA system, 81–2; Ghana’s independence from, 170; and halting of affordable housing programme, 74; and homelessness, 75; and idea of social contract, 75–6; and Labour Party’s victory, 246–7; and largest charity Wellcome Trust, 149; and Medical Research Council, 83; and mercantilism, 90; and national insurance programmes, 75; and philanthrocapitalism, 76; and public offering of Royal Mail, 100; and spending on global health issues, 154; and think-tanks, 238 United Nations: and Anand Grover, 165; and Food and Agricultural Organization, 19, 210; and microcredit loans, 78; and United Nations Foundations, 192; and World Food Programme’s Purchase for Progress, 207–8, 216; and World Health Organization, 8, 19, 225 United States: and Affordable Care Act, 105; and aid to developing regions, 38–9; and Chamber of Commerce, 137; and charitable giving, 17, 40; and CIA’s fake vaccination drive, 156–7; and Civil Rights movement, 73; and clinical trials for drugs, 167–8; and commodities markets, 210–4; and companies in poor nations, 172; and contraception, 22, 102; and debate over safety of Gardasil vaccines, 163–4; and Department of Justice anti-trust case against Microsoft, 9, 184, 185; and DOJ’s suit against Standard Oil, 4, 53; and Departments of Justice and Agriculture, 209; economy of, 149, 171, 199–200, 211; and expertise in fighting diseases, 150; feelings about Gates Foundation in, 21; and food insecurity, 210; foreign policy of, 157; and global food aid, 203–4; Harrison, Benjamin, 45; and Hoover administration, 109–11; and immigration policy, 132; and income inequality, 107–8; and lack of political will for reform, 234; and laws regarding price-fixing and product bundling, 185; and Lewis and Clark, 113; and list identifying countries in violation of intellectual property rights, 188–9; and lobbying efforts of multinational companies, 225; and McKinley tariff, 45; and National Guard, 10, 43; and New Deal policy of lowering oil costs, 60; and the Panic of 1857, 211; and People’s Party, 43; and President Harrison, 45; and prisons, 113–5, 131; and racial climate of the early 20th century, 58; and railroad expansion, 113; and regulatory laxity; and Republicans, 111; and scandal in Luzerne Country, PA, 114–5; and securities law, 64; and segregation, 46; and shaping of education sector by Gates Foundation, 27–8; and Sherman Antitrust Act, 45; and Silicon Valley, 8, 83; and spending on global health issues, 154, 160; and stock market crash of 1929, 110, 211; and subsidies to farm industry, 217; and US Food and Drug Administration, 105; and US National Science Foundation, 83; and wealthiest one per cent, 18 University of Chicago, 58, 59, 236–7 University of Edinburgh, 167 University of Oxford: and Mandeville’s essays attacking charity, 91; as site of Skoll World Forum, 63–5, 86–87 University of Toronto: and Apotex as corporate donor, 104; and Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 104; and David Healy, 104–5; and donor Eli Lilly, 104–5; and James Orbinski, 153; and threatening or dismissing academics, 103–4 USAID, 78, 203–4, 217 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 193 US-Central America Free Trade Agreement, 201–2 US Congress: and the Commodity Exchange Act, 211; and donor-advised funds, 231–2; and Gensler’s testimony about harmful speculation in energy and agriculture, 213; and philanthropic foundations, 234; and report on Gore’s effort to overturn South African legislation, 188; and Rockefeller Foundation, 3–4, 6 Veblen, Thorstein, 115–6 Vodafone, 81–2, 85 Wainer, Howard, 134–5 Walmart, 25, 67 Walsh Commission on Industrial Relations, 52; and public concerns over wealth concentration, 234; and testimony of Rockefeller Sr., 53 Walton Family Foundation: and contributions to education, 122; criticisms of, 24–5, 230; and investments, 123; and primary and secondary for-profit schools, 9; and tax-avoiding trusts, 24–5; and Walton family, 23, 25–6 Ward, Lester Frank, 51, 84 Washington, Booker T.: and efforts to advance education for African Americans, 10, 47; as supporter of ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, 46 Weber, Max, 53 Wellcome, Henry, 149 Wickersham, George, 95–96 Wilson, Woodrow, 52, 58, 234 Woestehoff, Julie, 135–6 World Bank: and International Monetary Fund, 172; and Joseph Stiglitz, 172; and lending requirements for Ghana, 170; and microcredit loans, 78, 79; and ranking of countries, 2; and tax avoidance loopholes, 204–5 World Economic Forum, 30, 64; and attendance during 2009 crisis, 86; and founder Klaus Schwab, 66 World Food Programme, 207–8 World Health Organization: and accountability, 8, 196; budget of, 8; and campaign against smallpox, 155; and cash grants from large corporations, 226; and conference in Moscow, 226–7; and cutting of jobs, 226; and delay of guidance on early use of HIV treatment, 194–6; and earmarked funding for fighting diseases, 224; and eradication of malaria, 160; establishment of, 150; and fight against polio, 154, 157–8; and global health issues, 26, 149, 191; investments of, 149; and involvement of Gates, 154, 196; and League of Nations Health Organization, 150; and list of companies manufacturing safe AIDS drugs, 191; and Melinda Gates, 244; and Pan American Health Organization, 226; and policy-setting, 19; and regulations for businesses, 226; and report on diet and physical activity, 225; and voluntary contributions, 224 World Trade Organization, 186, 187, 189, 201 Young, Michael, 72–3 Yunus, Muhammad: and awarding of Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, 77; and Grameen Bank, 78, 79; and microcredit loans, 7, 78–9; and social innovation, 73 Zambia, 204, 205 Zuckerberg, Mark, 23, 24 Zunz, Olivier, 60, 110

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The new philanthropists are increasingly proud, triumphant even, about the private economic fortunes to be made through embracing philanthrocapitalism. Not only is it no longer necessary to ‘disguise’ or minimize self-interest, self-interest is championed as the best rationale for helping others. It is seen not as coexisting in tension with altruism, but as a prerequisite for altruism. I explore the ramifications of this ideological shift. This book’s structure is straightforward. In the first half, I investigate the rise of the philanthrocapitalism movement, exploring its political implications and commercial goals. Today’s philanthrocapitalists are remarkably fond of the word ‘social’.

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better
by Rob Reich
Published 20 Nov 2018

This frame gives rise to questions such as: When is giving obligatory? To whom and how much should one give? Is anonymous giving more praiseworthy than its alternative? Does individual motive matter in evaluating giving? What role, if any, does philanthropy play in an account of personal virtue? Peter Singer’s argument that individuals in developed countries have especially demanding obligations to assist those in desperate poverty is but one well-known example of such an approach.¹² These are natural and important questions, and since large majorities of people make philanthropic donations and volunteer time every year, they are asked as often, I would think, by ordinary people as by moral philosophers.

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Economists have attempted to model and measure the motivation of receiving a “warm glow” or psychological benefit in acting altruistically.¹⁵ In making a charitable contribution, the donor experiences pleasure in giving and receives in return for the gift a “warm glow,” consuming the benefit of her own altruism. A warm glow might be non-preclusive in that purchasing joy through a charitable contribution does not diminish the ability of others to do the same. But a warm glow is undeniably private rather than public. Altruism might also be construed as a scarce resource, anyway. Other economists have demonstrated how much charitable giving, especially to elite institutions such as universities, hospitals, and cultural organizations, is motivated by status signaling.¹⁶ Here the motivation to give is status seeking and self-interested, not altruistic, to maintain position or move up the social hierarchy.

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Philanthropy calls out for an analysis through republican political theory, alert to questions of domination by philanthropists.¹ Finally, consider the rise of effective altruism, a movement inspired largely by philosophers that seeks to move donors to maximize the good they do with their donations (and career choices). Effective altruists have a powerful private morality for informing giving—fund proven and highly effective charitable organizations that maximize human or animal welfare—but they have ignored the implications for public morality.² In addition to questions concerning paternalism, dependence, and effective altruism, a host of recent developments in the institutional patterns of philanthropy cry out for the attention of political theorists, social scientists, and investigative journalists.

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

Through most of our prehistory, humans lived under conditions that would have strongly favoured the evolution of all four kinds of altruism. We lived in villages, or earlier in discrete roving bands like baboons, partially isolated from neighbouring bands or villages. Most of your fellow band members would have been kin, more closely related to you than members of other bands – plenty of opportunities for kin altruism to evolve. And, whether kin or not, you would tend to meet the same individuals again and again throughout your life – ideal conditions for the evolution of reciprocal altruism. Those are also the ideal conditions for building a reputation for altruism, and the very same ideal conditions for advertising conspicuous generosity.

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With corresponding minor differences, the Kuna show the same moral judgements as the rest of us. Of particular interest for this book, Hauser also wondered whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should differ. But it seems that they don’t. Hauser, working with the moral philosopher Peter Singer,87 focused on three hypothetical dilemmas and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious people. In each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a hypothetical action is morally ‘obligatory’, ‘permissible’ or ‘forbidden’. The three dilemmas were: Denise’s dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it was permissible to divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.

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Then, too, there is improved education and, in particular, the increased understanding that each of us shares a common humanity with members of other races and with the other sex – both deeply unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially evolution. One reason black people and women and, in Nazi Germany, Jews and gypsies have been treated badly is that they were not perceived as fully human. The philosopher Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, is the most eloquent advocate of the view that we should move to a post-speciesist condition in which humane treatment is meted out to all species that have the brainpower to appreciate it. Perhaps this hints at the direction in which the moral Zeitgeist might move in future centuries.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

Since saving the human race is the one and only priority Christine Emba, “Why ‘Longtermism’ Isn’t Ethically Sound,” Washington Post, September 5, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/05/longtermism-philanthropy-altruism-risks/. Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher and ethicist https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ethical-implications-of-focusing-on-extinction-risk-by-peter-singer-2021-10. “The so-called ‘agents of doom’ ” https://www.abc.net.au/religion/rupert-read-the-dangers-of-longtermism/13977152. “The market is in a state of shock” https://www.morningstar.com.au/insights/stocks/219544/global-market-report-09-march.

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Nick Beckstead, a prominent Longtermist at Oxford University, wrote in his doctoral thesis that since wealthier countries “have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive” it makes sense to him that “saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country.” Bostrom floated the idea of putting a tracking device on every person in the world to make sure no one was cooking up a humanity-killing virus in their basement. Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher and ethicist whose work inspired many of the founders of effective altruism, saw longtermist thinking as a threat. “The dangers of treating extinction risks as humanity’s overriding concern should be obvious,” he wrote in an October 2021 article. “Viewing current problems through the lens of existential risk to our species can shrink those problems to almost nothing, while justifying almost anything that increases our odds of surviving long enough to spread beyond Earth.”

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Bankman-Fried, who’d become known for his unruly shock of curly hair and aversion to business suits, was an adherent of an increasingly influential semi-apocalyptic worldview known as longtermism—a movement that shared elements of Taleb’s precautionary principle. It was an outgrowth of a moral philosophy developed in the 2000s known as effective altruism, a quantitative philanthropic method designed to estimate probabilities about which causes were most important in terms of humanity’s well-being. Will alleviating global poverty do more good than preparing for the next pandemic? Will preparing for a killer AI be more effective than spending money to send a human colony to Mars? By the early 2020s, more than $40 billion had been invested in the effective-altruism movement, and its members were advising top officials in the United Nations and the U.S. government.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

But any testable version of these cynical theories must identify some independent ulterior motive for the help extended, such as assuaging one’s own distress, avoiding public censure, or garnering public esteem. The word altruism is ambiguous too. The “altruism” in the empathy-altruism hypothesis is altruism in the psychological sense of a motive to benefit another organism as an end in itself rather than as a means to some other end.48 This differs from altruism in the evolutionary biologist’s sense, which is defined in terms of behavior rather than motives: biological altruism consists of behavior that benefits another organism at a cost to oneself.49 (Biologists use the term to help distinguish the two ways in which one organism can benefit another.

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Shared traits and relief from shock: Krebs, 1975. 47. Empathy-altruism hypothesis: Batson & Ahmad, 2001; Batson et al., 2002; Batson, Ahmad, & Stocks, 2005a; Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981; Batson et al., 1988; Krebs, 1975. 48. Psychological definition of altruism: Batson et al., 2002; Batson et al., 1981; Batson et al., 1988. 49. Evolutionary definition of altruism: Dawkins, 1976/1989; Hamilton, 1963; Maynard Smith, 1982. 50. Confusions about altruism: Pinker, 1997, chaps. 1, 6; Pinker, 2006. 51. Empathy-altruism hypotheses: Batson & Ahmad, 2001; Batson et al., 2002; Batson et al., 2005a; Batson et al., 1981; Batson et al., 1988. 52.

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Krebs explained the sacrifice of his participants on behalf of their fellows with an idea he called the empathy-altruism hypothesis: empathy encourages altruism.47 The word empathy, as we have seen, is ambiguous, and so we are really dealing with two hypotheses. One, based on the “sympathy” sense, is that our emotional repertoire includes a state in which another person’s well-being matters to us—we are pleased when the person is happy, and upset when he or she is not—and that this state motivates us to help them with no ulterior motive. If true, this idea—let’s call it the sympathy-altruism hypothesis—would refute a pair of old theories called psychological hedonism, according to which people only do things that give them pleasure, and psychological egoism, according to which people only do things that provide them with a benefit.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 26 Dec 2005

T h e s e two p r o c e s s e s — k i n altruism and reciprocal altruism—do indeed explain nearly all altruism among nonhuman animals, and much of human altruism, too. This answer is unsatisfying, however, because our genes are, to s o m e extent, p u p p e t masters making us want things that are sometimes good for them but bad for us (such as extramari-tal affairs, or prestige bought at the expense of happiness). We cannot look to genetic self-interest as a guide either to virtuous or to happy living. Furthermore, anyone who does embrace reciprocal altruism as a justification for altruism (rather than merely a c a u s e of it) would then be free to pick and choose: Be nice to those who can help you, but don't waste time or money on anyone else (for example, never leave a tip in restaurants you will not return to).

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In the cold logic of these computer simulations, whoever accumulates the most resources in one generation goes on to produce more children in the next, so selfishness is adaptive but altruism is not. The only solution to the free-rider problem is to make altruism pay, and two back-to-back breakthroughs in evolutionary thinking showed how to do that. In chapter 3 I presented kin altruism (be nice to those w h o share your genes) and reciprocal altruism (be nice to those who might reciprocate in the future) as two steps on the way to ultrasociality. Once these two solutions to the free-rider problem were published (in 1966 and 1971, respectively),41 most evolutionary theorists considered the problem of altruism solved and essentially declared group selection illegal.

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S o m e ants, for example, spend their lives hanging from the top of a tunnel, offering their abdomens for use as food storage bags by the rest of the nest.7 T h e ultrasocial animals evolved into a state of ultrakinship, which led automatically to ultracooperation (as in building and defending a large nest or hive), which allowed the massive division of labor (ants have castes such as soldier, forager, nursery worker, and food storage bag), which created hives overflowing with milk and honey, or whatever other s u b s t a n c e they use to store their surplus food. We h u m a n s also try to extend the reach of kin altruism by using fictitious kinship n a m e s for nonrelatives, as when children are encouraged to call their parents' friends Uncle B o b and Aunt Sarah. Indeed, the mafia is known as "the family," and the very idea of a godfather is an attempt to forge a kin-like link with a man who is not true kin. T h e human mind finds kinship deeply appealing, and kin altruism surely underlies the cultural ubiquity of nepotism. But even in the mafia, kin altruism can take you only so far. At s o m e point you have to work with people who are at best distant relations, and to do so you'd better h a v e another trick up your sleeve.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

In a key 1971 paper biologist Robert Trivers laid out the evolutionary logic and parameters by which unrelated organisms engage in “reciprocal altruism”—incurring a fitness cost to enhance a nonrelative’s fitness, with the expectation of reciprocation.32 It doesn’t require consciousness to evolve reciprocal altruism; back to the metaphor of the airplane wing in the wind tunnel. But there are some requirements for its occurrence. Obviously, the species must be social. Furthermore, social interactions have to be frequent enough that the altruist and the indebted are likely to encounter each other again. And individuals must be able to recognize each other. Amid reciprocal altruism occurring in numerous species, individuals often attempt to cheat (i.e., to not reciprocate) and monitor attempts by others to do the same to them.

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For biologists the most frequent stance is anchored in chapter 10’s evolutionary view of cooperation and altruism, one that always contains some element of self-interest. Is this surprising? Pure selflessness is clearly going to be an uphill battle if the very part of the brain most central to an empathic state—the ACC—evolved to observe and learn from others’ pain for your own benefit.54 The self-oriented rewards of acting compassionately are endless. There’s the interpersonal—leaving the beneficiary in your debt, thus turfing this from altruism to reciprocal altruism. There are the public benefits of reputation and acclaim—the celebrity swooping into a refugee camp for a photo op with starving kids made joyful by her incandescent presence.

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Nahum et al., “Evolution of Restraint in a Structured Rock-Paper-Scissors Community,” PNAS 108 (2011): 10831. 30. G. Wilkinson, “Reciprocal Altruism in Bats and Other Mammals,” Ethology and Sociobiology 9 (1988): 85; G. Wilkinson, “Reciprocal Food Sharing in the Vampire Bat,” Nat 308 (1984): 181. 31. W. D. Hamilton, “Geometry for the Selfish Herd,” J Theoretical Biol 31 (1971): 295. 32. R. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Rev of Biol 46 (1971): 35. 33. R. Seyfarth and D. Cheney, “Grooming, Alliances and Reciprocal Altruism in Vervet Monkeys,” Nat 308 (1984): 541. 34. R. Axelrod and W. D. Hamilton, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Sci 211 (1981): 1390. 35.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Willpower is thus more like “a muscle that could be fatigued through use.” Contrast this with how a philosopher like Peter Singer writes about altruism. Singer, writing in the 1970s, attacks economists who think that altruism is a resource like oil, “the more of which we use the less we have.” Singer, in contrast, asks, “Why should we not assume that altruism is more like sexual potency—much used, it constantly renews itself, but if rarely called upon, it will be begin to atrophy and will not be available when needed?” Likewise, philosopher Michael Sandel, echoing Singer, writes that “altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use.

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Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, Kindle ed. (New York: Penguin, 2011), Kindle location 1448–1449. 339 “a muscle that could be fatigued through use”: ibid., Kindle location 362–363. 339 “Why should we not assume that altruism”: Peter Singer, “Altruism and Commerce: A Defense of Titmuss against Arrow,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 2, no. 3 (April 1, 1973): 312–320. 339 “altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic spirit”: Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 130. 339 To use the language of Ivan Illich: on Illich’s distinction between “needs” and “requirements,” see David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1992), 166. 340 “now that computers are getting smarter”: Baumeister and Tierney, Willpower, Kindle location 1616–1618. 340 “Instead of paying doctors and hospitals”: ibid., Kindle location 1718–1720. 341 “Rather than hope that we as a nation”: Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It, Kindle ed.

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Perhaps, if we universalize this scheme and prohibit citizens from breaking the law everywhere, we’ll end up with morally deficient citizens who won’t do the right thing unless the technological infrastructure explicitly robs them of the opportunity to do the wrong thing. Might automatically resetting meters somehow undermine the bonds of solidarity between drivers, depriving some of opportunities to engage in virtuous behavior while convincing others that the world is a fully atomized space where no acts of altruism are permitted? Such concerns might initially seem convincing, but they seem to rest on faulty logic, as the seemingly “virtuous” behavior in question (leaving prepaid time on meters for use by the next person who parks) is most probably self-serving, particularly if the departing drivers initially thought they would be staying longer.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

Britain’s Department of the Environment says each year of life in good health is worth £29,000. A World Bank study in 2007 about the cost estimated that a citizen of India was worth about $3,162 a year, which amounts to a little under $95,000 for an entire life. Indeed, we are all ready to accept that life has a price tag as long as it’s not our own. The ethicist and philosopher Peter Singer suggested a nifty exercise to prove the point: ask yourself how much you would be willing to pay, through insurance premiums say, so the health-care system would cover a treatment to extend the life of a stranger by one year. Would you pay $1 million? $10 million? The moment you say no you have put a ceiling on the price of that person’s life.

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The story about the invention of ninety-nine-cent stores is in Tim Arango, “Bet Your Bottom Dollar on 99 Cents,” New York Times, February 8, 2009. Kahneman’s opinion on paternalistic interventions is found in Daniel Kahneman, “New Challenges to the Rationality Assumption,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Vol. 150, No. 1, 1994, pp. 18-36. 40-41 The Price of Life: The Jewish teachings are mentioned in Peter Singer, “Why We Must Ration Health Care,” New York Times Magazine, July 19, 2009. The various prices placed on life come from Chris Dockins, Kelly Maguire, Nathalie Simon, and Melonie Sullivan, “Value of Statistical Life Analysis and Environmental Policy,” White Paper for Presentation to Science Advisory Board—Environmental Economics Advisory Committee, U.S.

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But In Rainbows demonstrated that if creators would free themselves of the capitalistic shackles represented by record labels, Hollywood studios, and other representatives of corporate greed that siphoned off a big slice of their revenues, this new paradigm could work out for everybody. No longer would it be necessary for creators to hide behind the walls of copyright erected to protect “intellectual property.” The production of information goods would be supported by consumers’ altruism, much like philanthropy or tipping. Artists could stoke consumers’ sense of fairness and reciprocity by giving away the product of their toil to anybody who wanted it for free. Yet despite the utopian feel of Radiohead’s implicit proposition, In Rainbows was less a product of communitarian idealism than of stark, urgent necessity.

Tyler Cowen - Stubborn Attachments A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Meg Patrick

They would instead become a kind of utility slave, serving only the interests of others and giving themselves just enough food and fuel to keep going. The result is that utilitarianism, or for that matter many forms of consequentialism, often is seen as an excessively demanding moral philosophy. People fall into two camps: those who reject utilitarianism for its extreme and 59 unacceptable implications, and those like the early Peter Singer, who trumpet the call for greater sacrifice and pursue the utilitarian logic to a consistent extreme. As I’ve stated, I am a pluralist rather than a simple utilitarian. Still, utility is a central and important value, so I would like to confront these dilemmas and consider the scope of our obligations to the poor.

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Oswald, Andrew J. 1997. “Happiness and Economic Performance.” The Economic Journal 107(445): 1815-1831. Oulton, Nicholas. “Hooray for GDP!”, unpublished manuscript, 2012. 126 Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1984. Parfit, Derek. 1986. “Overpopulation and the Quality of Life.” In Peter Singer (ed.) Applied Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Parfit, Derek. On What Matters, volumes I and II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Persson, Torsten, and Guido Tabellini. 1994. “Is Inequality Harmful for Growth?” American Economic Review 84(3): 600-621. Pettit, Philip. “The Consequentialist Perspective.”

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A higher growth rate means that the future, at some point in time, will be much richer than otherwise, and as I argued it means also that human beings will be much better off. How compelled should we feel to bring about this wealthier state of affairs? If you only care about today you won’t have such strong reason to act in favor of higher sustainable growth. Most of us are altruistic, especially toward our own children and grandchildren, but this form of partial altruism does not make us care much about other peoples’ grandkids. When people are voting or choosing for all future generations as a whole, they often behave quite selfishly. Political time horizons tend to be very short, often extending no further than the next election or 47 the next media cycle. Voters are keen to receive more government spending now and to postpone the required taxes to the more distant future.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Tyler Cowen
Published 15 Oct 2018

Most people would instead become a kind of utility slave, serving only the interests of others and feeding themselves just enough to survive. The result is that utilitarianism—or many forms of consequentialism, for that matter—is often seen as an excessively demanding moral philosophy. People fall into two camps: those who reject utilitarianism for its extreme and unacceptable implications, and those, like the early Peter Singer, who trumpet the call for greater sacrifice and pursue the utilitarian logic to a consistent extreme. As I stated earlier, I am a pluralist rather than a simple utilitarian. Still, utility is a central and important value, so I would like to confront these dilemmas and consider the scope of our obligations to the poor.

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The Economic Journal 107, no. 445: 1815–1831. Oulton, Nicholas. 2012. “Hooray for GDP!” Unpublished manuscript. London School of Economics. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Parfit, Derek. 1986. “Overpopulation and the Quality of Life.” In Applied Ethics, edited by Peter Singer. New York: Oxford University Press. Parfit, Derek. 2011. On What Matters, Volumes I and II. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Persson, Torsten, and Guido Tabellini. 1994. “Is Inequality Harmful for Growth?” American Economic Review 84, no. 3: 600–621. Pettit, Philip. 1997. “The Consequentialist Perspective.”

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A higher growth rate means that the future, at some point in time, will be much richer than it would be otherwise, and, as I argued earlier, it also means that human beings will be much better off. How compelled should we feel to bring about this wealthier state of affairs? If you only care about today, you won’t be as motivated to act in favor of higher sustainable growth. Most of us are altruistic, especially toward our own children and grandchildren. But this form of partial altruism does not make us care much about other people’s grandkids. When people vote or otherwise make choices that affect future generations as a whole, they often behave quite selfishly. Political time horizons tend to be very short, often extending no further than the next election or the next media cycle.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian
Published 5 Oct 2020

“I think many people will see it as still unresolved,” Smith says. “I think it’s fair to say it’s still a lively discussion.”63 The discussion isn’t only theoretical, either. Among the twenty-first-century “effective altruism” movement, for instance, opinions vary about how much of a sacrifice someone ought to make in order to maximally help others.64 Princeton philosopher Peter Singer famously said that neglecting to donate to charity was analogous to walking past a pond in which a child was drowning and doing nothing to help.65 Even for those who more or less agree with this argument, there is some debate over how much to actually give.

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As he puts it: “What shall I do when I am uncertain what I morally ought to do? Philosophers have paid little attention to this sort of question.” 78. For more on the ideas of effective altruism, see MacAskill, Doing Good Better, and Singer, The Most Good You Can Do. For more on the history of the term “effective altruism,” see MacAskill’s “The History of the Term ‘Effective Altruism,’” Effective Altruism Forum, http://effective-altruism.com/ea/5w/the_history_of_the_term_effective_altruism/. 79. MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord, Moral Uncertainty. See also the earlier book by Lockhart: Moral Uncertainty and Its Consequences. 80. See, e.g., Lockhart, Moral Uncertainty and Its Consequences, and Gustafsson and Torpman, “In Defence of My Favourite Theory.” 81.

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Some recent philosophical literature explicitly discusses the links between possibilism, actualism, and effective altruism. See, e.g., Timmerman, “Effective Altruism’s Underspecification Problem.” 65. Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”; see also Singer, “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.” 66. Julia Wise, “Aim High, Even If You Fall Short,” Giving Gladly (blog), October 8, 2014. http://www.givinggladly.com/2014/10/aim-high-even-if-you-fall-short.html. 67. Will MacAskill, “The Best Books on Effective Altruism,” interview by Edouard Mathieu, Five Books, https://fivebooks.com/best-books/effective-altruism-will-macaskill/. See also the organization Giving What We Can, founded by MacAskill and his colleague Toby Ord after Ord decided, inspired by Singer and others, to commit to giving a portion of his income to effective charities. 68.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

Moving up the pyramid, psycho-social needs – security, bonding, socialization, affiliation, acceptance, and affection – have evolved to aid and reinforce cooperation and altruism, traits that benefit both individuals and the group. Selfish genes drive kin altruism (the propensity to help those who are genetically related to us), and social relations fuel reciprocal altruism (if you’ll scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours); but to achieve species- and bio-altruism, we need to learn higher-order pro-social behavior. Achieving the upper levels of the pyramid requires social and political action. We evolved in a manner in which our concern for the environment and biodiversity was restricted to a few tens of square kilometers, a couple of hundred of species, and a handful of decades.

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I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.9 Then there is the principle of the interchangeability of perspectives, which is at the core of the oldest moral principle discovered multiple times around the world: the Golden Rule. Pinker notes that it also forms the basis of Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity, the Social Contract of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke; Kant’s Categorical Imperative; and Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance. It also underlies Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle – the optimistic proposal that our moral sense, though shaped by evolution to overvalue self, kin and clan, can propel us on a path of moral progress, as our reasoning forces us to generalize it to larger and larger circles of sentient beings.10 Professor Ellis asserts that my attempt to base moral values in science fails, but, in fact, as I document in The Moral Arc (and more briefly in my manifesto), the moral progress we have witnessed over the centuries – the abolition of slavery, torture, and the death penalty; the expansion of rights to blacks, women, children, workers, and now even animals – has its origin in the scientific and reason-based concept that the world is governed by laws and principles that we can understand and apply, whether it is solar systems, eco systems, political systems, economic systems, or social and moral systems.

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In my 1997 book, Why People Believe Weird Things, I devoted a chapter to the cult-like following that developed around Rand and her philosophy (I called it “The Unlikeliest Cult in History”), in an attempt to show that extremism of any kind, even the sort that the eschews cultish behavior, can become irrational. And although I now disagree with her theory of human nature and her ethics of self-interest (science shows that in addition to being selfish, competitive, and greedy, we also harbor a great capacity for altruism, cooperation, and charity), reading Rand led me to the extensive body of literature on politics and economics. I do not know if it was the practical outcomes of fiscal conservatism and free market economics that convinced me of their value or if it was my temperament that reverberated so well with this worldview.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

These changes would also have impacted the timing of further reproductive events, until at some point in the future, the identities of everyone who is born is different than they would have been. And this is all because of small decisions like which route home your parents took from work one day. I dedicated my first book, Doing Good Better, to Peter Singer, Toby Ord, and Stanislav Petrov, and I said that “without [them] this book would not have been written.” But the book also would not have been written were it not for Jesus, Hitler, or any random English peasant in the fifteenth century. In time travel stories, small actions in the past often result in radical changes in the present.

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Personal fit is, in addition, one of the main ingredients of job satisfaction. People often associate altruism with self-sacrifice, but I think that for the most part, that is the wrong way to think about it. For me personally, since I started trying to do the most good with my life, I feel that my life is more meaningful, authentic, and autonomous. I am part of a growing community of people trying to make the world a better place, and many of these people are now among my closest friends. Effective altruism has added to my life, not subtracted from it. There is, moreover, a pragmatic reason to do a job you enjoy: it makes your impact sustainable over the long term.

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For Holly William MacAskill is an associate professor in philosophy and senior research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world. He has focused his research on moral uncertainty, effective altruism, and future generations. A TED speaker and past Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur, he also cofounded the nonprofits Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Y Combinator-backed 80,000 Hours, which together have moved over £200 million to effective charities. He is the author of Doing Good Better and lives in Oxford. A Oneworld Book First published in Great Britain, the Republic of Ireland and Australia by Oneworld Publications, 2022 This ebook edition published 2022 Published by arrangement with Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want
by Nicholas Epley
Published 11 Feb 2014

And yet government and military leaders around the world are charged with diminishing these threats as effectively as they can. What are they to do? Diminishing threats requires understanding the minds of those who threaten. Might a failure to recognize terrorists as fully human have diminished our ability to combat them? In Wired for War, Peter Singer describes how the shock and awe strategy that opened the Iraq War was intended to terrify the enemy in the hopes of scaring them into submission.24 Led by drones and long-range aircraft, U.S. forces sought to establish fear of an eye in the sky that could see everything and kill anywhere. If you believed that your enemies were unfeeling savages, then you would need something really terrifying in order to make them feel enough to give up their fight and surrender.

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The violent actors are overwhelmed by empathy for their own group, which all too often naturally leads to disdain for competing groups. They act out of parochial altruism, a strong commitment to benefit one’s own group or cause without regard for the consequences for oneself.27 It is the very motive that John McCain, while campaigning for president of the United States, said all people wanted: “to serve a cause greater than their self-interest.” Parochial altruism motivates us to help those who are close to us and to fight those who threaten us. It uses the language of family, of brothers and sisters, of brotherhood and sisterhood.

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One of the most popular songs in Pakistan in 2007, in a region being hit by ten drone strikes per week, included the lines “America’s heartless terrorism,/Killing people like insects,/But honor does not fear power.”28 Shock and awe seems like a poor strategy for fighting warriors who love their cause as much as we love ours. The American military followed up with efforts to “win the hearts and minds” of Afghans and Iraqis, but the reality of parochial altruism means that this strategy came too late. You fight parochial altruism by weakening boundaries between in-groups and out-groups, between us and them. Far from being weak or soft, winning hearts and minds is the very thing that could turn empathic enemies into allies. Would conflicts be solved more intelligently if our political leaders recognized members of the other side as fully human rather than as savage animals or mindless objects?

The Evolution of God
by Robert Wright
Published 8 Jun 2009

Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Center for Human Values in 2004–2005. This gave me the time and resources to focus single-mindedly on this project, and weekly seminars, led by Steve Macedo, were valuable—especially the one devoted to critiquing ideas central to this book. Two years later at Princeton, I benefited from co-teaching a graduate seminar with Peter Singer on the biological basis of moral intuition. The Center for Human Values also brought me two bona fide godsends—graduate students who became invaluable research assistants: Kevin Osterloh, whose fluency in Hebrew and conversancy in the Hebrew Bible helped guide me through largely unfamiliar terrain; and Mairaj Syed, whose fluency in Arabic and conversancy in Islamic scripture had exactly analogous value.

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Now back to Princeton: The office environment at the Center for Human Values was warmed by the presence of Jan Logan, Erum Syed, Kim Girman, and John Hibbs. And thanks, for performing the aforementioned critique of ideas in this book, go to some of my fellow fellows: Justin D’Arms, Stephen Gardiner, Daniel Jacobson, Rachana Kamtekar, Susan Lape, and Rob Reich, who were joined in that task by faculty members Peter Singer and Dale Jamieson. (Dale gave me what may turn out to have been the best advice: Abandon the project.) At Bloggingheads.tv, a staff of highly trained professionals allowed me to pretend to run a video Web site while actually writing a book. Thanks to Greg Dingle, Brenda Talbot, Sang Ngo, Sian Gibby, Aryeh Cohen-Wade, David Killoren, Milton Lawson, and the original BhTV staffer, Brian Degenhart.

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So, in theory, some of the more basic features of the human mind should be fairly standard equipment in gods, especially the gods of “primitive” religions. That seems to be the case, and one of these features deserves special consideration: the part of the human mind shaped by the evolutionary dynamic known as “reciprocal altruism.” In light of this dynamic, much about the origin of religion, and for that matter much about contemporary religion, makes a new kind of sense. Thanks to reciprocal altruism, people are “designed” to settle into mutually beneficial relationships with other people, people whom they can count on for things ranging from food to valuable gossip to social support, and who in turn can count on them.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

Thank you to Josie Axford-Foster, Beth Barnes, Nick Beckstead, Haydn Belfield, Nick Bostrom, Danny Bressler, Tim Campbell, Natalie Cargill, Shamil Chandaria, Paul Christiano, Teddy Collins, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Andrew Critch, Allan Dafoe, Max Daniel, Richard Danzig, Ben Delo, Daniel Dewey, Luke Ding, Peter Doane, Eric Drexler, Peter Eckersley, Holly Elmore, Sebastian Farquhar, Richard Fisher, Lukas Gloor, Ian Godfrey, Katja Grace, Hilary Greaves, Demis Hassabis, Hiski Haukkala, Alexa Hazel, Kirsten Horton, Holden Karnofsky, Lynn Keller, Luke Kemp, Alexis Kirschbaum, Howie Lempel, Gregory Lewis, Will MacAskill, Vishal Maini, Jason Matheny, Dylan Matthews, Tegan McCaslin, Andreas Mogensen, Luke Muehlhauser, Tim Munday, John Osborne, Richard Parr, Martin Rees, Sebastian Roberts, Max Roser, Anders Sandberg, Carl Shulman, Peter Singer, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Pablo Stafforini, Jaan Tallinn, Christian Tarsney, Ben Todd, Susan Trammell, Brian Tse, Jonas Vollmer, Julia Wise and Bernadette Young. Thanks also to Rose Linke, for her advice on how to name this book, and Keith Mansfield, for answering my innumerable questions about the world of publishing. This project benefited from a huge amount of operational support from the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) and the Berkley Existential Risk Initiative (BERI). My thanks to Josh Axford, Sam Deere, Michelle Gavin, Rose Hadshar, Habiba Islam, Josh Jacobson, Miok Ham Jung, Chloe Malone, Kyle Scott, Tanya Singh and Tena Thau.

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To my editors: Paul Whitlatch, who saw what this book could be and believed me when I said I would meet my final deadlines; and David Lamb, who guided the project from a manuscript into a book. And to everyone else at Hachette who played a part behind the scenes, especially Michelle Aielli, Quinn Fariel, Mollie Weisenfeld. Looking back to the earliest influences on this book, I want to thank four philosophers who shaped my path. The first is Peter Singer, who showed how one could take moral philosophy beyond the walls of the academy, and extend our common conception of ethics to encompass new domains such as animal welfare and global poverty. Then there are my dissertation supervisors Derek Parfit and John Broome, whose work inspired me to become a philosopher and to come to Oxford, where I was lucky enough to have them both as mentors.

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And finding that my own money could do hundreds of times as much good for those in poverty as it could do for me, I made a lifelong pledge to donate at least a tenth of all I earn to help them.5 I founded a society, Giving What We Can, for those who wanted to join me, and was heartened to see thousands of people come together to pledge more than £1 billion over our lifetimes to the most effective charities we know of, working on the most important causes. Together, we’ve already been able to transform the lives of tens of thousands of people.6 And because there are many other ways beyond our donations in which we can help fashion a better world, I helped start a wider movement, known as effective altruism, in which people aspire to use evidence and reason to do as much good as possible. Since there is so much work to be done to fix the needless suffering in our present, I was slow to turn to the future. It was so much less visceral; so much more abstract. Could it really be as urgent a problem as suffering now?

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

But militaries that do not take into account this dual-world phenomenon (and their responsibilities in both) will find that, while new technology makes them far more efficient killing machines, they are hated and reviled as a result, making the problem of winning hearts and minds that much more difficult. The modern automation of warfare, through developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), constitutes the most significant shift in human combat since the invention of the gun. It is, as the military scholar Peter Singer notes in his masterly account of this trend, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, what scientists would call a “singularity”—a “state in which things become so radically different that the old rules break down and we know virtually nothing.” Much as with other paradigm shifts in history (germ theory, the invention of the printing press, Einstein’s theory of relativity), it is almost impossible to predict with any great accuracy how the eventual change to fully automated warfare will alter the course of human society.

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As long as human beings conduct war, these errors must be factored in. Until artificially intelligent systems can mimic the capability of the human brain, we won’t see unmanned systems entirely replacing human soldiers, in person or as decision-makers. Even highly intelligent machines can have glaring faults. As Peter Singer pointed out, during World War I, when the tank first appeared on the battlefield, with its guns, armor and rugged treads, it was thought to be indestructible—until someone came up with the antitank ditch. Afghanistan’s former minister of defense Abdul Rahim Wardak, whom we met in Kabul shortly before he was dismissed, chuckled as he described how he and his fellow mujahideen fighters targeted Soviet tanks in the 1980s by smearing mud on their windows and building leaf-covered traps similar to the ones the Vietcong used to ensnare American soldiers a decade earlier.

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Personal interviews proved invaluable, and we want to thank in particular former secretary of state Henry Kissinger; President Paul Kagame of Rwanda; Prime Minister Mohd Najib Abdul Razak of Malaysia; Mexico’s former president Felipe Calderon; the Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal; Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistan Army; Shaukat Aziz, former prime minister of Pakistan; WikiLeaks’ cofounder Julian Assange; Mongolia’s former prime minister Sukhbaatar Batbold; the Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú; Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali of Tunisia; the former DARPA administrator turned Googler Regina Dugan; Android’s senior vice-president Andy Rubin; Microsoft’s chief research officer, Craig Mundie; Vodafone’s CEO, Vittorio Colao; the Brookings senior fellow Peter Singer; former Mossad chief Meir Dagan; Taj Hotels’ CIO, Prakash Shukla; and the former Mexican secretary of the economy Bruno Ferrari. We had a number of friends, colleagues and family who allowed us to impose on them at various stages of the writing process. We’d like to thank Pete Blaustein, a rising star in the field of economics, whose insights proved essential to several chapters of this book; Jeffrey McLean, who offered invaluable strategic insights into the future of combat and conflict; Trevor Thompson, who helped us better understand the future battlefield; and Nicolas Berggruen, who was one of our early motivators in the development of this book and who read some of our earliest drafts.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

Judging by some of the criticisms leveled even at Gates, it may be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to win three unqualified cheers from the public in the twenty-first century. That needs to change. In the December 17, 2006, issue of the New York Times Magazine, Peter Singer, one of today’s leading moral philosophers, questions whether Gates is generous enough. Noting Gates’s belief that “all lives—no matter where they are being led—have equal value,” Singer asks whether any of us could walk past a child drowning in a pond when we could save the child at little cost to ourselves.

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Although the list is too long to include everyone who has given us their valuable time and insights, it includes Patty Stonesifer, Larry Brilliant, Kurt Hoffman, Mary Robinson, Joel Klein, David Blood, Muhammad Yunus, Tom Vander Ark, Bobby Shriver, Steve Gunderson, Judith Rodin, Trevor Nielson, Jamie Drummond, Melissa Berman, Doug Bauer, Diana Aviv, Andrew Hind, Adam Meyerson, Jeffrey Sachs, Amir Dossal, Peter Singer, Linda Rottenberg, Peter Kellner, Hernando de Soto, Diana Leat, Phil Buchanan, Carlos Danel, Bill Drayton, William Zabel, Paul Schervish, Lester Salomon, Joan Di Furia, Vartan Gregorian, Luc Tayart de Borms, Sam Jonah, Volker Then, David Green, David Carrington, Pamela Hartigan, John Elkington, Geoff Mulgan, Rowena Young, Larry Mone, Lael Brainerd, Alex Nicholls, Rob John, Fritz Mayer, Robert Dufton, Carl Schramm, Etienne Eichenberger, Felicitas von Peter, Charles MacCormack, Thomas Tierney, Bruce Lindsay, Michael E.

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IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE TRULY ALTRUISTIC? “To a psychologist, I gather, if you get the warm, fuzzy feeling, you’re not being altruistic, because you actually enjoyed it,” says biologist and author Olivia Judson, who has grappled with the question of the evolutionary motivation for altruism. In an interview with the Atlantic Monthly in October 2007, she questioned whether this test for true altruism is too tough. “So to a psychologist, somebody is only being altruistic if they do something for somebody else and they don’t enjoy it. I think that’s a rather stringent definition, myself. I think you should be able to enjoy it.” French sociologist Marcel Mauss argues that receiving is actually the point of giving.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

Deborah Small and George Loewenstein, “Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26, no. 1 (2003): 5–13. Deborah Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic, “Sympathy and Callousness: The Impact of Deliberative Thought on Donations to Identifiable and Statistical Victims,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102, no. 2 (2007): 143–153. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1972): 229–243. Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009).

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*If you feel like trying this for yourself, ask a few of your acquaintances to describe themselves using the methods of online dating (without giving information that will identify who they are). Then see if you can tell, from their profiles, whom you actually like and whom you can’t stand. *This thought experiment is based on one of Peter Singer’s examples in Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972). His recent book The Life You Can Save further develops this argument. *Though I describe these three factors (closeness, vividness, and the drop-in-the-bucket effect) as separate, in real life they often work in combination and it is not always clear which one is the main driving force.

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She next turns to you and asks you a question: “Since you are the first among the last two participants of the day, you can choose which form you would like to use: the clean one or the premarked one.” Of course you realize that taking the premarked bubble sheet would give you an edge if you decided to cheat. Do you take it? Maybe you take the premarked one out of altruism: you want to help the experimenter so that she won’t worry so much about it. Maybe you take the premarked one to cheat. Or maybe you think that taking the premarked one would tempt you to cheat, so you reject it because you want to be an honest, upstanding, moral person. Whichever you take, you transfer your answers to that bubble sheet, shred the original quiz, and give the bubble sheet back to the experimenter, who pays you accordingly.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn
by Chris Hughes
Published 20 Feb 2018

The GiveWell team and he felt a responsibility to investigate what it would mean to do exactly that, just as they ran down every single other way of giving to assess its impact. As GiveWell grew, it became an anchor for the “effective altruism” movement, a philanthropic approach moving away from pull-the-heartstrings inspiration and toward empirical, transparent, and rigorous evaluation of impact. The Princeton philosopher Peter Singer pioneered this utilitarian approach to philanthropy, and not without controversy. “By donating a relatively small amount of money, you could save a child’s life,” he writes in The Life You Can Save.

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“Maybe it takes more than the amount needed to buy a pair of shoes—but we all spend money on things we don’t really need, whether on drinks, meals out, clothing, movies, concerts, vacations, new cars, or house renovation. Is it possible that by choosing to spend your money on such things rather than contributing to an aid agency, you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved?” Singer, GiveWell, and the effective altruism movement are in pursuit of a practical ethics that seeks not just to give away money, but to rethink our collective responsibility to one another and create a tradition in philanthropy focused on maximizing the return of each dollar invested. Holden’s post only came to tentative initial conclusions, but I marveled at the simplicity of the idea of giving cash directly.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo
Published 15 Jan 2024

Though unwilling to name his clients, Guzzo stressed that the decision-makers at these companies have a range of motivations: they often face pressure from unions, consumers, their own employees, and shareholders. Many begin with a commitment to pay equity—eliminating discrepancies based on gender or race—and gradually broaden their concern to include living wages. This progression exemplifies what the philosopher Peter Singer calls the “escalator of reason.”42 Once you begin to reason about morality, it’s hard to avoid certain conclusions. It’s bad to pay women less than men, but if the most a company can claim is that they underpay all employees equally, this is not good. One commitment flows naturally to the second—you can’t reasonably step off halfway.

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JUST Capital, “The Worker Financial Wellness Initiative—Making Workers’ Financial Security and Health a C-Suite Priority,” accessed December 16, 2022, https://justcapital.com/reports/worker-financial-wellness-initiative/. 40. JUST Capital, “The Worker Financial Wellness Initiative.” 41. JUST Capital. 42. Peter Singer, “The Escalator of Reason Excerpted,” in How Are We to Live? Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest (New York: Prometheus Books, 1995), 226–235. 43. Investopedia, “The Top 5 US Cities with the Highest Minimum Wage,” accessed December 16, 2022, https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080515/top-5-us-cities-highest-minimum-wage.asp. 44.

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After the class, I talked with a few of the UCL students. One young woman from Armenia told me that she had found the CORE textbook “totally shocking… because we started learning about a completely different set of characteristics for these economic agents. The self-interest was there, but they also added altruism, reciprocity, inequality aversion; it was just completely different.… One of the key things that CORE does differently is depict people, economic agents, more realistically, more three dimensionally.” A German-Belgian student had also absorbed something vital from the history of the field. When I asked if he thought it really matters what students learn in their introductory economics courses, he replied, “I have a quote from Keynes.… And it really answers your question.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

It is a goad to question our instinctive response to the superficial features of the entities we are being asked to consider (the reaction from System 1, if you will) and to reason our way to coherent beliefs on who is deserving of rights and protections. The prodding of cognitive reflection by analogizing a protected group with a vulnerable one is a common means by which moral persuaders have awakened people to their biases and bigotries. The philosopher Peter Singer, an intellectual descendant of Bentham and today’s foremost proponent of animal rights, calls the process “the expanding circle.”26 Slavery was a common frame of reference. The Enlightenment hosted a vigorous abolitionist movement, initiated by arguments from Jean Bodin (1530–1596), John Locke (1632–1704), and Montesquieu (1689–1755).27 With the latter two, their case against slavery also underlay their criticism of absolute monarchy and their insistence that governments are legitimately empowered only by the consent of the governed.

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Lyttleton, J. 2020. Social media is determined to slow the spread of conspiracy theories like QAnon. Can they? Millennial Source, Oct. 28. https://themilsource.com/2020/10/28/social-media-determined-to-slow-spread-conspiracy-theories-like-qanon-can-they/. MacAskill, W. 2015. Doing good better: Effective altruism and how you can make a difference. New York: Penguin. Maines, R. 2007. Why are women crowding into schools of veterinary medicine but are not lining up to become engineers? Cornell Chronicle, June 12. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2007/06/why-women-become-veterinarians-not-engineers. Mann, T.

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Overblown: How politicians and the terrorism industry inflate national security threats, and why we believe them. New York: Free Press. Mueller, J. 2021. The stupidity of war: American foreign policy and the case for complacency. New York: Cambridge University Press. Myers, D. G. 2008. A friendly letter to skeptics and atheists. New York: Wiley. Nagel, T. 1970. The possibility of altruism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nagel, T. 1997. The last word. New York: Oxford University Press. National Research Council. 2003. The polygraph and lie detection. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. National Research Council. 2009. Strengthening forensic science in the United States: A path forward.

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece
by Kevin Birmingham
Published 16 Nov 2021

Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 11, 43, 29. My discussion also draws upon Hegel’s Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956). I am indebted to Dennis O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History: A Contemporary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), and Peter Singer, Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Dostoevsky described the capital: Dostoevsky, Occasional Writings, 17–30. “the most abstract and premeditated”: Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, and The Gambler, trans. Jane Kentish (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 10. Translation altered: I’ve changed “on the face of the earth” to “on earth.”

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The natural law that most captivated the radicals’ imagination was the premise that humans seek pleasure and avoid pain. “All people are egoists,” Chernyshevsky wrote. He renovated Max Stirner’s egoism by tethering it to altruism. Virtuous acts provide more pleasure than vicious ones, so the true egoist would never slide into a selfish, violent abyss. A person needs only to experience altruism to live a life of benevolence. Chernyshevsky referred to this as rational egoism. Where Stirner saw the ego as doing what it wills—taking what it wants and murdering, if necessary—Chernyshevsky claimed that we are the slaves of the pleasure we seek.

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German officials impounded 250 copies of The Ego and Its Own but released them after determining that it was too absurd to be dangerous. Egoism made its way to Russia, to Belinsky and his circle, and to Dostoevsky. Belinsky advocated a milder egoism. He told a friend that because egoism “governs the whole living world,” we must bend it toward altruism by convincing people that helping others is the greatest pleasure. But once it seems clear that selfishness governs the world, it is difficult for an atheist to bar the path down to Stirner’s depths. For if there is no God, no heaven and hell, then only persuasion will stop people inclined to rob and murder.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

Taking care of one’s future self is just one level of positive intention, though. Tuggun now fights for the rights of other disabled people in his country. Social causes are better served as individuals with a narrow present-orientation expand to a future-orientation; and as people extend their concern from themselves to others in what philosopher Peter Singer has called “expanding circles.”9 It’s good to care for oneself, better to care for family and community, even better to care for country, and best to care for humanity as a whole.10 The “evil” of tyrants and criminals often lies in their tiny circles of concern – they may have positive intentions for their present selves, and possibly for their future selves, but the concern doesn’t extend to others.

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I still think of that day as the dawn of my adulthood because I realized then that I was driven by powerful subconscious aspirations: I sought certain kinds of achievement, and I wanted accolades. And while I knew at some level that it was better not to care about public esteem, the aspiration ran deep – I couldn’t reason myself out of it. The Life You Can Save The philosopher Peter Singer opens his book The Life You Can Save with one of his favorite thought experiments.1 Imagine you’re on your way to work when you spot a young child drowning in a pond, but no one is around to save her except for you. Rescuing the child would require you to wade into the water, ruining your new shoes and making you late for work.

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So why aren’t we saving these dying children? By juxtaposing the two situations, Singer argues that it’s indefensible that we allow such tragedies. His point is compelling. Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit that Singer endorses, recently received a donation accompanied by a note revealing the inner tension. It read, “Damn you, Peter Singer!” But for every such donor, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who follow the thought experiment and never write a check. When I read about Singer’s drowning girl, my first thought was that I already made annual donations to several causes. Though I agreed with his reasoning, and though I could surely afford to give more, I didn’t reach for my wallet.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other. For this reason many contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Goldstein, Peter Singer, Peter Railton, Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Derek Parfit, are moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be objectively true or false.45 It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. Given the absence of evidence, any belief in how many deities there are, who are their earthly prophets and messiahs, and what they demand of us can depend only on the parochial dogmas of one’s tribe.

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The specter of anomie and meaninglessness is probably exaggerated (according to studies of regions that have experimented with a guaranteed income), and it could be met with public jobs that markets won’t support and robots can’t do, or with new opportunities in meaningful volunteering and other forms of effective altruism.69 The net effect might be to reduce inequality, but that would be a side effect of raising everyone’s standard of living, particularly that of the economically vulnerable. * * * Income inequality, in sum, is not a counterexample to human progress, and we are not living in a dystopia of falling incomes that has reversed the centuries-long rise in prosperity.

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Newspapers are supplementing shoe leather and punditry with statisticians and fact-checking squads.93 The cloak-and-dagger world of national intelligence is seeing farther into the future by using the Bayesian reasoning of superforecasters.94 Health care is being reshaped by evidence-based medicine (which should have been a redundant expression long ago).95 Psychotherapy has progressed from the couch and notebook to Feedback-Informed Treatment.96 In New York, and increasingly in other cities, violent crime has been reduced with the real-time data-crunching system called Compstat.97 The effort to aid the developing world is being guided by the Randomistas, economists who gather data from randomized trials to distinguish fashionable boondoggles from programs that actually improve people’s lives.98 Volunteering and charitable giving are being scrutinized by the Effective Altruism movement, which distinguishes altruistic acts that enhance the lives of beneficiaries from those that enhance the warm glow in benefactors.99 Sports has seen the advent of Moneyball, in which strategies and players are evaluated by statistical analysis rather than intuition and lore, allowing smarter teams to beat richer teams and giving fans endless new material for conversations over the hot stove.100 The blogosphere has spawned the Rationality Community, who urge people to be “less wrong” in their opinions by applying Bayesian reasoning and compensating for cognitive biases.101 And in the day-to-day functioning of governments, the application of behavioral insights (sometimes called Nudge) and evidence-based policy has wrung more social benefits out of fewer tax dollars.102 In area after area, the world has been getting more rational.

The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
by Yascha Mounk
Published 19 Apr 2022

Compare also Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in The Cosmopolitanism Reader, eds. Garrett W. Brown and David Held (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010), 155–62. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT After all, philosophers have a point: The classic formulation of this point, which also applies to other local attachments beyond the nation, was made in Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (Spring 1972): 229–43, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265052. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT If more people took these obligations: I say likely since many altruistic efforts to help the poor in distant countries have historically failed to have a positive impact.

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If more people took these obligations seriously, the world would likely become a better place. The few people who are capable of such boundless empathy have my full admiration. But over time I have also (as I explained in part 1) grown deeply skeptical about whether most people are capable of sustaining this kind of altruism. Humans are groupish. Our tendency to form in-groups, and to discriminate against those who do not belong to them, goes deep. Given those facts, I fear that it is naive to assume that a society that discourages its citizens from feeling any form of national sentiment would thereby encourage them to care about those who are more distant.

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Similarly, many whites want to make their democracies better for members of ethnic minorities because of their own aspirations for the kind of country in which they seek to live. Citizens are unlikely to stand up for the interests of an out-group because they have been told to defer to its views. But they are capable of acts of real courage and altruism when they believe that their own ideas about what is just are being violated. And that is precisely why diverse democracies must insist on an ambitious model of political solidarity. The Virtue of Mutual Influence: It is a long tradition for writers and politicians to denounce the ways in which their nations change because of immigration or other forms of contact with the outside world.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 15 Jan 1995

Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same rime- imagine indifference itself as a power — how could you live according to this indifference! [Nietzsche 1885, p. 15] Beyond inclusive fitness comes "reciprocal altruism" (Trivers 1971), in which nonrelated or distantly related organisms — they needn't even be of the same species — can form mutually beneficial arrangements of quid pro quo, the first step towards human promise-keeping. It is commonly "objected" that reciprocal altruism is ill-named, since it isn't really altruism at all, just enlightened self-interest of one form or another: you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours — quite literally, in the case of the grooming arrangements that are a favorite simple example.

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The latter competes, for instance, with the advice the Pirate King gives to Frederick, the self-styled "slave of duty" in Pirates of Penzance: "Aye me lad, always do your duty — and chance the consequences!" Neither slogan is quite vacuous. 6. A Kantian who presses the charge of practical imponderability against utilitarianism with particular vigor and clarity is Onora O'Neill (1980). She shows how two utilitarians, Garrett Hardin and Peter Singer, armed with the same information, arrive at opposite counsels on the pressing moral dilemma of famine relief: we should take drastic steps to prevent shortsighted efforts to feed famine victims (Hardin), or we should take drastic steps to provide food for today's famine victims (Singer). For a more detailed consideration, see O'Neill 1986.

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It is commonly "objected" that reciprocal altruism is ill-named, since it isn't really altruism at all, just enlightened self-interest of one form or another: you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours — quite literally, in the case of the grooming arrangements that are a favorite simple example. This "objection" misses the point that we have to pass by small steps to the real McCoy, and reciprocal altruism, ignoble (or just a-noble) as it may be, is a useful stepping-stone on the progression. It requires advanced cognitive abilities — a rather specific memory capable of reidentifying one's debtors and creditors, and the capacity to spot a cheat, for instance. Moving beyond the most businesslike and brutal forms of reciprocal altruism towards a world in which genuine trust and sacrifice are possible is a task that has begun to be explored theoretically. The first major step was Robert Axelrod's (Axelrod and Hamilton 1981, Axelrod 1984) Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments, which invited all comers to submit strategies — algorithms — for competing against all comers in a reiterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournament.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

In blurring facts with values, they resemble the messy emotion-riddled thinking that reflects the human minds that conjured them up. To tackle wicked problems requires peculiarly human judgment, even if these judgments are illogical in some sense—especially in the moral sphere. Notwithstanding Joshua Greene and Peter Singer’s logical urging of a consequentialist frame of mind, one that a computer could reproduce, the human tendency to distinguish acts from omissions and to blur intentions with outcomes (as in the principle of double effect) means we need solutions that will satisfy the instincts of human judges if they’re to be stable over time.

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The only real difference is the crucible of creation: a womb versus a factory. But any intuitively strong distinction between biology and technology is bound to fade as humans become more adept at designing their babies, especially outside the womb. At that point, we’ll be in a position to overcome our organicist prejudices, an injustice that runs deeper than Peter Singer’s species-ism. For this reason, the prospect that we might create a superintelligence that overruns humanity is a chimera predicated on a false assumption. All versions of this nightmare scenario assume that it would take the form of “them versus us,” with humanity as a united front defending itself against the rogue machines in its midst.

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Much of what defines us is constraints—most notably, death. Being alive implies the possibility of death. (And abundance, it turns out, is leading us to counterproductive behavior, such as too much food and short-term pleasure on the one hand and too little physical activity on the other.) But if it were immortal, why should it have any instinct to altruism, to sharing—or even to reproducing, as opposed to simply growing? Why would it expend its limited resources on sustaining others, except in carefully thought-out rational transactions? What will happen when it no longer needs us? What would motivate it? If it could live forever, would it be lazy, thinking it could always do things later on?

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
by Jim Holt
Published 14 May 2018

After all, if the misery of a possible child creates an ethical obligation not to bring it into the world, shouldn’t the happiness of a possible child create an ethical obligation to bring it into the world? Why should the well-being of a possible child enter our moral calculus in one case but not the other? Moral philosophers have yet to come up with a satisfying explanation for this asymmetry. Witness the rather tortuous attempt of Peter Singer: “Perhaps the best one can say—and it is not very good—is that there is nothing directly wrong in conceiving a child who will be miserable, but once such a child exists, since its life can contain nothing but misery, we should reduce the amount of pain in the world by an act of euthanasia. But euthanasia is a more harrowing process for the parents and others involved than non-conception.

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Is there an important distinction between failing to do this and walking away from the drowning child? And, if there is not, can you in good conscience stop at just two hundred dollars? Don’t your ethical convictions compel you to save as many children as your bank account permits? Philosophers like Peter Singer of Princeton and Peter Unger of New York University have used such simple but intuitively powerful “rescue cases” to argue for an inconvenient conclusion: we rich Westerners should be giving away most of our money to international relief efforts. Doing so is not praiseworthy; it is required by the ethical principles we all implicitly share.

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Some of these ideas, Dawkins observes, spread because they are good for us, in the sense that they raise the likelihood of our genes getting into the next generation; others—like, he claims, religion—spread because normally useful parts of our minds “misfire.” Ethical values, he suggests, fall into the first category. Altruism, for example, benefits our selfish genes when it is lavished on close kin who share copies of those genes or on non-kin who are in a position to return the favor. But what about pure “Good Samaritan” acts of kindness? These, Dawkins says, could be “misfirings,” although, he hastens to add, misfirings of a “blessed, precious” sort, unlike the nasty religious ones.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
by Dan Ariely
Published 31 May 2010

Deborah Small and George Loewenstein, “Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26, no. 1 (2003): 5–13. Deborah Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic, “Sympathy and Callousness: The Impact of Deliberative Thought on Donations to Identifiable and Statistical Victims,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102, no. 2 (2007): 143–153. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1972): 229–243. Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009).

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*If you feel like trying this for yourself, ask a few of your acquaintances to describe themselves using the methods of online dating (without giving information that will identify who they are). Then see if you can tell, from their profiles, whom you actually like and whom you can’t stand. *This thought experiment is based on one of Peter Singer’s examples in Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972). His recent book The Life You Can Save further develops this argument. *Though I describe these three factors (closeness, vividness, and the drop-in-the-bucket effect) as separate, in real life they often work in combination and it is not always clear which one is the main driving force.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

He would be the first to say that he isn’t 100 percent there yet, but he has reached a tipping point. He has realized that his education and mentoring as a leader had left him without the most important asset he needed to try to be successful—consciousness. Learn, Earn & Return During a recent TED talk, moral philosopher Peter Singer argued that the best way to change the world is to go into finance. You can make a lot of money and then give it away. If you make enough, you can pay the salaries of dozens of aid workers, which has a better social return on investment than simply becoming an aid worker yourself. And the best part is that you get rich, too.

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Individual: Abigail Donahue Face-to-face with human potential, I feel my whole heart at work. These moments exemplify times when I’ve felt the deepest sense of purpose in my life. Working alongside my students, directly serving communities in need, feels meaningful and engaging in ways I can’t fully articulate. I observe awareness and altruism accumulating in small acts of kindness. Someone who needs food is fed; someone who wants a chance to speak is heard. In these moments, I see a new world evolving right in front of me. For me, individual transformation leads to social impact. Though nebulous social issues require vast structural shifts, I believe personal connection to these issues is what changes society.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

As people become more confident that they will be free from violence, the incentive to build schools and write and read books becomes greater, which in turn encourages the use of reason instead of force to solve problems, which then reduces violence even further. We have experienced an “expanding circle” of empathy (philosopher Peter Singer’s term) that extends our sense of identification from narrow groups like clans to entire nations, then to people in foreign countries, and even to nonhuman animals.[171] There has also been a growing role for the rule of law and cultural norms against violence. The key insight for the future is that these virtuous circles are fundamentally driven by technology.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 167 Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 49, 53, 63–64. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 168 Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 52–53. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 169 Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 193–98. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 170 Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 175–77, 580–92; Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 171 For several more detailed summaries of recent applications of AI to materials discovery for solar electricity and energy storage, see Elizabeth Montalbano, “AI Enables Design of Spray-on Coating That Can Generate Solar Energy,” Design News, December 26, 2019, https://www.designnews.com/materials-assembly/ai-enables-design-spray-coating-can-generate-solar-energy; Shinji Nagasawa, Eman Al-Naamani, and Akinori Saeki, “Computer-Aided Screening of Conjugated Polymers for Organic Solar Cell: Classification by Random Forest,” Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 9, no. 10 (May 7, 2018): 2639–46, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.8b00635; Geun Ho Gu et al., “Machine Learning for Renewable Energy Materials,” Journal of Materials Chemistry A 7, no. 29 (April 30, 2019): 17096–117, https://doi.org/10.1039/C9TA02356A; Ziyi Luo et al., “A Survey of Artificial Intelligence Techniques Applied in Energy Storage Materials R&D,” Frontiers in Energy Research 8, no. 116 (July 3, 2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fenrg.2020.00116; An Chen, Xu Zhang, and Zhen Zhou, “Machine Learning: Accelerating Materials Development for Energy Storage and Conversion,” InfoMat 2, no. 3 (February 23, 2020): 553–76, https://doi.org/10.1002/inf2.12094; Xinyi Yang et al., “Development Status and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence in the Field of Energy Conversion Materials,” Frontiers in Energy Research 8, no. 167 (July 31, 2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fenrg.2020.00167; Teng Zhou, Zhen Song, and Kai Sundmacher, “Big Data Creates New Opportunities for Materials Research: A Review on Methods and Applications of Machine Learning for Materials Design,” Engineering 5, no. 6 (December 2019): 1017–26, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2019.02.011.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 113 For some clear and compelling summaries and visualizations of the global development and industrialization process, see Council on Foreign Relations, “Global Development Explained | World101,” CFR Education, YouTube video, June 18, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po0o3Gk9FPQ; “Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes—the Joy of Stats—BBC Four,” BBC, YouTube video, November 26, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo; “The History of International Development | Max Roser | EAGxOxford 2016,” Centre for Effective Altruism, YouTube video, April 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbBn8OEqL4k; Max Roser, “The Short History of Global Living Conditions and Why It Matters That We Know It,” Our World in Data, accessed October 29, 2021, https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts; Bourguignon and Morrisson, “Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820–1992.”

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Signet, 1993 Centennial edition), p. 679. 46. David Harriman (ed.), Journals of Ayn Rand (New York: Plume, 1999), p. 421. 47. Ayn Rand, “Collectivized ‘Rights,’” reprinted in Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964 Centennial edition), p. 120. 48. Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save (New York: Random House, 2010), pp. 17–18. 49. For Rand’s analysis of altruism see Ayn Rand, “This Is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1963 Centennial edition), especially pp. 136–48; Ayn Rand, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” reprinted in Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984); and Peter Schwartz, In Defense of Selfishness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 50.

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Sacrificing his wants doesn’t achieve some higher social good—it just allows other people to gain at his expense. The notion that a person is entitled to have his needs fulfilled by others is generally treated as non-controversial. But, taken seriously, it has disturbing implications, and some egalitarians have drawn out those implications. Peter Singer, one of the most widely respected and influential egalitarian philosophers, argues that if we really believe that we have a moral obligation to fulfill the more important needs of others before we tend to our own, less important needs, then this means radically curtailing our own standard of living.

All the Money in the World
by Peter W. Bernstein
Published 17 Dec 2008

“The research programs of entire countries”: Michael Specter, “What Money Can Buy,” The New Yorker, Oct. 24, 2005. 6. Giving of this magnitude: Peter Singer, “On Giving,” New York Times, Dec. 17, 2006. 7. Even before the Carnegies: Franklin Parker, George Peabody: A Biography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995). 8. He gave away more than two-thirds: Christina Wise, “He’s the Financier Who Fathered Philanthropy,” Investor’s Business Daily, Sept. 22, 2006. 9. One person Carnegie influenced: Carol Loomis, “Warren Buffet Gives It Away,” Fortune, July 10, 2006. 10. As Princeton’s Peter Singer points out: Peter Singer, “Happiness, Money, and Giving It Away,” Project Syndicate, July 2006, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/singer13. 11.

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Anders Ericsson (Florida State University), Charles Geisst (Manhattan College), Alexander Horniman (Darden School of Business, University of Virginia), Christopher Jencks (Harvard University), Steven Kaplan (University of Chicago Business School), Andrew Keyt (Chicago Family Business Center, Loyola University), Josh Lerner (Harvard Business School), Anthony Mayo (director, Leadership Institute, Harvard Business School), Eli Noam (Columbia University Business School), Peter Singer (Princeton University), David A. Skeel Jr. (University of Pennsylvania), George Smith (Stern School of Business, New York University), James Allen Smith (Georgetown University), Roy C. Smith (New York University), Robert J. Sternberg (dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University), Jonathan Taplin (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California), David Waterman (Indiana University), and Jerry White (Caruth Institute of Entrepreneurship, Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University).

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As a lengthy profile of the organization in The New Yorker observed, “The research programs of entire countries5 have been restored, and fields that have languished for years, like tropical medicine, have once again burst to life,” thanks largely to the Gates Foundation. * * * In the philanthropic universe, however, it was decidedly not just another day. Giving of this magnitude6, wrote Peter Singer, bioethics professor at Princeton University, in the New York Times, makes it clear that “the first decade of the twenty-first century is a new golden age of philanthropy.” Not only was Buffett’s bequest the single largest act of charitable giving ever in America, but it was also, as even cynics agree, a rare display of unadulterated generosity.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

But operations in Bosnia and Afghanistan are more like policing operations, aimed at protecting civilians and the built environment rather than blowing it up and looking for bad guys. Policing and combat require very different kinds of training, and very different institutional cultures. Good soldiers are seldom good policemen, and certainly not both at the same time. Technology ramps up the complexity further. In his book Wired for War, Peter Singer reports that the United States had no ground robots when it invaded Afghanistan in 2002, 150 of them by the end of 2004, 2,400 by the end of 2005,5,000 by the end of 2006, and 12,000 by the end of 2008. The number of UAVs has increased even faster. One result of this escalation is a profound culture conflict as officers who absorbed traditional military culture as they worked their way through the ranks find themselves competing with gamers, and as military personnel who are in active combat situations in the Hindu Kush are supported by remote-control UAV pilots who go home to their houses in American suburbs when their day is done.

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After all, our students are not enhancing themselves in a vacuum; they are competing to be hired by firms that value their increased productivity and economic output, not their "happiness" or "freedom," in a society that measures its achievements in terms of gross domestic product and comparative advantage over other societies. The United States and China are not investing in enhancement technologies out of altruism, but because the technologies are supposed to offer comparative advantage in the perpetual jockeying for cultural, economic, and geopolitical dominance. We are not trying to argue here that efficiency, productivity, and cultural authority are in some way "wrong"-indeed, that might seem rather rich coming from two American authors.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

Members of that future species would have cause to thank us, that we had provided the great plastic deposits which they mine for their favourite snacks; and they would react with distaste and horror on encountering the record of a previous world of lush vegetation, temperate climate and gentle breezes in which they could never have survived. Should we not take account of these creatures and their interests? Why does the discount rate suddenly rise to 100 per cent when we begin to contemplate their alien interests? Even if we thought, as Peter Singer and his followers seem to think, that there is a class of uniquely reasonable people who will be both adept at utilitarian reasoning and inherently disposed to obey it, the futility of this belief is surely evident. If we are to solve our environmental problems through some piece of moral reasoning, it must be with an argument that motivates all normal people, and not one addressed solely to those armchair philosophers whose mastery of infinite moral space comes from being bounded in an academic nutshell.

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Goodstein, Economics and the Environment, Hoboken, 2004. 199 The claims of environmental economics are subject to ruthless examination by Sagoff, op. cit. 200 See Holmes Rolston III, Philosophy Gone Wild, Buffalo, 1989, and David R. Keller, ed., Environmental Ethics, Chichester, 2010. For an elegant survey of views pertaining to the natural world, see Angelika Krebs, Ethics of Nature: A Map, Berlin, 1999. 201 See Peter Singer, ed., Applied Ethics, Oxford, 1986. 202 See, for example, Tim Mulgan, Future People: A Moderate Consequentialist Account of Our Obligations to Future Generations, Oxford, 2006. For earlier and less sophisticated work, see the collection by R. I. Sikora and Brian Barry, eds., Obligations to Future Generations, Philadelphia, 1978. 203 For the theory here, see Pearce et al., Blueprint for a Green Economy, op. cit. 204 John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government. 205 Thus discount rates, according to one utilitarian, must take account not only of future preferences, but also of future second order preferences, including our present preferences for future preferences and future preferences for future preferences.

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Dieter Birnbacher, Verantwortung für zukünftige Generationen, Frankfurt, 1995, pp. 31–2. 206 See Robert Spaemann, ‘Technische Eingriffe in die Natur als Problem der politischen Ethik’, in Dieter Birnbacher, ed., Ökologie und Ethik, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 195. 207 See Derek Parfit, Reason and Persons, Oxford, 1984, and ‘Overpopulation and the Quality of Life’, in Peter Singer, ed., op. cit. 208 Birnbacher, Verantwortung, pp. 219–20. 209 Arne Naess, ‘The Shallow and Deep Ecology Movement’, in Keller, ed., op. cit; Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism, Boston, 1990. 210 See Andrew McLaughlin, ‘The Heart of Deep Ecology’, in Keller, ed., op. cit. 211 211 See J.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

This, essentially, was the counterargument of the opposing team, which drove home a good-billionaire narrative based on the Gates Foundation’s good deeds. “You’re saying that Bill and Melinda Gates are immoral despite the fact that they set up the Gates Foundation, operating in accordance with the belief … that all lives are equal,” noted Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer. “The Gateses have given so far fifty billion dollars to endow that foundation, and there’s going to be more to come. You’re saying they’re immoral although they have undoubtedly already saved … several million lives, perhaps more than any other living person today.” Variations on this winning argument have long played counterpoint to any criticism of the billionaire class.

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“success cartel”: This term is taken from Yogesh Rajkotia, “Beware of the Success Cartel: A Plea for Rational Progress in Global Health,” BMJ Global Health 3, no. 6 (November 1, 2018): e001197, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2018-001197. CHAPTER 1: LIVES SAVED “clever new ways”: “Anand Giridharadas: It Is Immoral to Be a Billionaire,” Oxford Union Debate, September 5, 2019, YouTube, 3:25, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axN8ppre-mU. “already saved”: “Peter Singer: It Is NOT Immoral to Be a Billionaire,” Oxford Union Debate, September 5, 2019, YouTube, 4:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYgMtZODcVQ. “If you want to have a balanced, healthy”: Kelsey Piper, “Bill Gates’s Efforts to Fight Coronavirus, Explained,” Vox, April 14, 2020, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/4/14/21215592/bill-gates-coronavirus-vaccines-treatments-billionaires; Kelsey Piper, Twitter, May 29, 2019, https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1133761319646089217.

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after he died: “Gates Foundation, Calestous Juma Bet on Huge Progress in African Agriculture,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, January 22, 2015, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/gates-foundation-calestous-juma-bet-huge-progress-african-agriculture; “Calestous Juma Fellowship,” n.d., https://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/challenge/calestous-juma-science-leadership-fellowship. no disclosures: Calestous Juma, Public Comment to FDA, Docket No. FDA-2015-N-3403, November 18, 2015, https://www.regulations.gov/comment/FDA-2015-N-3403-0607. Monsanto executive Mark Edge: “Altruism or PR? How Monsanto Plans to Snag a Foothold in African Seed Markets,” St. Louis Public Radio, December 14, 2016, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/health-science-environment/2016-12-14/altruism-or-pr-how-monsanto-plans-to-snag-a-foothold-in-african-seed-markets. “impose their preferences on Africa”: Melissa Allison, “On Voters’ Plates: Genetically Engineered Crops,” Seattle Times, August 10, 2013, https://special.seattletimes.com/o/html/businesstechnology/2021586574_gmooverviewxml.html.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

Since 1790, as though keyed to Smith’s year of death, most ethical theory as practiced in departments of philosophy has derived instead from two other books published about the same time, one by Immanuel Kant (1785, down to, for example, Harry Frankfurt 2004) and the other by Jeremy Bentham (1789, down to, for example, Peter Singer 1993). A third and older tradition of natural rights, which influenced Smith too, by way of Locke and Pufendorf, finds favor nowadays among conservative and Catholic intellectuals.2 And the contractarian theories of Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes, to which Smith paid no favorable attention, have provided in our time a fourth, related, stream of narrow ethics paired with grand political theory, left or right.3 But the fifth and by far the oldest and broadest stream is the virtue-ethical one.

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The word “enrichment” has a highly relevant secondary meaning of spiritual growth.12 As the economists Ronald Coase and Ning Wang put it in their peroration to How China Became Capitalist (2013), “When the markets for goods and the market for ideas are together in full swing, each supporting, augmenting, and strengthening the other, human creativity and happiness stand the best chance to prevail, and the material and spiritual civilizations march on firm ground, side by side.”13 Many of the clerisy on the left and on the right lament the mass character of modern society, agreeing for example with the leftish Australian economist Geoffrey Harcourt, who wrote in 1994 that trade-tested betterment has stunted “the Christian (and humanist) virtues of altruism, cooperation, tolerance, compassion.” The conservative German economist Wilhelm Röpke in 1958 claimed similarly that mass democracy and enrichment has made for “a situation in which man can have no spiritual or moral life.”14 Tocqueville, Matthew Arnold, and José Ortega y Gasset lead the list of hundreds of members of the clerisy during the past century and a half who have deplored from above the Enrichment’s failure to enrich. But contrary to such talk from left and right, and from above, the ability to seek the virtues of altruism and cooperation and to have a spiritual or moral life have in fact come from the enrichment of the masses.

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By “modeled” she seems to mean put into a Max U framework that a conventional Samuelsonian economist would be comfortable with. Compassionate explanations—contrary to Mr. Max U—McCants writes, are “not to be lightly dismissed as implausible.” But then she lightly dismisses the compassionate explanations, with a scientific method misapprehended, albeit in a way that some economists do misapprehend it—altruism, she says, holds “little predictive power.” She has adopted the ugly little orphan Max U, fathered by the economist Paul Samuelson over in another building at her Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “After a long tradition of seeing European charity largely as a manifestation of Christian values,” McCants is relieved to report, “scholars have begun to assert the importance of self-interest.”5 Her own interpretation of the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage is that it was “charity for the middling,” a species of insurance against the risks of capitalism.6 The bourgeois said to themselves, as it were, “There but for the grace of God go our own orphaned bourgeois children.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Jan 2017

British Social Attitudes data can be found here http://www.britsocat.com/ 9.BSA 2013, http://www.britsocat.com/ 10.BSA 2013. 11.http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/ 12.Christian Welzel, Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 13.Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, London: Penguin, 2013. 14.Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideologial Origins of Political Struggles, New York: William Morrow & Co, 1987. 15.Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Ethics of Globalism, Nationalism, and Patriotism’, Centre for Humans and Nature, Sepember 2016, www.humansandnature.org/the-ethics-of-globalism-nationalism-and-patriotism 16.Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 17.Other leading British public figures I have heard, or read, expressing universalist views similar to Gus O’Donnell include Shami Chakrabati the former head of the civil liberties group Liberty, Oliver Kamm the Times commentator, Jonathan Portes the former senior civil servant and think tanker, Phillipe Legrain the think tanker and EU adviser, Danny Dorling and (the Australian) Peter Singer, both academics, and George Monbiot the environmental campaigner. 18.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18519395 19.Jonathan Haidt, ‘When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism’, The American Interest, 12, 1, (2016), www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/10/when-and-why-nationalism-beats-globalism/ 20.http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39094/bsa33_social-class_v5.pdf 21.Daniel Finkelstein, ‘Left and right are dead in our social revolution’, The Times, 1 July 2015. 22.Mark Lilla, ‘The End of Identity Liberalism’, New York Times, 18 November 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html?

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Nevertheless those housewives who for much of the twentieth century had been raising children and often holding together communities—or among the middle classes running voluntary organisations—would be surprised to learn that they had been doing nothing of value. They were working for others, expressing traditional ‘female altruism’—one of society’s main adhesives since the beginning of time. Whereas the interwar women’s movement had seen men and women as different and had pressed for the greater feminisation of society, the postwar movement—the so-called second wave—was uninterested in or even hostile to family life, saw men and women as not only equal but the same and saw equality in the public sphere as the main marker of progress.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Apr 2012

On the studies, see for instance, Ro’i Zultan and Maya Bar-Hillel, “When Being Wasteful Appears Better than Feeling Wasteful,” Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 5, no. 7, December 2010, pp. 489–96. On green products, see Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, “Do Green Products Make Us Better People?” Psychological Science, March 5, 2010, XX(X), pp. 1–5. On green eating, two standard sources are Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Way We Eat, Why Our Food Choices Matter (Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Publishers, 2006), and Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). On Annina Rüst, see Jascha Hoffman, “Carbon Penance,” The New York Times, December 12, 2008.

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Phase out water subsidies, which encourage inefficient agriculture and overuse of water supplies. These changes all allow for automatic marketplace adjustments, they don’t require consumers to understand the energy costs of different goods and services, and once passed they are enforced by selfish behavior rather than requiring ongoing altruism and extreme levels of environmental consciousness. The bottom line is this: I would rather propagandize for these changes than spend my time adding up the energy miles in my asparagus. (If it makes you feel better, I do now also eat less asparagus.) In the meantime, there is no carbon tax in the United States, so there’s still some environmental value in cooking that rutabaga, however much it means we are attacking the problem with a fly swatter.

Libertarian Idea
by Jan Narveson
Published 15 Dec 1988

We pay up because we have subscribed and because they are worth it to us—especially so, in the case of the electric company, because life without their extremely useful product would be too inconvenient and uncomfortable to be worth the sacrifice of it for the sake of mere Principle. Well, suppose someone claims that the State is worth it to us? Peter Singer, in discussing Nozick‟s argument for the limited state, observes that “Nozick does not say that a state is a good thing and we are all better off with a state than we would be without one. This obvious procedure for dealing with the anarchist would be foreign to Nozick‟s entire approach and would set a precedent subversive of his aim in the second part” (in which Nozick argues that no further State is justified).2 Singer has in mind evaluating the State in utilitarian terms.

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No doubt some, especially the artists involved, will put it down to education: lefs improve public taste by forcibly depriving them of enough of their incomes so that a little of it can be returned to them in the form of subsidized opera tickets. Neat, huh? Notes 1. Lawrence Haworth, Autonomy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 212. 2. Peter Singer, The Right to Be Rich or Poor,” in Jeffrey Paul, ed. Reading Nozick (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), p. 39. 3. See Jules Coleman for the argument that public goods problems are Prisoner‟s Dilemmas. See Allan Buchanan, Justice, Efficiency, and the Market (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allenheld, 1984), for outstandingly clear expositions of this and related matters. 4.

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Indeed, it is rather odd—perhaps somewhat hysterical—to say that by not contributing each noncontributor has thereby violated the rights of each potential beneficiary of a collective good, including himself.”12 Indeed, “whether or not a share of it is oured to each individual and regardless of whether those who fail to contribute could rightly be said to have wronged all potential partakers of the good, some collective goods are of sufficient importance that enforcement seems justifiable if that is what it takes to secure them.”13 Here follow the usual arguments, superbly articulated by Buchanan14 as to why enforcement might sometimes be needed: how there might otherwise be “free riders”, who collect the benefits without contributing, and how indeed even the benevolent might not come through: “since altruism is generally limited, the scope of duties to aid which we can expect people to fulfill voluntarily is probably considerably narrower than that of duties they would discharge if those duties were enforced,”15 and “even if an individual does not himself wish to take a free ride on the contributions of others to a system of aid to the needy, he still may be unwilling to render aid to the needy. ...

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

The United States Air Force has predicted that “SWAT teams will send mechanical insects equipped with video cameras to creep inside a building during a hostage standoff.”4 One “micro-systems collaborative” has already released Octoroach, an “extremely small robot with a camera and radio transmitter that can cover up to 100 meters on the ground.”5 If a waterbug can enter a crack in the wall, so too could the Octoroach. Who knows how many other noxious creatures are now models for drone “swarming” technology, another watchword of avant-garde military theorists. Peter Singer and August Cole’s novel of technologized war, Ghost Fleet, presented a kaleidoscopic vision of autonomous drones, hijacked satellites, and lasers deployed in a war pitting the United States against Russia and China.6 The book cannot be written off as a techno-military fantasy: it includes hundreds of footnotes documenting the development of each piece of hardware and software it describes.

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Adam’s inhuman abridgment of literary genres reflects a broader reductionism inherent in any effort to discipline persons into seeing machines as their equals.32 In the novel, Adam’s near super powers—at financial trading, fighting, sly maneuvering through a human world it has only known for months—are balanced by a quest for moral certainty. As the imagined Turing in the novel states, “The overpowering drive in these machines is to draw inferences of their own and shape themselves accordingly.”33 As it does so, Adam becomes impeccably eleemosynary.34 Reflecting the logic of the relentlessly utilitarian “effective altruism” movement, it decides one day to donate its gains from day trading to charities and reports Charlie’s income to tax authorities. Upon hearing this, Charlie begins to rue “our cognitive readiness to welcome a machine across the boundary between ‘it’ and ‘him.’ ”35 Miranda tries to reason with Adam.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

Joseph Gross’s description of Wood’s process in Puddling in the Iron Works of Merthyr Tydfil, quoted at http://www.henrycort.net. 24 “The puddlers were the artistocracy” Postan and Habakkuk, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 25 “a peculiar method of preparing” R. A. Mott and Peter Singer, Henry Cort, The Great Finer: Creator of Puddled Iron (London: Metals Society, 1983). 26 The source of the funds Newman and Brown, Britain in the Hanoverian Age. 27 Not only had grooved rollers Jennifer Tann, “Richard Arkwright and Technology,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 58, no. 192, February 1973. 28 “cleansed of sulphurous matter” R.

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Some of the results were predictable;6 the three biggest motivators were “love of inventing,” “desire to improve,” and “financial gain,” the ranking for each of which was statistically identical, and each at least twice as important as those appearing down the list, such as “desire to achieve,” “prestige,” or “altruism” (and certainly not the old saw, “laziness,” which was named roughly one-thirtieth as frequently as “financial gain”). A century after Rocket, the world of technology had changed immensely: electric power, automobiles, telephones. But the motivations of individual inventors were indistinguishable from those inaugurated by the Industrial Revolution.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

Many recent books have explored the hidden side of the food industry – both what’s in our food and how it’s made. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) is a classic. Felicity Lawrence’s Not on the Label: What really goes into the food on your plate (2004) and her subsequent Eat Your Heart Out: Why the food business is bad for the planet and your health (2008) are highly recommended. Peter Singer and James Mason point out that what we eat also has ethical consequences in their 2006 book The Ethics of What We Eat: Why our food choices matter. Richard Layard is a prominent economist who has championed the new approach to thinking about well-being. His 2005 book, Happiness: Lessons from a new science, is a good account.

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While the conclusions of Persson and Tabellini (1994) and Alesina and Rodrik (1994) have been challenged, it is still correct to say that there is no firm evidence that greater inequality lowers growth. This is discussed more fully in Chapter 9. 6 We noted earlier that mainstream economics does not restrict preferences to the purely selfish, so that altruism is allowed. Still, the typical model does assume pure self-interest. 2 Introducing economic models 1 Objecting to the placing of observables at the heart of the new quantum mechanics, during Heisenberg’s 1926 lecture at Berlin; related by Heisenberg, quoted by Salam (1990: 99). 2 John Maynard Keynes in a letter to Roy Harrod, 1938, cited by Vickers (1999: 210). 3 See McCloskey (1983, 1985), Klamer et al. (1988) and Klamer et al. (2010). 4 Card (1992a, 1992b), Katz and Krueger (1992), Card et al. (1994), Card and Krueger (1994, 1995, 2000).

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

England, ‘Statistical Physics of Adaptation’, Physical Review X, 6, 021036, 2016. 9O. Judson, ‘The energy expansions of evolution’, Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, 2017, 0138, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0138. CHAPTER 2 1Francine Patterson and Wendy Gordon, ‘The Case for the Personhood of Gorillas’, in Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer (eds), The Great Ape Project, New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993, pp. 58–77, http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/patterson01.htm. 2https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2743.xml. 3G. N. Askew, ‘The elaborate plumage in peacocks is not such a drag’, Journal of Experimental Biology 217 (18), 2014, 3237, https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.107474. 4Mariko Takahashi, Hiroyuki Arita, Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa and Toshikazu Hasegawa, ‘Peahens do not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains’, Animal Behaviour 75, 2008, 1209–19. 5H.

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Species that form complex, intergenerational social communities, in which individuals work together to secure their energy needs and reproduce, often do different jobs, and occasionally even sacrifice themselves for the good of the team, are described as eusocial rather than merely social. The ‘eu-’ is taken from the Greek εὖ, meaning ‘good’, to emphasise the apparent altruism associated with these species. Eusociality is rare in the natural world, even among other insects. All termite species and most ant species are eusocial to varying degrees, but fewer than 10 per cent of bee species and only a very small proportion of the many thousands of wasp species are truly eusocial.

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 2004

Racism and speciesism, and our perennial confusion over how inclusively we wish to cast our moral and ethical net, are brought into sharp and sometimes uncomfortable focus in the history of our attitudes to our fellow humans, and our attitudes to apes -- our fellow apes.* * The Great Ape Project, dreamed up by the distinguished moral philosopher Peter Singer, goes to the heart of the mater by proposing that great apes should be granted, as far as is practically possible, the same moral status as humans. My own contribution to the book The Great Ape Project is one of the essays reprinted in A Devil's Chaplain. RENDEZVOUS 3: ORANG UTANS Molecular evidence puts Rendezvous 3 -- where our ancestral pilgrimage is joined by the orang utans -- at 14 million years ago, right in the middle of the Miocene Epoch.

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In narrating Rendezvous 1, I have been forced to make a decision between the theories. Somewhat reluctantly, I'll go with the majority, and assume a chimpanzee-like concestor. On to meet it! * Some people distinguish a second species, Ardipithecus kadabba. * There is a well-developed theory of reciprocal altruism in Darwinism, beginning with the pioneering work of Robert Trivers and continuing with the modelling of Robert Axelrod and others. Trading favours, with delayed repayment, really works. My own exposition of it is in The Selfish Gene, especially the second edition. * The American edition rounds off the Tennyson quotation: 'Dies the Swan.'

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Methuen. London. [56] CRICK, F. H. C. (1981) Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. Macdonald. London. [57] CROCKFORD, S. (2002) Dog Evolution: A Role for Thyroid Hormone Physiology in Domestication Changes. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. [58] CRONIN, H. (1991) The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism andSexuai Selection from Darwin to Today. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [59] DARWIN, C. (1860/1859) On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray, London. [60] DARWIN. C. (1987/1842) The Geology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle: The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Of course, if a charity is doing the wrong things, being financially lean means nothing, hence Will’s quote. It’s all about real-world results. According to GiveWell.org in 2016, three of the most effective and impactful charities are: Against Malaria Foundation Deworm the World Initiative Give Directly ✸ Two of Will’s philosophical role models Peter Singer, Australian moral philosopher and Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His most famous works are the surprisingly readable Practical Ethics and Animal Liberation. Derek Parfit, who has spent his entire life at All Souls College at Oxford, which is elite even within Oxford.

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” * * * Will MacAskill Will MacAskill (TW: @willmacaskill, williammacaskill.com) is an associate professor of philosophy at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Just 29 years old, he is likely the youngest associate (i.e., tenured) professor of philosophy in the world. Will is the author of Doing Good Better and a co-founder of the “effective altruism” movement. He has pledged to donate everything he earns over ~$36K per year to whatever charities he believes will be most effective. He has also co-founded two well-known nonprofits: 80,000 Hours, which provides research and advice on how you can best make a difference through your career, and Giving What We Can, which encourages people to commit to give at least 10% of their income to the most effective charities.