Are Global Ethics Possible?
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, by Peter Singer
Random House, 206 pages, $22
Reviewed by Andrew Benedict-Nelson
The philosopher Peter Singer has never struck me as a particularly utilitarian advocate of utilitarianism. His position on world poverty is well known—he thinks it is not just unfortunate but indefensible that people living comfortably in the Western world do not give a significant portion of their income to help the world’s poorest. But whether or not it is Singer’s intent, that admirable argument is often presented in conjunction with others that most people find abhorrent. The latter include his defense of euthanasia and, under certain conditions, infanticide, as well as his efforts to consider human and animal lives on roughly the same plane. His book Animal Liberation strikes many readers as far out of touch with the details and practices of their daily lives. As a result, many people who might take action in response to his call to fight poverty do not.
In The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, Singer has resolved this dilemma. In key respects, he seems to have donned the publicist’s hat. He has disconnected, or at least distanced, his argument for the world’s poorest from the larger utilitarian project. Instead of philosophical wrangling, he tries to show how contemporary philosophers, the world’s great religions, and figures as diverse as Rick Warren and Bill Gates should all inspire us to do more for others. Then he provides counterarguments to the most common objections to charitable giving. Instead of dismissing those objections as emanations of greed or false consciousness, he sincerely searches for their roots in human psychology and looks for ways that we can overcome them. He demonstrates that personal giving does real good for people living in extreme poverty, and then presents institutions and individuals whose efforts have made a difference. Finally, recognizing that most of us will not live up to the standards of these saints, Singer suggests a modest program of charitable giving, public service, and political action that anyone could reasonably follow without feeling complicit in the slaughter of the innocents—or, for that matter, without buying the book (see thelifeyoucansave.com).
By momentarily divesting himself of some of his philosophical trappings, Singer has done a great service to the world’s poor that even his most ardent enemies should recognize. The book’s existence shows the seriousness with which the man approaches global inequality. It demonstrates that he is the kind of person who regularly asks himself how to do the greatest amount of good he can in the world, and he isn’t afraid to pursue a counterintuitive answer. No matter what conclusions readers may draw from The Life You Can Save, it is hard to imagine that they will not feel encouraged to do the same. Its moral urgency makes it difficult to maintain the aloof position of the critic—therefore, buy it now and think about what you can do. Or send $22 to Oxfam.
The foundation of The Life You Can Save is formed by the kind of utilitarian thought experiments for which Singer is famous. If you had to sacrifice a small amount of your time or money to save a child from drowning, would you do so? Of course. But Singer argues that there is no real difference between letting that child drown and choosing material comforts rather than donating to charity. According to the World Bank, more than 1 billion people on Earth live on less than $1.25 a day, which means that they are unable to afford the most basic human needs. Children who grow up in such conditions, most of whom live in Africa and South Asia, may not be drowning, but they aren’t much better off than if they were. Five quarters don’t go much farther in India than they do here, and people living on such a meager allowance often cannot obtain food, water, shelter, and other basic human needs. By tinkering with this essential equation (or rather, inequality), Singer attempts to respond to the main objections to giving.
To me, the most profound perturbation is the car-or-child question, which Singer attributes to the philosopher Peter Unger. In this scenario, a man has purchased and restored a valuable antique car. He derives great satisfaction from owning and maintaining the car, though he does not have the money to insure it. However, he knows that the value of this particular model of car has increased over time, so if he needs extra money for retirement, he could sell it. Thus, the car is both a source of pleasure and a wise investment.
One day, the man decides to park the car near an old railway siding and take a walk along the tracks. But he soon observes that a runaway train with no passengers is coming down the line. Worse still, a small child is playing on the tracks, oblivious to both the train and the man’s warnings. The man knows that there is a switch he can throw to divert the train to the siding, thereby saving the life of the child but destroying his car. The man weighs his options. He knows the car brings him great satisfaction. But he is uncertain about whether he can save the child’s life. The kid might move out of the way on his own, or the man might not understand trains as well as he thinks. Given this uncertainty, he decides not to throw the switch.
While the man’s actions are not as immediately revolting as allowing a child to drown, most people would still agree that he had acted badly. Singer argues that we, too, act badly by letting hypothetical uncertainties about the effectiveness of aid outweigh the immediate need to feed starving children.
Of course, this sort of hypothetical story is not sufficient to convince most people to significantly reorder their lives or finances. Singer recognizes that a philosophical proof would need to be much more rigorous, but that is not the purpose of this book. Instead, he turns to the two main reasons people choose not to give to charity: doubts about the political and economic consequences of aid, and psychological obstacles that prevent people from giving even when they know it is right.
Of these two sections of the book, the first is more convincing. Many people suffer from misconceptions about international aid for the poor. For example, in a widely cited study, most Americans believe that their government spends about 15 to 20 percent of its budget on foreign aid, when the true figure is less than 1 percent. Our foreign aid as a percentage of the gross national product lags that given by most industrialized nations. Most respondents also say that the United States spends too much in providing aid to other countries, but when asked what would be a reasonable amount, they say something like 5 to 10 percent. “In other words,” Singer writes, “people wanted foreign aid ‘cut’ to an amount five to ten times greater than the United States actually gives!” When one takes into account how much of this aid is given to further strategic objectives in regions like the Middle East rather than to alleviate extreme poverty, it seems like a paltry amount indeed.
Singer also takes into account some changes to America’s political economy that could help end poverty. The most striking example is subsidies to U. S. cotton growers, which, if eliminated, would allow African growers to compete in a fair market and lift themselves out of destitution. But Singer’s main goal is to encourage personal giving, not policy changes. Therefore, most of his section on the facts of aid is devoted to showing that donations can, indeed, permanently end poverty in the developing world.
This is a complex problem, of course, but the good news is that a variety of approaches have proved effective. One model that has received a great deal of attention, and rightly so, is microfinance. The idea is to give the very poor modest loans that help them find livelihoods or start businesses. In certain instances, a loan amount of $50 or $100 to an individual entrepreneur can make a huge difference in helping them establish a livelihood. Some people also use microcredit to get through famines or medical crises that, without such assistance, would either leave them at the mercy of predatory lenders or, just as likely, dead.
Singer shares several other innovative models for eliminating poverty, from the capacity-building work of Oxfam to the UN Millennium Villages project founded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs. But he also points out that there are many international aid organizations whose projects, while not lifesaving or novel, are reliable, scalable, and cheap. Examples include medical charities that focus on such specific interventions as the treatment of cataracts, cleft palate, or obstetric fistulas, which can completely restore a person’s livelihood and greatly reduce suffering. The existence of so many rewarding avenues for giving shows that the question we must answer is not whether but how.
Singer writes that although nonprofits can do much to improve their transparency and accountability, this does not relieve anyone of the responsibility to give. Indeed, while he considers many criticisms of aid, the only argument he really needs to refute is the contention that, on the whole, it has done more harm than good. This idea’s most recent proponent is William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden, who writes that the developed world has seen little return on the $2.3 trillion it has invested in aid over the past fifty years. But as Singer correctly responds, much of that aid was caught up in the politics of the cold war. The resulting corruption was indeed disastrous. It includes, for example, millions of dollars that wound up in the bank accounts of the Congolese tyrant Mobutu Sese Seko.
Singer sometimes oversimplifies such debates, in part because he is attempting to remain concise. When he writes that “Bill Gates, the master of global technology, has drawn the implications for ethics of the fact that we are now one world,” it’s hard not to ask whether we missed the one-world software update. But for those who want to understand such issues in greater depth, there is no shortage of literature, from, most notably, Sachs’s The End of Poverty to the more skeptical criticism coming from Easterly. Overall, I find it difficult to disagree with Singer when he writes that, “because it hasn’t been tried, no one really knows whether poverty on a global scale can be overcome by a truly substantial amount of aid provided without political interference.”
In fact, the more relevant critic of Singer is not William Easterly, but Charles Dickens. In his section considering the psychological barriers to giving, Singer reminds us of Dickens’s creation Mrs. Jellyby, the character from Bleak House who was obsessed with raising funds for charity work for “the natives of Borioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.” According to Singer, Dickens was right to mock characters like Mrs. Jellyby, but mainly because international philanthropy was, in her day, impractical. This is an interesting line of thought, which draws on Adam Smith’s observations about our lack of sympathy for those in distant disasters. Singer writes that, before globalization, it may have made sense for human beings to go without a global ethic of giving. But now that we know exactly where those disasters are happening and can provide some form of help almost instantly through credit cards, he writes, that is no longer the case. We no longer have an excuse.
It should be pointed out, though, that Mrs. Jellyby is not a ridiculed figure because of her inadequate political economy; rather, the problem is that she neglects her own family. To be fair, Singer acknowledges this, but only as part of an inquiry about the wide variety of feelings that keep people from giving. He seems to regard any aspect of human nature that impedes giving as an obstacle, dismissing them as “quirky relics of our tribal past.”
This sort of sociobiological shorthand does not serve Singer’s overall purpose very well, particularly when he applies it to such fundamental institutions as the family. He shares the story of Paul Farmer, the heroic physician and activist for poor Haitians, who struggles over the question of whether spending time with his daughter is preventing him from saving someone else’s child. To ease his conscience, he carries in his wallet both a picture of his child and one of his patients, a malnourished girl of about the same age.
Singer respects Farmer’s dilemma but reconstructs it as a limit on ethical human behavior. That “conflict . . . between being an ideal parent, and acting on the idea that all human life is of equal value, is real and irresolvable,” he writes. I’m no philosopher, but it seems to me as if Singer has approached this problem in the wrong order. The idea of family is foreign to no human being. Whether through our blood relations or through surrogates, it is one of the few ways we have to learn to relate to other people or to find meaning in life. If it is a limitation on our ethical life, it would seem to be similar to the limitation of having free will or consciousness. Certainly those aspects of human nature allow many of us to be selfish and shortsighted, but they are also the only way we know the meaning of good.
This paradox is most evident in a section where Singer quotes Mother Teresa: “If I look at the mass I will never act,” she said. “If I look at the one, I will.” Singer takes this remark as proof of the fact that human beings are overwhelmingly disposed to help specific individuals whom they can see. It’s true that this poses practical dilemmas for aid organizations; in the past, some groups have allowed donors to “adopt” individual children and follow their progress. The problem is that, while this increases donations, it is a terribly inefficient way to deliver aid.
Nevertheless, I just can’t see Mother Teresa’s focus on individuals as a liability. Instead, it seems to me that the challenges charity poses to our limited concepts of family, justice, and personhood are exactly what gives charity meaning, both for those who give and for those who receive. Singer includes in the book several stories of people who felt like their lives lacked meaning before they embarked on a radical program of giving, as well as brain research and public opinion polls that all show that altruism is good for our overall well-being. But I would imagine that one of the ways that happiness is actually felt is through improved relations with other people. I don’t mean to say that a lack of such feeling frees one from the obligation to help others. It simply seems like the most natural way to discover and renew that obligation’s significance.
These objections to The Life You Can Save are far from fatal, however, because Singer is not asking us to be Mrs. Jellyby. He is simply asking us not to be Ebenezer Scrooge (or, perhaps, to be the Scrooge of Christmas morning). Sadly, as is Scrooge, this book is haunted by a ghost chained to money boxes: the ever-worsening state of the American economy. It has crept in only parenthetically, as when Singer praises the philanthropic principles of the late Bear Stearns. But it will surely be the excuse that many people give for not following through on Singer’s suggestions. My hope is that readers will pick up The Life You Can Save with the opposite intention in mind, taking it as a reminder of how much Americans still have. It is far more than most people in the world, and certainly enough not to dismiss others as “surplus population.”
But I also hope that readers will remember that once Scrooge did begin to live his life for others, his happiness was not just a feeling in his brain. In Tiny Tim he found not just a child he could save but also a chance to be his second father. •
Paying Back Our Moral Debts
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, by Margaret Atwood
House of Anansi Press, 280 pages, $15.95
Reviewed by James Roots
Margaret Atwood’s novel was scheduled for publication in the fall of 2008. Truly historic national elections, mere weeks apart, in both her native Canada and in the United States, persuaded her publishers that an author even of Atwood’s international renown would get lost in the clamor, so publication was pushed back to the beginning of 2009. To fill the resultant gap, her 2008 Massey Lectures were rushed into print, a month before she actually read them over CBC Radio.
It is tempting, nonetheless, to suspect Atwood of prescience and her publishers of preternatural quickness in producing Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth almost simultaneously with the collapse of the global economy. Is there a whiff of sulfur about the pages of this unusual and often enlightening book? Serendipitous timing or not, Atwood is not interested here in analyzing current financial crises, much less prescribing remedies for them; she is no economist. Instead, she is curious about the mental construct behind the notion of debt, “that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.”
At bottom, the entire structure of every financial system and institution anywhere in the history of the world—I don’t think I’m exaggerating her point here—is rooted in the notion of debt: you give me something I need, and I promise to pay it back (normally with some interest) or I suffer the consequences. Society, even at the level of chimps, cannot function without a system of lending and returning, because no one creature can do it all.
In other words, payback is essential as a redress of balance. Atwood writes, “None of our many systems of debt and credit could exist without an innate human module that evaluates fairness and unfairness and strives for balance: otherwise nobody would either lend or pay back.” Fairness requires, too, evaluators of that balance, both internally—our conscience—and externally “someone or something . . . in charge of evening up the scores,” whether that be a bank, a Mafia enforcer, God, or the devil.
Debt is, at a certain level, literally a deal with the devil. Ancient religious prohibitions against the lending of money cast both debtor and creditor as partaking of a sin. In Aramaic, the language of Jesus, the word for debt is the same as the word for sin; the Lord’s Prayer could legitimately be translated as “forgive us our debts/sins” or even “our sinful debts.” Not for nothing is Jesus also called the Redeemer, “a term drawn directly from the language of debt and pawning or pledging.”
Keeping score of debt-sins is a job for the devil, and with so many souls trading so many debts, even he needs an aide-mémoire; hence the development of the written contract, the debt sheet, and presumably the bar tab. No wonder literacy was regarded with such suspicion and mistrust throughout history; no wonder one of the first things rebels do on invading institutions, even today, is to burn the tax records. Destroying tax records destroys not only debts but also sins, thus freeing one’s eternal soul from the clutches of the devil and his lawyers.
Lest we view such preliterate mentalities with amused condescension, Atwood reminds us that the spread of literacy, beginning with the Protestant Reformation and peaking in the nineteenth century) went hand in hand with the triumph of capitalism, under which money became the measure of most things and consequently led to an explosion of debt. Most of the second half of Payback shows how debt became “a governing leitmotif of Western fiction” in this period. The examples Atwood studies are somewhat predictable and shopworn: the various Faust legends, Ebenezer Scrooge, The Merchant of Venice, The Mill on the Floss. But these are the works of literature that profoundly influenced public attitudes and beliefs about debt and payback, and Atwood is marvelously adroit at breathing new life into such fusty artifacts.
She may not be the first to note that Dr. Faustus and Scrooge are reverse images of one another, but it is edifying to be shown how their different paybacks reflect their financial times. Marlowe’s Faustus repents, yet still ends up ravaged for his blood debt, because in protocapitalist times, great wealth and self-indulgence were considered great sinfulness. Dickens’s Scrooge, in contrast, redeems himself “by going on a giant spend-o-rama” and instantly becomes beloved and admired for it. How did that sea change in public attitudes toward wealth come about? By Scrooge’s era, unbridled capitalism reigned triumphant; becoming wealthy and selfish was no longer a sin in itself.
Scrooge’s big sin was to freeze his money; for money, as all students of it recognize, is of use only when it is moving, as it derives its value entirely from whatever it can translate itself into. Thus, the Scrooges of this world who refuse to change their money into anything else are gumming up the works: currency is called currency because it must flow. Scrooge’s happy ending is therefore entirely in keeping with the cherished core beliefs of capitalism.
This points to one of the major reasons recent government actions have failed to even slow the decline of the global financial meltdown, let alone reverse it. Bailouts, loans, tax cuts, and interest-rate cuts granted to banks, investment firms, automakers, and other giant institutions are being frozen at the top levels within those institutions rather than put into circulation through reduced banking and transaction fees, sustained employment, and corporate “spend-o-ramas,” if you will. The bailout beneficiaries are refusing to see the Dickensian ghosts.
They are willfully failing in many things: common sense, business ethics, obligations to beneficiaries and to clientele, fundamental economic responsibilities. But mostly theirs is a failure of the heart. Atwood’s great precision of focus leads her not to bash capitalism, as one might expect, but to tie credit and debit to one’s moral status. Like Scrooge’s hoarding of his wealth, the refusal of bailout recipients to circulate their gift has created a massive moral debt: “Money isn’t the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have value: good turns and gifts must also flow and circulate . . . for any social system to remain in balance.”
The enshrinement of entitlement has warped rational-choice microeconomics. Now we not only believe that we have a right to the best-quality goods at the cheapest price but also demand that someone else pay for them. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman, in his new book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, describes this attitude as one of “moral hazard” and sees it as the perversion of trickle-down capitalist theory into trickle-down debt: the exploitation of taxpayers as helpless redeemers of financial debt because the sense of entitlement has eliminated the entire concept of moral debt.
And to be conscious of moral debt, one must be conscious of morality. As the philosopher Jacob Needleman explains in his 2006 book Why Can’t We Be Good?, “Moral action is never automatic; it presupposes intention, free choice. And intention inevitably either begins or must pass through the mind.” A quarter century of moral relativism has made it difficult for us to think about whether an action is right or wrong; we fail to even recognize an ethical dilemma as such. We don’t get mad at the ethics of failed institutions using public monies to pay billion-dollar bonuses to their incompetent ex-CEOs; we get mad because that money isn’t being paid out to us instead. We, too, are entitled to be overpaid for our rotten work or for not working at all, aren’t we?
Even where we still feel the stirrings of the remnants of moral judgment within us, there is no guarantee that, like Scrooge, we will be moved to action by them. “The moral sense is no surer a cause of moral action than beliefs are the cause of actions generally,” wrote James Q. Wilson in The Moral Sense. He goes on to specify that the key to moral behavior is the sense of commitment, the decision to undertake a duty or an action because it is the right thing to do, as when parents sacrifice out of commitment to the best interests of their children.
Atwood writes amusingly of this kind of moral action. During the Great Depression, her father, “that man of rectitude,” resorted to a pawnshop to obtain the funds needed to pay a moral (not even a financial!) debt. In those days, when it was considered disreputable and shameful to resort to pawning, the sacrifice of his dignity and pride, the acceptance of the burden of shame, was enormous, but it was a commitment he made to family and to the rightness of paying one’s debts whether or not they were material. Today, there is no shame in the action of pawning and borrowing because there is no longer any moral judgment involved. Without moral repercussions, the element of sin, of evil, of wrongness, is eliminated. And without this moral substructure measuring the balance of debt like the blindfolded Justice, there can be no real direct payback:
The things that can happen to you in North America nowadays if you don’t pay your debts are so non-life-threatening as to make little impression on the extravagant borrower. . . . Everyone’s in debt—so what? That’s the way it is . . . [Now you] can declare personal bankruptcy and more or less walk away from the whole mess.
Even if a person, or a country, walks away from a debt, someone still has to pay for it: It doesn’t vanish into thin air. “Every debt comes with a date on which payment is due.” What usually happens, what is happening now, is that governments will pick it up through the taxes that disproportionately burden the poor. If the poor are too poor to pay it on behalf of the rich, payback time will come just the same. Who, then, ends up redeeming the debt?
Atwood’s concluding chapter extends this worrisome question to the health of the planet itself. Reworking Scrooge’s night travels with the spirits of Christmas as an ecological tour led by the spirits of Earth Day, Atwood presents Scrooge Nouveau as a product of our self-esteem culture, neatly skewered thus: “he grew up surrounded by advertisements that told him he was worth it, and that he owed it to himself . . . but, by extension, he doesn’t owe a plugged nickel to anyone else.” One result of this culture is a near-absolute imbalance in humanity’s account with the earth, which is the original creditor, because “all wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn’t be any economics.” Getting a bit simplistic in her economics at this point, Atwood has the spirit of Earth Day Future explain:
Mankind made a Faustian bargain as soon as he invented his first technologies, including the bow and arrow. It was then that human beings, instead of limiting their birth rate to keep their population in step with natural resources, decided instead to multiply unchecked. Then they increased the food supply to support this growth by manipulating those resources, inventing ever newer and more complex technologies to do so. . . . The end result of a totally efficient technological exploitation of Nature would be a lifeless desert. . . . But long before then, payback time will come for Mankind.
This Scrooge Nouveau reacts at first by calculating how he could make a killing out of what he now knows about the future, but Atwood has to remain true to the spirit and the message of Dickens’s classic. If she cannot realistically offer us a happy ending, she can bring this collection of lectures full circle by reminding us that her thesis is that debt is a mental construct; therefore, “how we think about it changes how it works. Maybe it’s time for us to think about it differently.” Is it too late to learn how to do that? Her answer is “maybe.” But that is not her last word. This entertaining and thoroughly absorbing little book ends instead with a challenge to begin the process by asking ourselves the deceptively simple question “Where should I start?” Not how or why or when; it’s too late for those words. Payback is already in process. Where will you begin redeeming your debts? •
