The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Peter Singer and Coleman Hughes

Episode Date: July 11, 2020

Peter Singer has been described as the world's most influential living philosopher.  He is professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and the author of many books, including Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, One World, The Life You Can Save, and The Most Good You Can Do. Coleman Hughes is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal. His writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The City Journal and The Spectator. He has appeared on many podcasts, including The Rubin Report, Making Sense with Sam Harris, and Real Time with Bill Mahr. 

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table, on the Riot to Live from the Table. My name is Noam Dorman. I'm the owner of The Comedy Cellar. I'm here with Dan Natterman, as almost always, our producer, Perry L. Ashenbrand, my good friend and noted intellectual who writes for the City Journal now, Mr. Coleman Hughes, and our really esteemed guest of honor who we're very, very proud to have, Mr. Peter Singer, has been described as the world's most influential living philosopher. He is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and the author of many books, including Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, One World, The Life You Can Save, and The Most Good You Can Do.

Welcome, Mr. Singer. Thank you. Nice to be joining you. Where are you located right now, by the way? I'm just outside Melbourne in Australia. Is it easy to keep safe there? I don't know. Is it high, low? It's a lot easier to keep safe here. We have had a total of 106 deaths since the beginning of the whole pandemic compared to, what are you at, 130,000 or something? Something like that.

What do you attribute that to? What did you guys do right that we did wrong? Well, we, you know, I'm not a great fan of our present government, I have to say. It's rather conservative. But one thing I will say for them is that they listen to the scientific experts. I think it's a good idea. I think that's something that your leader has not been doing. And that certainly hasn't helped in dealing with this situation. The last question about this, I'm so curious, are you guys wearing masks there? Are you locked down? What do you do right?

So we have, the city of Melbourne itself has gone back into lockdown because there has been a spike in cases. That means like, you know, somewhere like 100 cases a day. Still not a lot by US standards, but it's enough to make the city itself go back into lockdown, but not regional Victoria and not the rest of Australia. There are fewer cases there, so they're basically out of lockdown. Well, largely out of lockdown, still some restrictions. So Coleman here just graduated as a philosophy major from Columbia University. And I don't know if you're aware of him, but he's quite noted already here in America.

And I know this is a big, exciting thing for him to be able to speak to. So I'm going to turn it right over to Coleman because I know he's been studying you and he's got all kinds of questions on his mind. Go ahead, Coleman. Yeah, it's an honor to meet you, Peter. I've been a big fan ever since I read Animal Liberation many years ago. Great. So I guess the first question I want to start out with actually pertains to what we were just talking about, about the body count in Australia versus America. And my question is about the role that body count

should play in our moral judgments of harms in the world. And I think this is something that lies at the bedrock of a lot of concerns going on right now, not just coronavirus, where we're comparing body counts between different states and different countries, but also with police killings of unarmed Americans. On the one hand, it's possible and utilitarianism often gets attacked as a naive philosophy that only cares about something like body count. So it's possible to care about body count to the exclusion of all other issues and to say that X is a bigger issue than Y purely based off body count alone. And that it's possible to not care enough about body count and dismiss it altogether as an important indicator of how much you should care

about an issue. So I'm curious as someone who is, you know, the leading modern day utilitarian, I would argue, how you think about how much you should care about an issue in terms of body count versus more subjective measures of harm? Yeah, thanks, Carmen. That's a good question. And firstly, let me say utilitarians are not just counting bodies. So I noticed that some time back when the number of U.S US deaths from coronavirus passed the number of deaths of Americans during the Vietnam War, a lot of people sort of made this point

as if somehow that showed that the coronavirus was doing more harm than the Vietnam War. Well, that's clearly a mistake. And not only because the Vietnam War obviously harmed Vietnamese a lot more than it harmed Americans, but it's also a mistake because the coronavirus does mostly kill people in their older years, more like my age group, 70 plus. Whereas in Vietnam, the Americans killed and probably most of the Vietnamese killed were much younger people in their 20s or 30s. So a utilitarian would say it's not the number of deaths, it's the number of years of life lost that we should be looking at.

And obviously when somebody in their 70s dies, they maybe lose 10 or 15 years of life. When somebody in their 20s dies, they lose 50 or 60 years of life. So that's a big difference. Secondly, utilitarians don't just look at life anyway. They also want to take account of the qualities of life. So that's why utilitarians have been among the forefront of those who are trying to find ways of measuring well-being, happiness, whatever you want to call it.

Utilitarians, going right back to Jeremy Bentham, have always been concerned about that. And so the loss of life of somebody who's in misery, not even wanting to go on living, which certainly can be true of some people, is not a tragedy in the way that the loss of life of somebody who's enjoying their life and does want to go on living is a tragedy. So all of those factors need to be taken into account. But when they are, when they're properly taken into account, then yes, it's true. Utilitarians want to add things up and they want to say how bad something is depends on its consequences and

how bad it is for the well-being of all of those affected by it. So this kind of leads into another question, which is about abortion. And I've been pro-choice my whole life, first by instinct and then by reasoning. But the intuition that you just mentioned a minute or so ago, that it's much worse to take to steal 80 years of someone's life, as opposed to five years of someone's life, would seem to entail or at least imply that we have to take very seriously the harm caused by canceling a life that may not even be born yet. Whether we want to call this a life or a person or not, we can sort of table those and just look at the cancellation of potential life years as a concern in itself, is that a reason to, is that a sound place to ground a non-religious pro-life stance,

or do you have a different view of that? Well, it's a factor that ought to be taken into account. I don't think in the present global circumstances it's enough to ground a so-called pro-life stance. For one reason, I don't think that it's a good thing really for the world's population to grow further than it already is growing and is predicted to grow over the coming century. So I don't think that it's a good thing to say we want more beings to exist. And when you're talking about using this argument as an argument against abortion, then given that abortions are carried out at the stage when the subjective life of the being has not really begun.

That is, there aren't conscious experiences. There isn't a sense of a being who wants to be existing, wants to go on living, and is enjoying life. It's really equivalent to not bringing another being into existence. In other words, this argument, insofar as it is an argument against abortion, is an argument against contraception or even going even further, an argument for having children, for having as many children as you can have under the circumstances. And I don't think in the world as it is today, that's what we want. If you try to apply this in a world in which, you know,

had the resources of our planet and only had a few million people in it, maybe, sure, that would be a different situation. What do you, I'm sorry, have you, are you familiar at all with the anti-natalist position, which says that having a baby is bringing a child or a life into this world is immoral and unethical because the worst case scenario, if you don't have a child, is no harm, no foul. But if you do have a child, you take the risk that this child will suffer. And you're bringing a suffering human being into the world is a moral negative. Do you lend any credence to that argument?

Oh, it's an argument, again, that needs to be considered, but I think it's too pessimistic about what life is like. We shouldn't only be focusing on the harms and the possibility that, well, in fact, more or less the certainty that any child we bring into existence will suffer to some extent. But I think we need to balance that against the positives of the lives of the children we bring into existence. And depending on the circumstances in which we bring them into existence, we can reasonably

hope that those positives significantly outweigh the negatives. I think that's a suitable justification. I don't think we have to only think about the negatives. Can you imagine a situation where you would say it was unethical to bring a child into the world? We're talking about a couple that's impoverished or has certain genetic conditions that would make the likelihood high of a child being born with terrible illness or something like that?

Yes, absolutely I can. And I think there are many couples who recognize that. There are couples, for example, who know that they're carriers for genetic diseases that mean that perhaps their children will only live briefly and that that short life will be a life of suffering. And if they know that, then I do think it's unethical for them to have children. They should find, or at least to have children that will have that disease, they should find a way around that, maybe using donor gametes in order to get around that.

They're not secure, but they know it for, say, 50-50 chance. Yeah, I still think it's better to avoid that risk then. There are ways of, depending on the condition we're talking about, there are ways of eliminating that risk. I think 50-50 chance is too big to take. Wasn't there a big piece that, I mean, it was at least 15 years ago, maybe longer, that you had written specifically about this? I believe it was on the cover of the New York Times magazine about spina bifida.

And your friend was on the cover of the magazine. It was a fascinating conversation. This was something called Unspeakable Conversations. Yes. That's right. So, yeah, that was an interesting debate it wasn't written by me she wrote it and it was about um her visit to princeton uh she was somebody who was born with a very serious disease and was in a powered wheelchair and was very disabled but she was enjoying her life um she she sadly she died a few years ago, but

yeah, she did have a good life. And I think she had many assets that balanced the disability. She was very intelligent and did a law degree and was working as a as a lawyer um she also came from a family background that had the resources to give her that good life despite the disability uh so yeah certainly a discipline i would never say that just the fact of a disability guarantees that life will be miserable but um i would say that if a couple can make a choice between having a child with a disability or having a child with a serious disability I'm talking about, or without, it's reasonable to choose to have the child without the disability. I loved that piece. I mean, I would like to say that for me too, it's such an honor to talk to

because when I was in graduate school, I discovered your books and they really changed the way that I saw the world. And I remember that there was one particular quote, and you'll forgive me if I'm not quoting it exactly, that was, you have a moral and ethical responsibility to help someone if helping them doesn't cause you harm? Am I getting that nearly right? Yes, that's pretty close. In fact, what I say is if helping doesn't cause you harm that is in any way comparable to the harm that you're preventing, so it might cause you some harm. This actually started from an example I used in an article many years ago about jumping into a shallow pond to rescue a child. And I was

assuming that it does cause you some harm because you're wearing your fanciest clothes and they get ruined by jumping into the pond. So you're at some expense. But on the other hand, there's no risk to your life. And if you don't jump into the pond the child is probably going to drown that's right so the harm is in no way comparable to the harm you're preventing and i then generalized from this to say uh okay everybody would probably think you should jump into the pond and save the child but why doesn't everybody think that we ought to help people in extreme poverty when for relatively modest sums that don't cause us a lot of harm, we can probably save a life of a child in a low-income country who, let's say, otherwise will get malaria, and we can

provide them with a bed net so they don't get malaria. So you had said, actually, that proximity is no excuse to not then carry over with that behavior, right? The absence of proximity, right? Yeah, that's right. Because if the child is right in front of you in the pond, we would rescue the child. If the child is somewhere on the other side of the world,

in a malaria-prone region, we don't feel the same obligation to say, yeah, I better do something to help protect these kids from malaria. So let's see how we can apply some of these concepts, I'm sure Coleman's thought along these lines, to the current day issues, the Black Lives Matter protests and the various issues that we're kicking around here. One of the obvious ones to me, and I'm sure Coleman will have more that he's thought about, but always um weighed on my mind was um weighing for instance i think you're familiar with the new york had a policy of stop and frisk they would where they would um pull over a lot of uh

i think it's fair to say they were profiling african americans um and prevented a lot of ostensibly prevented a lot of people from being killed through this, while at the same time causing a lot of lesser harm, rage, resentment, oppression in a sense. How does one weigh that? When you could say, listen, it's not fair. It's caused all this resentment, yet it saved a thousand lives, let's say, if it could be demonstrated.

How do you weigh those types of things? It's not easy to weigh a lot of minor problems as against a small number of big losses. But I would have said, you know, in general, probably the saving of all of those lives justifies the annoyance, if you like, some resentment to the people who are stopped and frisked. But the problem, I think, was that it seemed to be racially biased. And that was one issue which it needn't have been. As I take it, it could have been non-discriminatory in that sense. And it could have been done with the maximum amount of respect.

I would have thought, in general, people should support the idea of, you know, we want to be safer. We want police to carry out policies that have been demonstrated to save lives and to save our lives, as long as they do it in a way that really minimizes the harm that they're causing. So I see the problem with the stop and freeze policy that it wasn't done in that way. Coleman? Yeah, I mean, the other issue that I think about frequently is the problem of homicide, and particularly homicide in the black community, but in general, you look at the, you know, CDC keeps the leading causes of death, and murder is the number one cause of death for black men in their 20s and early 30s. And usually the issue really isn't brought up, or if it is brought up, it's just brought up as a that one should care about in its own right.

But you look at body count and it seems like there world in a way that the body count of an issue would perhaps should lead them to experience it. And then, of course, you get into trade-offs with, you know, with the stop and frisk example, one thing I would worry about, which is where a body count thinking can go too far, is what does it do to a community that is over-policed to the level of trust that that community has in the police, the degree to which they and their children are willing to cooperate with police officers one or two generations down the line, which then ends up creating a situation where the police can't solve homicides because no one will talk because there's just a general resentment. And it's very, very difficult to find that balance. And that is somewhere where I feel like, you know, one can be a utilitarian, as I've always considered myself to be, or a consequentialist more broadly, but still feel like I just have to go with my gut and be sort of, you know, if I were in charge of that program, I would just have to find the right

balance and just notice when I was pissing people off too much in one direction or the other. And so it seems like there are some practical problems that once you have the moral philosophy down, you still really haven't solved. And like the devil is often in the details. I totally agree with that. It is, there's a lot of detail. You always have to go into the circumstances, but,

but also in this case, if we're talking about levels of homicide and the fact that murder is a major cause of death for black males of, in those age groups, surely we need to look at the background factor, which is that there's so many guns in the American community. And again, sitting here in Australia where basically nobody has guns, maybe certainly nobody has handguns, I wouldn't know anybody in Australia

who owns a handgun, whereas in America I do know people who have handguns. They tell me they have. That seems to me to be the basic thing. You need to get those guns out of the community, and then that homicide rate will go down, as well as, of course, the accidental shooting rate that will go down, which is quite horrible.

These children who are being shot, which I read about over the July 4th weekend in the US, it's astonishing to me that it's not possible who are being shot, which I read about over the July 4th weekend in the U.S. It's astonishing to me that it's not possible to build a political coalition that will have that policy of getting guns out of the community. Do you have something to follow up on that, Coleman? As I said, Coleman and I have both, I think, separately used an analogy to speed limits where obviously you could end a lot of death by lowering the speed limit to 30 miles an hour, let's say. But we still let people drive at 70, even though

we may not think that's rational. And at some point, I think we just have to allow the pendulum to swing to its own possibly irrational position that the human race is comfortable with. So that in a certain sense, if the people being policed just find this too distasteful, even though they're fully aware that the alternative will lead to more deaths, then I kind of respect that. I don't see any alternative to letting them weigh those things for themselves. And that's why I was against stop and frisk. And I'm pretty conservative about a lot of things, but I was pretty much always against stop and frisk because I saw that the level of resentment that it caused was just untenable. It was just untenable for a free society. We just couldn't live that way. I don't know if that's philosophical or not. Well, it's philosophical to say that we need policies that

are realistic and that human beings can live with. But there is a question of what human beings can live with. When you talk about speed limits, then actually we have accepted a lot of changes that were opposed, which perhaps the most important one in terms of saving lives is requiring people to wear seatbelts. And there was, you know, I'm old enough to remember when those laws were brought in and there was opposition to those laws as well. People said, I don't want to be buckled in. I want to feel free.

And there were claims that you might want to get out of a burning vehicle or whatever, even though statistically that was far less likely than that your life would be saved by not smashing your head into the windscreen. And breath testing is another thing that has saved lives, I think. So people do come to accept this to some extent. Now, there may be limits to that and maybe stop and frisk went past those limits. But certainly, some reforms that people might find irksome at first, they will later come to accept as perfectly normal and

valuable. I oppose the seatbelt laws actually, full disclosure, but not because I never drove 10 feet in my life without being belted in, but just because I thought it would give the police another excuse to pull people over. And I think that did turn out to be true, whether or not that's a good reason not to have a seatbelt law, I don't know. But the police do indeed use that law as an excuse to pull people over. So you've written about the obligation to spend, if you have a lot of money, to spend that money to help people. I think I saw that you wrote about that you shouldn't spend money on art when you could spend money on

things that could help people, things like that. I want to go past that, but is that correct? Yeah, that's roughly right. I'm not against that, but I think that there are so many important and urgent causes that are saving lives, reducing suffering, restoring sight to people who are blind, and they seem to me to be much better things to spend money on than to... So that makes me think of kind of what Coleman was talking about before, because first of all, I think of money in terms of time. You could spend that time to make that money to help somebody, or you could take that time directly, although maybe it's not as efficient to do that. But we tend to be able to only focus on one thing at a time.

And one of the trade-offs and one of the things that Black Lives Matter does make me think about as a philosophical question is that if we're devoting all our energy, all our time on this issue, and by definition, that really seems to mean we are not going to devote any time to the other issues, which is where all the deaths are, where all the deaths are. And do we have an obligation in some way to face up to that and say, well, I can't spend, it's like spending all my money on something when it could be much more efficiently used to cure malaria or whatever the example is. And that really seems to be what's going on. I don't ever want to say all lives matter, God forbid, because I understand and I've always felt that that usually comes out of the

mouth of somebody who's saying it in bad faith. But it does seem that we're seeing just body counts increasing now in a direct trade-off to what we're focusing on. And would you cry alarm philosophically at that outcome and what's going on there? I think I'd be more specific with what you're getting at. Well, Coleman, you want to elaborate on that? Well, yeah, I guess just to be a little more specific, there's a recent paper called Policing the Police by Harvard economist Roland Fryer,

who has done a lot of very interesting research on police use of force. And he looked at every every Department of Justice investigation of a of a police department since the mid-90s. And what he found, the question he asked was, when the Department of Justice investigates a police department, does that affect the level of crime in that city? The intuitive hypothesis being that maybe when the police are under investigation, they pull back, stop doing their jobs as much, stop doing proactive policing, and the crime rate might go up as a result. So he tested that, and he found that in general, Department of Justice investigations didn't affect the crime rate. But under special circumstances, when there was a viral video that provoked outrage, and as a result of that video, a Department of Justice investigation ensued.

In those circumstances, crime went up significantly to the tune of thousands of deaths that, you know, if he's correct, wouldn't have happened in the absence of those particular investigations. So I think what I think that's what you're getting at, Noam, right, that there is a trade-off on that, at least there's some evidence that there's a trade-off on the issue. And there's an overwhelming pressure to only care about one side of that trade-off right now at this particular moment because of the level of energy that there is around this particular issue, but there might be a very sound and utilitarian reason to go against the tide and say, yes, I care about your issue as well, but actually, if you were to ask which one is more important or whether there's a trade-off, there's a very compelling case to be made that there is an important one to recognize. Yeah, it's possible. I don't know the paper, so I can't say how well grounded those claims are, but it does sound like it could be another example of this identifiable victim effect, which is really what I was talking about in the child in the pond. That is, if you see a child

in the pond who's drowning, you would jump in and save that child, no question, because the child is in front of you you can see that child if somebody says will you donate to the against malaria foundation to provide bed nets in regions where children are dying in malaria and the bed nets demonstrably save lives at low cost well you're less drawn to do that because you will never know which child you've saved right because if you can't you don't know where your bed nets are going but anyway you don never know which child you've saved, right? Because you don't know where your bed nets are going, but anyway, you don't know which children would have died from malaria and which wouldn't have.

So it's much less appealing. And that's been demonstrated in a lot of research. There was a famous case of a girl who fell down a disused oil well in Texas and people donated several million dollars to rescue her, and she was rescued which is great but they won't donate the same money again to help people elsewhere where they don't have an identifiable victim so you know you see a shocking video like the death of George Floyd and of course everybody's outraged and needs to do something about this. You say, well, when these things are investigated, then there are other crimes and other people get killed.

But we can never identify exactly who the people are because, of course, there were always some level of crimes. And you can't say which are the ones that would have occurred, which are the homicides that would have occurred anyway, and which are the homicides that only occurred because the police were pulling back as a result of this investigation. So we're less concerned about that, and we're less likely to make it a big cause. And that certainly can be a reason for distorted emphasis. I think I'm saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sir. I think I'm saying something also,

I am definitely saying what Coleman was saying, but I'm trying to think of a good analogy. Let's say I had $10 million or $100 million and 40 hours a week to spend and I could spend it and have a good chance of curing cancer and save millions and millions of lives or spend it and have a good chance of curing some very, very rare disease, some flesh-eating amoeba, which is just horrible and save 10 lives a year. I think if I'm understanding the stuff you've been saying, I would have a moral obligation to spend that money to save the millions of

lives rather than the 10 lives. And that is, and that's kind of analogous to what I'm seeing going on here. I'm saying, well, there's a tremendous amount of time, money, energy going now towards the issue of social,

of policing, justice and policing and all that. And I'm wondering if in a certain way, when we look at the statistics, it is in a way spending all our time and money on the disease that kills very few, while we're just ignoring the thousands of lives that are being killed in cities all over the country. And it's pretty clear we

can't focus on both at the same time. As a matter of fact, we focus on one at the expense of the other. And I'll just, and then I'll really stop. And I think that part of it is that, rightfully so, we just can't look at issues of race that disinterestedly. When you see a white person kill a black person, as opposed to a white person kill a black person as opposed to a black person kill a black person or a white person kill a white person as much as we think it shouldn't matter it's just you know it's just a statistic it does matter to us and and we just can't be comfortable treating it like you know the trade-off between diseases. So that's my... Right. So, I mean, the question is, is there really that trade-off?

Or is it, in fact, as Coleman suggested at one point, that maybe police attitudes to policing black communities, especially when we're talking about white police who don't live in or come from those communities, that those attitudes not only mean that people get killed in, black people get killed in horrible circumstances, as in George Floyd's case, but also that they're less connected with the community.

People in the community don't talk to them. And in general, there's a worse situation. I honestly don't really know what the facts are here. I'm not an expert on crime in American cities. But those are the issues that are relevant, surely. We need to get answers to those questions. I think Coleman would agree with me, and we can move on to something else.

In Chicago, they're having crazy numbers. What are the stats of people killed in a weekend in Chicago now? It's horrible. I don't know the number off the top of my head. And moreover, they tend to be younger. I mean, people killed by cops are generally in their 20s, I gather. Well, not just younger. They're people, you know, innocent

children, not tangling with the police, not, you know, not just innocently. Walking to school, driving, whatever. 15 this week, 20 that week, 12 every week. And really the answer, the natural answer, we flood the cities with police and stop this immediately, stop this bleeding. And the answer to the other problem is defund the police. And so it's just an interesting trade-off. I don't want to dwell on it too much. But I think in the end, it really does, if you think deeply about it, it really does come down to really

philosophical type issues, very similar to what I've seen you speak about. I don't know. Yeah, I think that's true. But let me just go back and say, I think the ultimate answer is get the guns out of the hands of people who have no reason to have guns. Good luck with that. Yeah, that's just not feasible in this country.

I disagree. I agree so much in theory. I think we're just, you know, every, every country in Europe, as well as Australia, that's looking into America and saying, what the hell is going on with you guys? What's going on with the police? What they, what they don't, you know, what they often don't think about is how much a result, how much of this is all caused by the fact that we have a gun culture. Even the police brutality elements and the police killings, because when an American cop pulls a suspect over, they have a fairly rational expectation that that suspect might have a

pistol hidden in the glove compartment. And they're on edge to a degree that cops in Europe just aren't and don't need to be. And that leads to making more mistakes and more jumpiness on the part of cops. And so yeah, I agree. It's all, you know, the landscape would be completely different if we were like the UK. But you know, I worry that a war on guns here would might go about as well as the war on drugs has here, you know, given how many guns are illegal. But I'm, you know, you know, you, you, you highlight the problem. You hit the problem on the head, I think. But so I think if, if you want, we can pivot to a little bit of a different topic.

Sure. Can I ask you something? I just have, no, I just want to backtrack for one second because part of what's always fascinated me so much about your work is I would venture to guess, and again, please correct me if I'm wrong, that what Noam said, that if you have $10 million and you could either cure cancer for 100 people or a very rare disease for two people, you would say, as you said, that you would have the ethical responsibility to cure the disease that affected more people. But I would say that based on what I've read from your work, that you would say that that would even be the case if one of the people with a very rare disease was one of your own children.

Am I right? Well, you're right in the sense that I do think that's what you ought to do. Now, of course, I would understand anybody who didn't do that. Maybe I wouldn't do that myself um so I I I would hit draw a bit of a line between what I would say you ought to do and what I would say you know we ought to condemn you for doing or blame you for doing I think we understand that people are going to give preference to their children you know we tend not to blame them but ideally yes if you're you know very large number of lives that you save or the life of one of your children, then.

But, you know, in your scenario where you say that you're obligated to spend money to help the most people possible and not on art and not on other things, you know, one might argue that nobody would. The reason we make money in the first place is to spend it on ourselves or on our children and so on so that um i mean we have to give people we have to allow people uh the the ability to spend money on things they enjoy and to spend it on themselves or they're not going to make it in the first place they'll just stay at home and then say and i'm not going to work i mean you know to what extent should we be morally allowed to be selfish so that we'll be motivated to work? Well, I think people are motivated to work for other reasons, and I'd like to encourage them to be motivated to work for other reasons, like the fact that it gives them great potential to do good. And I've had you one example. I had a student who was an excellent philosophy student,

thought about going on to do graduate work and essentially to become a philosophy professor, would have enjoyed that, had an offer to go to Oxford University to do graduate work there, which is a place where I did my graduate work. And I can tell you it's a beautiful city, a great university to study in. But he chose to go to Wall Street in order to earn money,

in order to give most of that money away. This is now probably about 10 years since he graduated. He's been giving half of his income to effective charities ever since. Wow. And since he's doing pretty well, that's a reasonably substantial amount of money. So he was motivated by that. And I know it sounds unusual, and you'll say, well, you know, that's one in a million or something like that. But I don't see

why we can't encourage that. And he's certainly not the only one that I know, by the way. I'll tell you, that's a rare thing on Wall Street. I went to Wharton, by the way, with a lot of people who had Wall Street ambitions, and that never came up, I must tell you. Well, actually, you know, Wharton started this organization called One for the World, where a lot of Wharton business graduates have pledged to give 1% of their earnings. This is not as much as my former student gave. He's been giving 50%, but if every Wharton graduate gave 1% to effective charities, that would also make a significant difference.

And my Wharton graduate had my income, it wouldn't. Come on, pivot us, Coleman, pivot us. My good friend, Ethan at Columbia was head of the one for the world chapter there. All right. So I wanted to talk about long time horizons, thinking about the distant future from a utilitarian perspective. I'm sure you're aware of Tyler Cowen. Are you familiar with his book from a year and a half ago, Stubborn Attachments? I haven't caught up with that one yet. No, sorry. So just to give you a basic picture of what he's arguing there, Tyler is a libertarian or libertarian-leaning economist, but also someone who's very versed in philosophy, published co-authored papers with Derek Parfit and whatnot. when you think about the distant future, there's obviously the first observation

that the number of people that are going to exist are going to dwarf the number of people that have existed. So on a baseline utilitarian perspective, the future matters more than everything that's happened up to the present. And so what he basically does is argue that a few different premises, one, that the future really matters and that we shouldn't discount the future. Two, that GDP is a decent proxy for happiness,

and that as the GDP of a country increases, the average happiness tends to increase. And third, that very small changes in the GDP rate today will translate into extremely large changes in the amount of wealth that Earth has, you know, 500 years from now. So if you just change the GDP rate slightly, in the past 100 years of American history, then we would be as poor as Mexico rather than what we are today. And so he basically comes to the conclusion that our biggest moral obligation, setting aside human rights, which he agrees with as constraints, our biggest obligation should be to maximize the rate of GDP so that, you know, people, you know, citizens 500 or 1,000 years from now are orders of magnitude more wealthy and happy than they would be. What do you think of that uh thesis i just real quickly say

that you know when when um peter was talking about the more remote people are harder to care about and now you're talking about people that don't even exist 500 years in the future that sounds like an extreme example of that yeah no but in many ways i the reason i thought of this is because when i was reading this book it it seemed very much like Tyler Cowen was making the singer argument, but using time instead of distance. Yeah, and, you know, look, I totally agree with the general idea that whether people are distant from us geographically or temporally in time isn't relevant. That in itself is not relevant. We should be just as concerned about the well-being of somebody who is going to live in a thousand years as we are about somebody who's living today. But there are some buts in that. One is, you know, we can't be certain that anybody

will be living in a thousand years. It may be that there will be some catastrophe so that nobody is living at all. There's a small chance of that, but the further you project into the future, the larger the chance is. Secondly, it's really hard to know what is going to improve the well-being of people in the future. But those are caveats which affect what we ought to do, but they certainly don't negate the argument

that Tyler Cowen and others have put forward. There's a great book by somebody in the effective altruism movement called Toby Ord called The Precipice, which came out quite recently, which is about the risk of wiping out, of us wiping ourselves out or of some catastrophe wiping us out. And he also makes the argument about the importance of the long-term future and why we should be putting more resources into ensuring that we don't become extinct. So I accept that. Tyler's emphasis on GDP, I'm more inclined to question.

I don't think it is really a good indication of human well-being. It depends a little bit on how you measure well-being, what questions you ask people. And on some indications, you do get the richest countries with the highest well-being. But on other questions that you ask that relate more to people's mood and how much they're enjoying themselves

at randomly selected moments of the day, it doesn't seem to correlate that much. So that's a factor. Then another factor is you obviously have to consider the environmental impact of increasing GDP. And particularly in the world today, ways of increasing GDP, you know, here I am in Australia, a big coal exporter, we can increase our GDP by exporting more coal, but that's in turn going to have, well, we just had the worst bushfire season ever last January. So that's clearly climate related,

and we're going to inflict bad things on ourselves. And of course, even worse things on other parts of the planet that are less able to cope with environmental climate catastrophes. So I think there's a lot more to be taken into account than simply increasing GDP. But in terms of the general principle about looking at the long-term future as far as we can, yes, I fully agree that that's important. Of course, we can't be sure that the future on assholes undeserving of our generosity, but. You know, no, we can't be sure, but, um, uh, I'm concerned about people living better lives and some of them will be assholes and some of them will be great people. And I think we have to just,

you know, lump it. If we benefit some, some people that we don't think deserve to be, to have good lives at all. Um, that's, that's not something that we can do anything about really. Let's wind up with a few quick takes. So where does lying step into all this? Let's say a wife has cheated on her husband and he asks her to tell the truth and And she knows if she tells the truth, it's going to cause tremendous harm to her children. And, you know, there's way more harm to be done

than good by telling the truth. Does she have an obligation to lie or is she supposed to tell the truth? I don't think that there's an absolute rule to tell the truth. I do think it depends on the circumstances. And I think we can all think of circumstances where it's better to lie. I guess the most obvious one was when during the Holocaust, when the Gestapo come to your door and say, are there any Jews in the house? Obviously, if you're hiding Jews in your basement,

the right thing to do is to lie. And, you know, the circumstances you described are somewhat less at stake, but there's still a lot at stake. So maybe it's right to lie in those circumstances, too. I may call on you for a letter, some sort of letter of, you know, mine, that you've said that incest is okay or not okay. These are some of the things I have to admit. I took these from a review in the Times, but they're really interesting to me. Incest is okay among adults. So I'm using this example from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt about adult sibling incest. So we're talking about adults. They're fully informed and consenting.

They know what they're doing. They decide that it might be fun to have sex. I don't, you know, and they use contraception to make sure they're not going to have a child who might have a higher risk of abnormality. You know, there's a kind of instinctive reaction we have to that, but it's pretty hard to say why there's anything wrong with that. I don't think so. I agree, you know, I try to bring it up at Thanksgiving, but my family's like... You talk a lot about on this show about judging people by the times that they live in. And so, of course, that comes up with the founding fathers.

Oh, good one, Dan. Whether or not, you know, slave owning, we consider it horrifying. But in those days, it was more normal. Do you think that in the future, is there anything you can think of that people in the future will look at us and say, my God, what horrible people, I can't believe they thought that was okay. And in a hundred years, 200 years, it will be taken for granted that it's not okay. And they take down Natterman statue, by the way, that's how it ends.

Well, my answer to that is, is yes, it's absolutely clear. I think that people will look back on the way we have put literally billions of animals every year through factory farming, through horrible kinds of confinement, treating them just as things, doing everything as cheaply as we can, irrespective of the suffering it causes to animals, just in order to eat their flesh when we don't need to eat their flesh. It's not necessary for our good health or nutrition. It's not environmentally desirable either. I think we will broaden the circle so that we understand that we do have ethical obligations in the way we treat non-human animals, sentient beings, and people will look

back on that as we might look back on slavery or the games at the Roman Colosseum. Does that apply to one of Coleman's favorite examples, to choosing to buy a cell phone that, to our best of our knowledge, has the fewest slave-like laborers constructing it? It's a little more remote, I guess, that people have to try and get all this information, but sure, if you have a choice in cell phones and you, you know, one of them is labeled slaves were used to make this cell phone and the other isn't,

then it's obviously completely wrong to buy the one Chinese manufactured versus a Korean one. Go ahead. Go to animals. What about, what about immigration? Do you think people will look back hundreds of years from now and say, how could you have possibly let so few people come into your country?

Well, I hope that in hundreds of years we will have a borderless world and they will be astonished at what we're doing. But I'm not sure about that because that would require us to get this sort of xenophobia out of human nature, this idea that we are not comfortable with people who are different from us. And if they still have that, then they won't feel that. But maybe we will have developed and got more used to living

in very diverse communities. And we will look at that and say, yes, having borders is part of the same thing as to leaving people in other countries to just starve. Well, that was from Dan, and I got one more if anybody else could. One more from... I mean, I just was with animals. Are there any animals you think it's okay to eat, or should we just err on the side of caution and assume all animals are sentient beings worthy of not killing? Well, you know, oysters, for example, I don't think are sentient beings.

So if you're partial to oysters or mussels or clams or scallops those sorts of creatures i think when we look at their nervous system they're probably not capable of feeling pain so yeah go ahead oh shut down your oysters uh my anybody has a final question before me because my question is very light-hearted so um anybody have something serious after this one you're not gonna be able to go back to death so uh anybody else okay this is my question what was 11 year old peter singer like were you like what were you like as a child were you walking around weighing deep questions among your friends? Did you always have this aspect to your thought process?

Well, it was fascinating to me. No, I really attribute it to getting into philosophy, actually. No, and I wasn't reading any philosophy when I was 11 years old. I think my first, I read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy when I was about 14, and I was interested in it, but it took a lot longer before I started really thinking about ethics and thinking that I should be living in some way that was according with my thinking on those questions. I was just a pretty normal 11-year-old kid. You want to pinch yourself when you hear yourself

described as the most important philosopher on planet Earth? I mean, that's a very heady thing to deal with. Yeah, it is. It is. But to me, you know, yes, maybe I pinch myself, but I also think, gee, that's a pity that there aren't more influential philosophers around because I'm not all that influential.

So, you know, I want to increase the influence of philosophy so that there can be hundreds of philosophers who have more influence than I do. Noam, how do you feel when you're told that you own the number one comedy club in the world? That's such a minor thing. I feel lucky. I'll tell you this.

I want to say, I want to make this observation, and I really mean this from the bottom of my heart. I am always amazed that the truly most impressive people come across so humble. And like I would never in a million years feel like I was talking to someone who is who you are. And I've had so many conversations with so far lesser people who talk down to you

and are arrogant and look for the excuse to put you in your place and whatever it is. So, I mean, I just doubly admire that with all the, with all that you've accomplished that you can be so patient and, and, and speak to us. The Australia. Just as regular people, you know, I, I really admire that.

I've never met an arrogant Australian. Well, maybe James Smith's a little bit arrogant. But I don't want to keep him. When you were reading Peter Singer's books, did you read, did you hear the Australian accent? Because when I was reading what little I've read, it was an American guy. Well, I always knew that he was Australian. So maybe it was there somewhere, but you really did. I don't know.

I really think that like you changed the course of i don't know of my life but of the way that i really saw the world and um i like to think that a lot of the more ethical decisions i've made i've always had you um in the back of my head so thank you really for taking the time by the way peter barry ells also has some books i don't know if you've read the only book my own but it is books. I don't know if you've read The Only Bush I Took of My Own, but it is available. I don't know if you ever get to America, but if you do, we'd love to have you come and join us

in the restaurant where the comedy is held. John Hite lives about two blocks down the street, and he comes in, and Tyler Cowen comes in from time to time, and Coleman comes in. I know if you ever came in, they would all flock. Well, I would be going back to America in the fall because I teach every fall at Princeton. But this year we're teaching remotely now, so I won't be. But, you know, hopefully this thing will be over and I will be back there again.

Let me just add, you know, since you talked about Australian accents, if your readers want to hear more of me reading the book The Life You Can Save, you can go online to thelifeyoucansave.org, and you can download an audio copy of the book in which I read one chapter and a lot of celebrities like Kristen Bell and Paul Simon, Stephen Fry, a lot of people. We have a lot of different accents. So we have American accents.

We have Stephen Fry's beautiful bbc english accent we have uh shabana asmi an indian uh actress uh they all donated their time because they support the cause of uh saving lives and helping people in low-income countries so if your listeners can go there and download it absolutely free and where can they follow you on twitter as well is that right yeah i'm peter singer um uh on twitter you can find me there um and uh i have a facebook page as well you know a guy named jonathan barron by the way you pen i had him is that right yeah i had yeah i know him and he he's a great journal editor now and i've just actually with some other people we've published uh his paper, in the journal he edits, called Judgment and Decision Making, sort of related to what we're talking about, about making rational appeals to people to do good as compared to emotional appeals.

He was one of, I got an A from him. I didn't get that many. And when I went to law school. I'm sure it was well-deserved. When I went to law school, I called him up for a recommendation, and he said, there's too many lawyers out there. So he indeed. I cheated a lot in school, but it's because I wanted to spend time, you know, in helping people. So. All right. So I guess that's it. We're at an hour and you've been very generous with your time and we really want to thank you so much. And I really do indeed hope we will get to meet you face to face. Peter enjoyed his time with us.

Did you enjoy it? I've enjoyed my time. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's been good fun. He's not a person of great effusiveness, but I can tell that he,

right. That's it. Good night, everybody. Good night, everybody. Bye. Comedy seller.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell them. Podcast at comedy seller comedy sell podcast at comedy seller.com for questions comments suggestions and uh i guess that's it and coleman do you have anything you'd like to plug follow me at cold x man on twitter look at my columns at the Manhattan Institute at City Journal. Thank you all so much. Bye.