The Daily Stoic - Peter Singer on Practicing Effective Altruism Daily

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

Ryan speaks with professor of moral philosophy, author, and activist Peter Singer about the 10th anniversary edition of his book The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty, how Peter’s views on charitable giving have changed throughout the years, the connections between Effective Altruism and Stoicism, applying ethical philosophy to issues in our daily lives, and more.Peter is an Australian professor of moral philosophy who specializes in applied ethics. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and the founder of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University. He is the author of numerous books and essays focusing on ethics, bioethics, global poverty, and animal rights, including The Most Good You Can Do, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," and Animal Liberation. Peter is most known for developing and promoting Effective Altruism, the argument that effective giving involves balancing empathy with reason. In 2021, he won the esteemed Berggruen Prize for his work in the field of philosophy, and was awarded one million dollars, all of which he donated to charity.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have. Here on the weekend when you have a

little bit more space when things have slowed down be sure to take some time to think to go for a walk to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Writing for me has hit a little bit of a snack. I think I broke my middle finger playing basketball over the weekend, so I haven't been able to sign as many books downstairs at the store. And my typing has been a little screwed up as we got these two fingers taped together, but it's funny, it takes me back to when I broke my arm writing my first book. I might have already told this story before, but I broke my arm while I was writing Trust Me I'm Lying. And it set the book back

in quite a bit, but it actually eventually ends up queuing up the obstacle as the way, because the walks that I ended up taking the extra time that I ended up taking because of it opened up all these wonderful little avenues. I guess my point is you never know where life is going to take you. And that takes me to today's guest. I'm writing now. The book that is tied up a little bit is my third book in this virtue series. I'm writing about justice. So when a book arrived, the 10th anniversary edition of the Life You Can Save by the philosopher Peter Singer, I was like, not only do I need to read this book, and not only was I planning to read this book, but he is someone I absolutely

want to talk to on the podcast because he's one of the foremost thinkers in the world about these ideas, one of the most influential philosophers in the world, the Stokes turn up their noses at the so-called pen and ink philosophers. Well, Peter Singer is not just a professor and a teacher of philosophy, but his philosophy has guided billions of dollars of aid that's been given to people all over the world. It's changed how many people think about animal rights,

whether they eat meat, don't eat meat, animal welfare. And he's one of the pioneers of what they call effective altruism, which thinks about effectively doing good, how one can do the most good with the good or the donations that they make. It's just an all around fascinating person. And I think put his money where his mouth is quite literally. He won the Bergeru in prize for philosophy in 2021, which has a million dollar prize. It's a prize given to thinkers whose ideas

of profoundly shaped human self-understanding in advancement and rapidly changing world. And so what does a tenured philosophy professor do with a million dollars, they buy themselves a vacation home. Do they buy a house for their kids? Do they retire? What do they do with the money? Well, Peter Singer donated every cent of it to people in need, to the causes he had been

championing about and talking about that he talks about in the life you can save, which I enjoyed so much. And then I bought one of his older books, which I'm reading next, called the Expanding Circle. And then I'm hoping to have him back on the podcast from one of his animal rights books. He teaches an online course you can check out called Effective Altruism,

which I'll link to in today's show notes. You can follow him on Twitter at Peter Singer, follow him on Instagram at Peter underscore singer. Thank you so much Professor Singer for coming on the podcast. It was eye opening for me and provocative and interesting and I think it will be for all of you and I think it will make the new book better and enjoy. Well, I wanted to start really practically with you.

Maybe you could help me with an ethical dilemma or debate I'm having with my wife. I would like to donate one of my kidneys as you talk about in the book, and my wife is quite concerned. She thinks that I should save them in case one of our children need them. How do you solve this? If you're prepared to donate your kidneys and your wife is not going to divorce you because you do it, I think you should go ahead with it. I think it's a wonderful thing to do.

Now in saying that, I should say that I still have two kidneys, so I'm really in no position to tell your wife that she's wrong, but donating a kidney does make a huge difference to somebody who needs a kidney. Possibly say their life certainly make the quality of life vastly better, and the chances that you will need your kidney, either for one of your children or for yourself, are extremely small.

It does strike me that if you do something so generous, I know karma isn't actually real, but I would like to think that if you put something like that out into the world, the chances of you dying in desperate need of a kindie and nobody coming to your rescue strikes me as pretty slim and also perhaps not a world you'd want to continue to live in either. Yeah, well, suddenly pretty slim, that's definitely true. Yeah, it would be a terrible ironic fate if you then did need a kidney for yourself. If you're one kidney, it's really unlikely, very few

diseases would strike only one kidney, so generally, that's not the issue, but I suppose theoretically at least you could get hit by a car that just destroyed the kidney on the side that you had left. But yeah, what are the odds of that? Not very great. So why haven't you done it? You do seem like an exceedingly generous person and a person who lives the philosophy that you talk about. What's held you back from doing? Well, one thing is when I first heard about kidney, altaristic kidney donation, when it became accepted, which is not that long ago. I was already in my 60s and some people suggested

that my kidneys were getting a little bit old to donate. But I'm not sure, maybe that was a kind of a rationalization. Maybe I'm just a coward when it comes to undergoing surgery, which I do find it a lot easier to give a substantial part of my income to people who need it than I do to give one of my bodily organs. Well, my wife's other argument was we've both already checked the Oregon donor box on our driver's license, so we've effectively already made the donation, we're just holding it in trust until we don't need it anymore.

Yes, except that the chances are you're going to get older, like me, or even older before you die, hopefully. And by which time your kidney may not be very much good. Those checked boxes are really useful. Should you be in an accident and be brain dead or something like that. That's good, but unless you're going to spend a lot of time riding a motorcycle without a helmet, you're probably not going to end up like that. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, I found the book very fascinating.

I read the, obviously I was familiar with your work and then I read this 10 year anniversary edition. And you start off the book. You say something kind of interesting that I wanted to get some clarity on from you. You're saying at the beginning of the book, basically, you're going to be asking people to be far more generous than they currently are. You're going to ask developed nations to be more generous than they currently are.

And yet you also say that this version of the book entails you scaling back to a certain degree what you expect people to give or what you think our obligations are. So talk to me about that tension and the evolution of your philosophy. Right, so my thing on this goes back, not just to the first edition of the book, The Life,

you can say about to an article I wrote in 1972 called Famine Affleherence and Morality. And in that article, obviously I was quite young then, in that article, I argued that really that only ultimate limit of how much we should give is the point at which if we gave more, we would be harming ourselves more than we would be benefiting the person we were helping. And given the discrepancies between affluence in developed countries and people in extreme poverty and low income countries, that's a very demanding standard. Really, you have to empower us yourself to a pretty extreme level. And although there's a sense in which, yeah, ultimately, if you say,

what's the best thing to do, that might be the best thing to do. But the effect of telling people that morality is that demanding is actually a big danna, right? I think they're less likely then to say, okay, I'm going to do this and more likely to say, wow, if morality is that demanding, too bad for morality, I'm just not going to take any notice of it. So my scaling back is kind of pragmatic. It's designed to produce

the best consequences. And I think producing the best consequences don't come from asking people to make things that really they would inevitably see as a huge sacrifice, but rather from asking something less from them and convincing them that this is not really a sacrifice at all, but that this is something that, yes, though, in terms of money, there'll be a little less well-off, but in terms of satisfaction, purpose, in life, fulfillment, that'll actually be better off. Yeah, it strikes me as a trade-off between appealing to the handfuls of Gandhi's and Jesus's and saintly figures out in the world who would hear this call and cut everything

to the bone, which might cumatively add up to a small amount of difference, or appealing to a large number of people to give slightly more than they might be inclined to give and cumulatively end up with a lot more aid or help or raw material and having to strike that balance is a difficult one. Yeah, so I think you put that very well. I think that's, it is an attempt to try to try to persuade people to give what will amount to the largest benefits for people in need. And I have become convinced that having a less demanding target about getting more people tonight,

that will end up adding up to a greater sum. That is, I think the tension in a lot of philosophy, right? Because it's not that philosophy is naive, but there is, in kind of, a purity or an idealism in a lot of philosophical thinking, particularly when it gets to morality. But you use the word pragmatism there also for this philosophy to be brought into the world effectively that is a certain amount of pragmatism is required and yet if you have if all you're focused on is pragmatism you know you probably end up with simply maintaining the status quo.

Yes that's right and it's very relevant in politics too. And if you go from philosophy to politics, you have to think about the effects of what you're advocating. And if the effects are going to be really negative, then you don't want to advocate that as a politician. You're not going to get anywhere. You're going to maybe damage the party that you're associated with and maybe lose a lot more besides. So I think it is, you know, similarly when a philosopher gets involved in practical ethics and talking about actual decision people make, you do have to think about what effect am I going to have? And is that overall effect going to be better or worse if I have a pure idealistic demand

rather than one that is realistic for the circumstances you're in? It's interesting that philosophy that I write and think a lot about, which is stoicism, so ancient Greece and ancient Rome, philosophy and politics were inextricably linked. They were one and the same. The philosophers were often politicians. The politicians would consult philosophers with the exception of your work and a handful of other philosophers. It does feel like in the modern world, the two worlds could not be further apart and have really less influence on each other

Does some extent that's true, but not entirely. I think I'm not the you know I only want to think about people are actually doing political philosophy say John Rose would be an example Not so recent though not not so recent I guess, no, but still certainly within my lifetime, maybe not yours. So I think his ideas had an influence on American politics anyway. So I think there is still a connection, but it's certainly quite right. It's not the same as it was in ancient Greece or Rome. Although, you know, the philosophers didn't always do too well. Did they look at Seneca's tutoring of Nero, for example? Didn't turn out right. Well, I think about that all the time, because either he was a mar-like figure saving us from a much worse outcome or he was a complete

and utter hypocrite who debased his philosophy and depending on what is happening in the news and what side of the bed I woke up on, I can make the argument in either direction. Right, yes. I don't know. I can't come in on that, but I think it does so that it's hard for philosophy to have an impact on the real world. I mean, it does, but it doesn't always have it exactly in the direction that you want it to have. Yeah, I mean, there was an observation. I think it was from Cicero was talking about Cato, and he said, you know, Kato acted as if he lived

in Plato's Republic instead of in the dregs of Romulus. And his point was that Kato went through the world, you know, thinking about these sort of big moral questions, you know, simply on their face, not about what was possible or impossible, you know, he's thinking about them, what's right and wrong, not what's easier, what's hard. And this was admirable and made impossible. You know, he's thinking about them, what's right and wrong, not what's easier, what's hard. And this was admirable and made him,

you know, above most of the pragmatic philosophers of this time. And yet he was also pretty ineffectual, pretty unable to compromise, pretty, you know, pretty much stood alone apart from everyone else because everyone else understood that they weren't living in Plato's Republic. Right.

And you could probably take that to current United States politics, and you could say some of those on the liberal wing of the Democrats in a somewhat similar position to Kato, maybe they think they're living in certainly some more ideal society, whether they're living in a country that is, I don't know, the, the, the drags of Trump's presidency, maybe. Well, I'll, I'll give you another stout concept that I think ties quite beautifully with your work, and I've been thinking about a lot. So I'm in the middle of now a series on the Cardinal Virtues. So I just did Courage. I wrote about discipline now. I'm writing about justice, which is why I was so excited to read this book, Yours. But are you familiar

with high recleases, circles of concern? Very loosely, only. Circles are concerned, yes, but you want this scholarship, no, you better give me. Well, I'll summarize it for the listener, but it's this idea that we come into the world self-interested. We care about our own immediate survival. And then our circle expands a little bit. We care about our family. We care about people that look like us, people that look near us, but there are these concentric rings

that get bigger and bigger and eventually include, not just people will never meet, but animals and everything that's ever lived. And he basically argued, and I think surprises people because they think of stoicism as such an individualistic philosophy. He said the work of philosophy was to try to pull

these outer rings towards the center to care about more people and more things as you go through life. And when I read your work on veganism, on, you know, effective altruism, it strikes me, and long-termism, all of the stuff that's come out of your thinking, it strikes me that that's the work that you're doing trying to help people bring these outer concerns closer and closer to home and to have more impact on those seemingly far away or impossibly complex or difficult global issues. Right, you're absolutely right that that's what I'm doing.

And in fact, I wrote a book in the 80s which got reissued more recently called the Expanding Circle, which talks about exactly that. But I trace that to W.A.H. Lecky, the historian of Rome. He wrote a wonderful book called The History of European Marles from Augustus to Schaulman, I think the subtitle is, and he talks about that expanding circle. That's where I got it from, and I was not aware that it came out of a historic philosophy. So that's something I've learned. Thank you. Yeah, and I think particularly with regards to animals, the idea that it's not just, hey, you should care about somebody who lives in a country that's not yours. But you should also care about an animal that can't even tell you that they're suffering

or are in pain. Yes, yes, I think that's quite right. I've also been engaged in a dialogue with a Buddhist philosopher called Sheech-Away. And she argues that you can get there through Buddhist meditation, that you start by thinking about somebody that you love who's close to you and you imagine them suffering and you feel compassion for them then suffering. And then you transfer that to somebody who's a little further from you, and you feel the same empathy and compassion. And then you keep going outwards. And so then you also can end up with compassion for non-human animals, for example. One of the ways I do that is I think about how I feel about my kids and what they mean to me,

and then I try to think about someone that I've never met or someone even that I dislike or that has done something horrible, and I try to think about how they think about their kids, and then I try to expand that further and I think, you know, how does this lioness think about their kids, or how does the, you know, the last living rhino think about its offspring, or, you know, its kin. And when you do that, I think you very quickly pick up on some idea of kinship or sameness between all living beings. And it makes it harder to be so indifferent to the fate of that other person or thing. Because as the Stokes would say, you realize that they have a nature not unlike your own.

Yeah, that sounds a very similar sort of thing to what Chowhai was talking about. Do you have children? I do, I have three children and now I have four grandchildren as well. Oh, that's beautiful. Well, one of the things you do talk about in the book is this struggle, speaking of the circles of concern. We obviously all care a lot about our kids, and you talk about certain activists who are spending time in Africa or wherever,

and they think about the, just the comforts and the things they would do for their children, and then the sort of indifference to the suffering of these other children. How do you think about that in your life? Like how do you think about obviously as a parent, you have this obligation,

a specific obligation to these people, but I guess you would argue you don't, that doesn't exempt you from an obligation to these other people just because you're not biologically related to them. Yes, certainly not. People often say, well, should I give exactly the same weight to a stranger's child as I would to my own?

And I think it's totally understandable that if you had to choose between saving your child and saving a child of a stranger, you would choose your own child. But on the other hand, the extent to which we give preference to our own children really reaches, I think, quite grotesque levels in modern society, where we think that we have to give our child all of the latest toys, whatever they might be, expensive, electronic, you know, Xboxes or whatever. And we don't do anything for the children of strangers. And I think it would be quite reasonable to say to your child

and they would understand at least once they got to a certain age that, look, you know, you're not getting this even though your friends have it. Because do you know there are children who don't get enough to eat or who, you know, when they get sick, they can't go to the doctor because their parents can't afford it. Can't even have a book to read. So I think it's, we ought to be scaling back the preference for that entirely abolishing it. Yeah, I forget where I got this,

but it definitely shaped it when I shaped me when I heard it. They were saying that, you know, not that long ago, when, if you heard someone say, hey, I think we should put in a pool for the kids, they meant we should put in a community center that has a pool, right? And now when you hear people say, we should put in a pool for the kids, they mean in their backyard.

And so it's not just, you know, like, do you care about these suffering children far away, but it does seem like, especially in America, the sort of nuclear family and the protection and the advancement of the interests of a very small amount of people is the norm even more than just thinking about people who live near you or people that live in your town or people that, you know, are part of your community or state or even country, we just have a very, very selfish, self-absorbed notion of what is ours. That's right.

And it's significant that it's the fact that people can have a pool in their backyard, that those things exist now, which didn't always exist. That means that they don't have to get together with members of their community and say, hey, it wouldn't be great if our kids could go into a pool when it's hot. So let's work for the community, find some land, raise some money, produce a pool. And then you're doing that together as a community enterprise and also your kids are more likely to be meeting other kids in that area. So it is a loss of community that we can do all of these things just within the

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rise and spectacular fall of FTX, and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freed. Follow Spellcaster wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes at free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, I think philosophy sometimes gets caught up with these, these impossible questions that kind of exempt us from having to make, you know, real choices in the real world. Like I think about the trolley problem. Obviously, it's an interesting thought exercise, but really, you're never going to be, it's not going to happen to you where you're like, am I throwing the switch this way to kill

these people or that people? But actually on a daily basis, you are asked, do you wanna make this product in America or do you wanna make it in a Chinese factory where children are having to work there. The environmental conditions are terrible or blah, blah, blah. And no one's going to die either way, but one's going to be more expensive than the other, so what do you choose? It strikes me that the moral choices that we actually face as human beings are less

stark, but also less impossible. And maybe we get caught up in these sort of abstract moral questions instead of having to think about the more practical tangible ethical quandaries that modern life presents us Yeah, for us it was do spend a lot of time talking about hypotheticals and They're interesting as thought experiments. I think they helped to clarify people's ideas and to test What they really think about certain situations I verify people's ideas and to test what they really think about certain situations.

I think some of the work helps us to understand where moral intuitions come from. Josh Green, who's a professor of psychology at Harvard, but you started off as a graduate student in philosophy here at Princeton, has done some interesting psychology work on the trolley problem, which as I say shows something about I think our evolved responses to hands-on violence that's playing a role there, but but in terms of trying to work out what we ought to do in our real life, yeah, we're not in those artificial situations where you can say well you know that this is going to happen if you do A and you know that that's going to happen if you do B and you know that's all you know

so We do need to think about real life differently Right, it's like you're not asked should you value this kid over that kid But you are asked will you send your kid to private school or public school, right? and one of those has community consequences and kind of the other, the other doesn't, but neither choice is totally free. And we sort of make those unthinkingly or without much regard to the philosophical or moral consequences of that decision,

even though it's actually the sort of quand of a quandary that life is put aside. Yeah, I think it's interesting that you raise that because that isn't an important example. It is a decision people may and they tend to make it simply on the basis of what they think will be best for their child and they might not even be right about that. But you're right, it has far more ramifications. So it has ramifications for the community in terms of if particularly educated people

send their children to private schools, then there's less support for the public schools. They have a different student body and then it becomes a vicious spiral, right? Because then people say, well, I'm not going to send my child there because the only people there are people who don't have educated parents and you know, not going to be that academically gifted, so I don't want my children to be there. But if you have a strong public school in your area where everybody attends, it does a lot for the community. It maintains the level of the school.

It helps to disadvantage people in the community who get to go to the same school as more advantage people. Plus, you're going to save a lot of money and then you can ask yourself, what can I do with that money? And that's where we get back to helping people in extreme poverty in low income countries. How did you not to to pry into your personal life but how did you make that decision with your own children as I my kids are very young so I'm thinking about this myself now. Right we send all of our children to public schools and interestingly our children have carried that on so all of our grandchildren are going to public schools as well. Now, I should say, we brought up our children

in Melbourne, Australia, and the grandchildren are still there. No, it is sending their kids to a school where there's a serious fear that they'll be violenceed under them. So it's maybe easier than it is for some people in some neighbourhoods elsewhere. That's true and I can't say what I would have done if in that situation if I thought the public schools were really very rough and even dangerous places. But if you have a public school that is not that bad,

and especially if you get together and talk to some of your friends about it with kids of the same age, and you send your kids to the same public school, you can have a real impact on the level of schooling in that community. Now that's very beautifully put. I had another specific question for you that I thought was quite interesting in the book. You talked about, as you're talking about effective altruism, Now, that's very beautifully put. I had another specific question for you that I thought was quite interesting in the book. As you're talking about effective altruism, you make this comparison. This is what it costs to raise a seeing eye dog.

It's like $50,000. And then here's what it costs to cure someone of blindness in the developing world. It's like $7 or something like that. Which it totally makes sense. It's a very compelling, you know, example. It's like, do you want to make one person's life a little bit better, or do you want to radically transform hundreds or thousands of people's lives for the same cost? But I assume we're all on the same page that a blind person should have a seeing eye

dog if it would be helpful to them. How does, like, again, when we get in these questions, it can be so simple to go, like, yes, you pick one over the other, but who pays for the seeing eye dog, right? Like, how does that happen in your sort of worldview? What do you think about that? Well, I mean, we don't have unlimited resources, and I think we ought to prioritize the resources where they will do the most good. So if there is somebody who is blind, my priority would be for them to see again before somebody

who is blind gets, but can't be helped to see again, gets a seeing eye dog. Sure. And that would be true, even if it costs the same to help somebody see and to help somebody get a seeing eye dog. And that would be true even if it cost the same to help somebody see and to help somebody get a seeing eye dog. So when, as you say, it costs hundreds of times less, possibly even thousands, but I'm not gonna go that far. Let's just say hundreds, hundreds of times less to restore sight in somebody in a low income country who has cataracts and can't see.

Or to prevent people becoming blind from trachomasae, which is a common preventable cause of blindness in low-income countries. Then I think that's what you should do. And you should only be donating to seeing eye-dog societies when there's nobody left who you can help to see for the same cost as providing a seeing eye dog. Yeah, that's so tough, I guess. We would like to live in a world where everyone can get what they need. It's very easy for people to say, let's do both. Actually, I had, there was a lecture at Princeton that I went to just a week or two ago,

at which somebody was talking about more funding for the arts. I'm saying it's bad thing that our community doesn't do more funding for the arts. So I said, well, this is a community in which there are some people who have no health coverage, unlike other African countries, the United States does not provide universal health coverage. The United States also provides a very low level of overseas aid, about a quarter as much as some of the better countries, some of the European countries, a quarter as much in proportion to the national income as a percentage of national income. And I don't think we should be funding the arts, which mostly generally

goes to, you know, arts that are patronized by fairly wealthy people, subsidies for the opera or whatever it might be. While we are not providing decent health care for everyone in the community, and even more while we are among the real laggards in terms of how much we help people in extreme poverty. And how popular does this make you with your humanities professors at Princeton? Not always popular, but that's okay. I can wear that. Yeah. I mean, it's tough because you are asking a person who has already suffered, a blind person to suffer more.

But the alternative, you pay $50,000 for them to have a C&I dog, which could be transformative and improve their life so much, you're asking hundreds of people over here to not see it all. That's right. And they're likely to be there in low income countries. They don't get the assistance that a person who can't see would get in the United States, even without a seeing eye dog. Maybe perhaps their daughter has to look after them and therefore can't get right to work.

So I think it's even tougher than it is to be unable to see in the United States. Well, and I guess the really challenging part of your work though is that actually, we're not choosing between those two things at all. People like you and me are choosing whether we wanna get a new car or not. Yeah, that's right, or you know, upgrade our phone because there's a new iPhone at,

a lot of your phone is still doing really what you need it to do. Yeah, or yeah, people are choosing to fly private because they don't want to sit with someone else on on an airplane. Meanwhile, they could save thousands or tens of thousands of lives with the money they spend. And this isn't even getting into the environmental consequences of their decision as well. Yes, certainly. That is another factor.

We should be thinking about those environmental consequences as well as about the money we could be saving. So you got this famous award, right? And I was talking about it in your bio that you won a million dollar philosophical prize, which you then donated to people in need. What does it feel like? Because I imagine it's a strange feeling

that not too many people have, where someone gives you a very large amount of money and there's probably this part of you that wants to think of it as yours, but you had, I guess the Stokes would say, both the Justice and the Discipline to not let it sit too long in your account or not at all. What did that process actually feel like of taking this life changing amount of money for you and directing it towards being truly life changing for a large amount of money for you and directing it towards being truly life-changing for a large amount of people.

Yeah well I have to say it felt really good I was really glad to get the opportunity to do that. To be able to help all of these and was donated through effective charities and the life you can say has a list of independently assessed effective charities. So I was confident that the money was going to do what I was wanting it to do to help people to save the lives of children who would otherwise be vulnerable to malaria or as we were saying to restore sight in people or perhaps to provide mentoring and assistance so they could start a small business and work their way out of poverty help women who were suffering from obstetric fistulas which are life-ruining

conditions which can be surgically repaired for about a thousand dollars. So Yeah, I was really pleased that there were a lot of different good things that I could do with this and certainly From my position obviously obviously I'm a Princeton professor, I'm not on the poverty line. So from my position, what I would have done with that extra million dollars was really putting a bit of icing on the cake, maybe it wasn't going to make any huge difference to improvement in my life. So I was fortunate to be in that situation. Yeah, I guess they say it's not a principle unless it costs you money.

And then you got a large amount of money and you had to test the principle. It did cost me money, but it didn't cost me happiness. And that's truly more important than money, right? Money is an instrumental good for what you can do with it. And I think in terms of its what it does in terms of increasing your happiness, it is really very high level of diminishing marginal utility. So yes, if you're on 30 or 40 thousand dollars a year and you get a million dollars, it could make a big difference. But even you know, even then you wouldn't need the whole million. You could probably

get most of the difference it would make in yourhow, happyness you would get for a couple of hundred thousand. Yeah, it's interesting. I don't want to get into some whole argument about whether money is real or not. The way that crypto people like to. But it is interesting that like, it's not really real, right? Like it's not like they gave you a brief case of cash and then you had to go put that in the safe in your house and then to spend it. It's like, it all goes into a spreadsheet somewhere. We're hoping someone is telling us that the number in the spreadsheet is getting larger or smaller, but it's all this kind of imaginary thing, especially after you reach a certain

point and you don't have excessive spending habits, that number gets exponentially larger quite quickly, right? That's the power of compounding interest in all these things. And yet, taking it out of that spreadsheet makes it quite real, like very real to a large amount of people as you did.

But for some reason, I think we get stuck trying, I know I certainly do, so I'm not trying to judge other people, but it's like, well, it came in, and I should put it here, and you have these systems, you don't, we're really good at building architecture in our lives or systems that make our net worth go higher, but we don't have the same system or prioritization of making our net impact number go higher, or the net lives we've saved in the course of

our life number going higher. Yeah, that's right. And that's exactly what the organization I found in the life you can say if I grew out of the book is trying to do. It's trying to change that culture. So the people have the sense that that's part of their life, giving is part of their life, helping people in greater need than they are, is part of their life. It's a regular thing that they do. Maybe they make a regular recurring

monthly donation, there's one good way to do it. And so they feel good about that and they don't they don't feel that it's a loss. And I've talked to people who grew up in families where they did that right from the start. And they just see that as part of their life. But if they start out with what they've got in, minus whatever it might be, the 10% or something, might be less if they're poorer or more if they're wealthier, that's going at. And you can think of it as a way of improving yourself as you go along. So just as if you're a runner, you might do a certain run every day or a few times a week,

and you time yourself and you think, hey, that's great. I broke my personal best today. So you can do that with giving. Last year I gave X percentage. This year I'm going to give X plus Y percent and that'll be my personal best. Sure. Sure. Yeah, there's a quote from Anne Frank that I loved and I was reading more about it. I guess it was the motto of the Frank family, but it's no one ever became poor by giving, which I think is a beautiful way of expressing what we're talking about. Exactly, I think that's quite right. Yeah.

And the other thing I wanted to pick up going back to what you just said before, is about if you don't have excessive spending habits and that presumably fits with the stoic view as well. Sure. It's really important that your spending is modest, that you keep it constrained, that you don't think I have to have, as we're just saying, whatever new thing comes at. Because if you live modestly, you can live a very satisfactory life. And it's then pretty

easy to say, I don't need this. You know, this is not something I really need to spend money on. Yeah, there's a there's a quote in Marcus really says, meditation that I think about often. He says that the blessing of his life was that he never knew want like he always had what he needed. And then anytime anyone ever asked him for something, he always had enough to give to them. So he was saying that he was rich, not just because he didn't need anything, but he always had a surplus big enough that he could help people who did need something. And I thought that was a kind of a beautiful and concise definition of wealth.

That's a great definition of wealth, but is it applicable to a world in which everybody can email you or, you know, and you're much more aware of the fact there are people in need in countries far away from us. Of course, Mike is already as ruled over a large-dramon empire, but I guess people couldn't actually come up to him and ask him for money in the way that they could now have emailed him. Well, there is kind of a magnificent scene in Marcus' life in the depths of the Antonin plague.

Rome's treasury is depleted, and he holds this sale on the lawn of the palace where he sells his wife's silken robes and their silver goblets and their furniture and their jewels. He just sells it all. The point being in his view was that he should suffer first before asking other people to suffer. I've always found that to be kind of a beautiful embodiment of both leadership and what stoicism is actually supposed to be about. Yeah, that's really fascinating. When I think back on my childhood, I don't remember many

parents talked a lot about money, about saving money, about being smart with money, about working hard and all these things. But I just don't really remember much in the way of a practice of generosity or charitable giving. So that wasn't like a, I feel like that wasn't a muscle. I think we went to church and I would see them put a little bit of money in the basket or whatever. But there wasn't much in the way of like that as a muscle. And I think that's one of the things I've

took from what you just said is that this is something that's a little unnatural or a little, we're a little unpracticed in it. And it's actually something you have to try to get good at and try to push yourself to get better at just in the way that you might have a fitness goal or a diet or a career goal, you should have sort of some charitable or impact goals also.

Yes, I think that's right. And maybe the reason that we have to work at that is that after all, we are descended from millions of generations of beings who had to survive first. And I had to think of themselves to survive. And I had to think of the, if there were mammals anyway, they had to think of helping their children to survive. Otherwise, they wouldn't have passed on the genes. Scarcity versus abundance. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And so I think we have inherited this idea of think about yourself first and think about your children,

but we also have the capacity to see that we are just one among what's now 8 billion people in the world. And some of them, fortunately, a diminishing number of them, but maybe 7,800 million of them are in extreme poverty, where they're living on what to us is like buying a cup of coffee somewhere, two dollars a day. And yet for us, that's to spend two dollars on something is just nothing. We don't even think about it.

So, that's the world we live in and that's why we have directly, I think, developed that sense of it is one world as you were saying before. We can think about them and how they feel and how their parents feel when their child would die, how we would feel if our child were to die. So that can help us to get in the habit of to make it something that feels perfectly natural to us, to share some of our good fortune with them. Do you think it also has something to do with sort of like who are our heroes? Like who do we celebrate? Who do we hold up as people that know, people that we wanna be like?

I was really surprised as I was reading the book. You have like a section or a chapter on Yonik Silver who I happen to know pretty well. I've known for a long time. I always knew him as a successful business person. I've seen him at a bunch of conferences. We've had dinner a few times. Nice guy, I knew him to be a good parent and a friendly person,

but I had no idea about his other sort of work on the side. His focus on effective altruism and his charitable work. And it just struck me as one how often we celebrate one kind of success in a person's life. And because they maybe they don't want to seem holier than that, maybe they don't want to seem holier than now or they don't want to seem like they're doing it to get attention.

Maybe we know less about the good they're doing on the side, but just that also so much of what we celebrate, like Forbes has their list of the richest people, they don't have a list of like the people who have helped the most people with their wealth. Right, and yeah, that's what we need, an impact assessment of what people have done. And it's not just how much they've given, because the people who, you know, we know are giving, and certainly this is true around Princeton, many other places, well, other people whose names are on buildings. Yeah, sure.

And they've given, but they've given on condition that the money be used for a building, and then it gets named after them. And that may not be the best use, even the Princeton could make of their money, right? But they're less likely to give that scholarships for the needy because nobody sees their name on the scholarship in quite the same way. So that's one thing, but you're right. In a way, you

said something like, you don't want to appear self-righteous. In a way, we're too modest, not the people who are giving for the buildings, but the rest of us are too modest. And we don't go public about what we're doing. So you know, you're like silver and yet you never knew the philanthropy that that he was doing. So, um, why is that? I think it's because he's inhibited about seeming to boast about it. Yeah. Um, so he doesn't do that. But because he doesn't do that, other people don't think about giving that much. And there's plenty of good research and psychology that says, if you know that other people are helping, helping strangers, let's say,

then you're more likely to help than if you think, oh, well, why should I help? Why am I the only one who's helping? You know, there's other people around who are just as well off or better than me. And if you don't know that they're helping, you're less likely to help yourself. Yeah, it's, we not only don't encourage it,

we even have like a slur that we throw at it, we call it virtue signaling, right? Like we not only don't celebrate the good stuff that people are doing, but that we criticize them if they dare to talk about it too much or if they're not modest enough about what they've done. Right. So, virtually signaling is the current sort of trainee turn that comes out of evolutionary

theory. Yeah. But otherwise we call them do-gooders, right? And that also has a bit of a pejorative sense to it to be a do-gooder. I don't know if you know the book by Larissa McFarquire called Strangers Drowning. It's a fascinating book because it has different chapters on different do-gooders who are really truly admirable. Some of them are giving money, some of them might be giving a kidney, some of them

are taking in kids who are in need, abandoned kids, disabled kids and so on. And she mingles that, it's not just the stories, but she mingles it with some sort of philosophical discussion about altruism, about how much people can do under the circumstances in which altruism arises. And it's a really interesting study which shows the possibilities for some of us that what people can do. And I found it really inspiring as well as intellectually

stimulating. Well, you know, it's funny, right? Like, the buying the Ferrari is visible, right? You can see that they bought the Ferrari and that's either impressive or whatever it means to you, but by definition not buying the Ferrari is not visible and sending the money overseas or to this charity or anonymously donating here is again by definition not visible. And so we kind of have this condition not visible. And so we kind of have this conflict in which not doing good is inherently more visible, inherently more rewarded than doing good. And so there's this sort of disparity in terms of credit. And then what do we signal to people is important. Like we signal having a nice car is important because people have nice cars and we see it and it says something about them

and the other thing by not having the signal we don't know about them so we have no sense of how important it is or how prevalent it is. Yeah and even more glaring example than the nice cars I find is the really expensive watches, the Rolexes or brightlings or whatever it might be, which don't do any better than this Casio. In fact, they're worse really in terms of keeping time or you have to wind them or something like that or they don't have the multiple functions. But people pay $5,000, $10 10,000, 20,000 for one of those

watches. And it does nothing except say, I'm really wealthy because otherwise I couldn't have afforded this watch. Yeah, that's a good point, man. It's tough. And then where do you draw the line? Do you need the Casio watch at all? I have an Apple watch,

it's certainly more expensive than you're watch, but I tell myself, hey, it's not a Rolex, you know, and all of a sudden, you know, you get down and well, why don't you just look at the sun and guess, you know? Yeah, you could do that, but not at night, maybe. Yes, sure. You know, you can use your phone, I suppose, but that's a bit less convenient. I carry a watch.

And maybe having an Apple Watch has some functionality for you. So as your time doing some things, that's fine. But actually, I got given a brightling recently for a talk that I did in Switzerland instead of getting paid for it. They gave me a brightling. If any of your listeners would like a brightling and it's prepared to donate, I think it's minus around $6,000 is prepared to donate $6,000 to charity. It's unused, unworn. I'd like them to just send me an email and it's theirs.

You should have an auction for it. Well, that would be an idea. Maybe that's what we should be doing. I'll talk to people at the life you can say, maybe we'll do that. You should wear it precisely once so that it could be Peter Singer's Brightling. And then it's now worth $50,000 because it has this story behind it. And now you've helped even more, but by attaching a story to it and a narrative and a cause to it, you took something that could have provided $6,000 in value. And now you've got $50,000 in that. OK, right. I'm going to take back what I just said.

You need to know that $50,000 to affect your charity. And it's yours. There you go. There you go. That's a beautiful idea. I do think about that. How do you, when you are good at something, you command in the system that we have,

you command a price that the market sets. And obviously, you don't want to accept less than what the market accepts, because that only helps the multi-billion dollar publisher that would have paid you X and instead is paying you three X. But just because they are paying you that doesn't mean you're actually worth that or you need that. And so reading your work and as I've been writing this book about justice, I am trying to think more and more about how does one, you know, sort of pay it forward or effectively use the surplus that their skills or

unique set of circumstances has created for them because again, just putting it in a spreadsheet and congratulating yourself that it's a large number at the end of your life is not particularly meaningful. No, it's not. So, I face this when I get invited to give talks, sometimes talks for corporations, sometimes talks for universities or other institutions. And I don't need the money, but I don't want to do it for free. And also, I would, you know, I get more invitations than I could possibly accept.

So I ask for a donation to one of the life you can save recommended charities, and depending on how much time is involved, how much travel, what the institution is, I'll vary that amount. But I take that as the sign of recognition that they want me enough that they're prepared to make a sizable donation. Plus, it's doing some good. I find that, I guess I could just charge the fee and then donate it myself, but I'm happy to do it either way.

Well, I sometimes think about that. My books have been popular with the armed forces, and so I'll often get requests. And I go, well, these are soldiers. You're speaking to them, I think they do important work and blah, blah, blah. And then I go 50% of the US budget goes to the defense department. I don't wanna keep it in there. And first off, it's my taxpayer dollars

that I'm just getting back in some form or another. But yeah, I think sometimes people who have this sense of money is not important to me. I want to do good in the world. They feel guilty making money or asking for what they are worth. And I do think effective altruism has been clever and innovative in this idea of earning to give or thinking about how,

you just not accepting money for your services doesn't really help anyone. But if you can leverage those services to do good for other people, then I think you found a way to solve that problem. I think that's right, yes. And recognizing that money can do good for others, that it's fungible in that way, is the first step towards thinking, yeah, sure.

I don't have to feel bad that I'm asking for money for this. If I'm asking for, as you say, the US military or from corporations or institutions that can afford it and that would normally expect to pay that for a speaker, let's say. But let's do something more positive with it than just use it to enrich myself. In which case, I would feel bad about asking some of those sums. What about, is there an ethical line, like let's say some foreign government of ill-repute wanted to pay you to give a talk? Now ostensibly you could get that money and it's better for you to have it than them

to have it and then you could use it to do good But would you draw a line there like can one take on can one On take money unethically to then use ethically or how do you think about that? Well, I think it does depend on on what the effective taking it will be Is the is the foreign government or this could also be a corporation, for example, this has been debated about tobacco corporations. Are they using it to improve their image so that people will think this is fine, we don't need to regulate tobacco, we don't need to put big warnings warnings on cigarette packs and they're okay. In that case, you know, maybe you shouldn't be taking that money or allowing your money to be used for them. But

if they're not doing that, and particularly, let's say, if it's a foreign government and you can say what you want about it, and that's my clear, then maybe you can actually do good within that country as well as using the money for some good. So it's going to depend on the particular situation that you're in. Yeah, have you seen this new golf lead that the Saudis have funded? Yes, I've heard about that. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm wondering if you take a hundred million dollar guaranteed payment, but then you use it for good.

Is that the same as just taking the money because they're paying you so much more than the PGA tour? Yeah, it's an interesting question. Yeah, that's a tough one. Does it make any difference to what the Saudis do or to their position in the world that they're sponsoring the Skull? I think probably not really. People know what they've done. They know about the Kishoggi murder and they know that they haven't been very helpful right now in the context of the Ukraine war and the energy shortage in terms of keeping prices down a little bit.

prices down a little bit. So I think they know that anyway and if I were good enough golf it would be off at $100 million for playing with the Saudi golf league. I'd probably take it because that would be a lot of good that I could do with that money. Yeah, it's tricky and to go to your donation, it's easy for regular people to sit around and going, you should never do it, or you should do it and donate it. But that's because you're not looking at, you know, a large number with a lot of zeros after it being dangled in front of you. It gets tricky once, once, you know, once it's your money or potentially your money. Yeah, I mean, it can get tricky, but if you've decided before you went into it that you were going to give this money, and maybe you say that publicly so that people know that

you're doing that and it makes it harder for you to back down without getting embarrassed, you can do that. Yeah, I guess that's why these pledges are so effective and some of these labels can be so effective is that they keep us honest or they force us to give, as you say in the book, past the point where it hurts a little bit. Yeah, that's right.

I think public pledges and saying things about you're giving in public, it certainly should help. Well, I thought the book was fascinating and it certainly changed how I think about a lot of things and I really appreciate what you do. And I think this is what philosophy is supposed to do, which is it's supposed to challenge us and it's supposed to make us better people,

not just involve a bunch of unpronounceable names and impossible to solve proofs or problems. Yeah, I think it's important to get people to realize that philosophy is relevant to anybody's everyday life. The humanities are not in such great shape in all areas. They have to compete with the STEM subjects. And, you know, there are some things that go on in some of the humanities that I don't think are particularly worthwhile, but I think philosophy really is something special.

I've seen this throughout my career that students have changed their lives because of classes that they've taken with me or people have read reading things that they've read that have changed their lives in philosophy. So I think it's got to be there. It's a society in which people didn't think deeply about how they ought to live would be really an impoverished society. No, that's right. And I think that's why we've been struggling with these questions for so long, is that they're really hard and really vexing. But as we get a little bit closer, hopefully we get a little bit better each time, each generation. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to

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