The Joe Walker Podcast - A (New) Darwinian Left - Peter Singer (Live in Melbourne)

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

Peter Singer is the world's most influential living philosopher.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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cover. Use Blinkist. Go to www.blinkist.com slash swagman, where you can get 25% off an annual subscription and you get to try Blinkist Premium for free for seven days. Don't be a dummy. Get on it. That's www.blinkist.com slash swagman. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Jo Walker. Hello there, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Swagman and Swagettes, welcome back to the show. This is a very special episode indeed, because it's a recording of a live event with the world's most influential living philosopher, Peter Singer.

More about that in a moment, but first three items of housekeeping. Number one, we now have a dedicated Facebook group that acts as a discussion forum for listeners of the podcast to talk about episodes and related links and sources. It's called Swagman and Swagettes, the and is an ampersand, and you can find it on Facebook. So please do join that group if you'd like to continue and broaden the discussion. Secondly, do subscribe to the podcast or follow it depending on which app you're using. It means you get updates and notifications as soon as new episodes come out. And it also makes it easier for other people to find the podcast on iTunes.

Thirdly, a word about the unfolding pandemic. We all have two goals over the next few months. One, don't get infected. And two, don't infect others. Even if you're young and healthy like me, and you think your chances of death are statistically low, you're being selfish by not socially distancing. You do not want to be a vector for this disease. This pandemic is our war. Our grandparents' generation was called to fight in far-flung lands. We're being called to stay at home. We can do this.

So why is social distancing so important? The R0 for this virus is not set in stone or preordained. If you lined up everyone in Australia or the United States or the United Kingdom, wherever you're listening to this podcast, if you lined them all up from left to right on a stage by the size of their personal R0, with people whose R0 is zero on the left, the people on the very right-hand side of the stage are what we call super spreaders, those who shed a lot of the disease and also have a lot of physical contact with other people. The logic of banning large events is to cut the tail off this distribution, that is, to remove the super spreaders, and thereby lower the average R0. That's why government bans on large events are absolutely essential right now,

as are a number of other countermeasures. But we can all reduce our personal R0 by practicing social distancing in our own little ways. What does social distancing mean? Well, I'm going to link to two high signal sources that explain how social distancing works. I'll link to them in my show notes and on my website for this episode. The first source is an article by The Atlantic, which interviews a number of experts who explain habits and practices for social distancing. And the second source is the guidelines from endcoronavirus.org, which was founded by my recent podcast guest and complex systems researcher, Yenir Bayam. Do check those out because it is our civic duty right now to socially distance. Hopefully,

when we all look back on this pandemic in a few years' time, we can say that it resembles the 1957 pandemic or better, more so than it resembles the 1918 pandemic. But that choice is up to us and our governments. To this episode, Winston Churchill famously said, never let a good crisis go to waste. And I think that even as this pandemic unfolds, it's still important that we both find the joys in everyday life and also that we think about the big questions for the future. A post-pandemic world may look radically different to the one we left behind only a couple of weeks ago. And I, for one, hope these events force a re-evaluation on the left of politics. Although, as you'll hear in this conversation, I think the terms left and right is a largely meaningless distinction.

What is this conversation about? Well, our guest, Peter Singer, is the world's most influential living philosopher, known for his provocative utilitarian stances on issues ranging from charitable giving to euthanasia for disabled infants to factory farming and much more besides. But here was what was so fun about this conversation. For at least the first half of it, we don't talk about any of the stuff Peter's most famous for. That's the stuff he gets asked about all the time. So what do we talk about instead? Well, you're probably wondering where the title of this podcast episode, A New Darwinian Left, comes from. It refers to a little-known book of Peter's, published in 1999,

called A Darwinian Left. The central metaphor of the book is that like a woodcarver who works with the grain of a given piece of timber, the left needs to accept that our nature is not perfectible and that we have evolved tendencies. To be sure, the logic of evolution isn't prescriptive enough to tell us what the content of policies should be, but it can set parameters and it can inform us about the likely consequences of those policies. But that begs the question, what type of timber are we working with? Is it cedar, mahogany, maple, birch, pine? For Peter, that answer is, or at least it was when the book was first published, clear. The timber comes from selfish gene theory. Selfish gene theory, of which the most famous proponent is Richard Dawkins, posits that since genes are potentially immortal, they form the

most logical candidate to be the unit of natural selection. Some genes extant today are identical to genes that existed tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years selection. Some genes extant today are identical to genes that existed tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago. So how good a gene is really matters. And good in this context refers to how successfully genes program their vehicles, that is organisms, us, to survive and replicate. Everything in biology, including even altruism, can ultimately be reduced to selfish genes vying for immortality. Or so the theory goes. My contention to Peter was that he needed to update his understanding of evolution to incorporate the insights of multilevel selection theory. In other words, we needed not just a Darwinian left, but a new version of Darwinism altogether.

Now, if you're wondering what multilevel selection theory is, it's the notion that natural selection can act not just on individual organisms, but on groups of organisms. And if you want a more detailed exposition of the idea and how it contrasts with selfish gene theory, I highly recommend my recent podcast, number 79, with David Sloan Wilson, the guy who came up with multi-level selection theory. Now, in the second half of this conversation, we take those insights from evolution and apply them to the things PETA's better known for, utilitarianism and effective altruism. PETA's famous for arguing that we should all be giving significant amounts of our income to the global poor. Now, there is one thing I want to say on

this before we go to the conversation. Normatively, I find it almost impossible to disagree with Peter's philosophy. But descriptively, for good evolutionary reasons, we're parochial, not universal altruists. Of course, this doesn't stop us from striving to do better against a normative benchmark. I agree with Peter that we discount the global poor too highly and privilege our families and local communities disproportionately, but I'm not convinced the discount rate should be as low as Peter thinks it should be, given the multiplicative benefits of localism. Put another way, giving to 10 different strangers is not the same as giving to one person 10 times. Originally, this conversation was to be recorded at Peter's home in Melbourne,

until the week before, with his blessing, I decided, on a whim, to turn it into a live event, just as a way of thanking and getting to know Melbourne swagmen and swagettes. It was recorded on the evening of Friday the 14th of February, Valentine's Day, and because it is a live recording, there will be a little bit of ambient noise, but I don't think it's too distracting. Two final parting remarks. Firstly, I strive to strike a balance in my podcast conversations between illuminating foundational concepts and terms and discussing more advanced and nuanced topics. I think we got the balance right in this conversation, but as always, thanks for bearing with my learning curve. Secondly, if you find yourself getting emotional, angry or outraged at any of the ideas explored in this conversation, then I humbly ask

that you unsubscribe from this podcast. It's imperative that as adults, we're allowed to explore ideas in good faith. And if you're not emotionally ready for that journey, then this isn't the podcast for you. So, without much further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Peter Singer. Tonight we have a very special guest who I'll introduce now. Now, he is probably the most controversial living philosopher and certainly the most influential. His essay, published in 1972, Famine, Affluence and Morality, kick-started the effective altruism movement. And his book, published in 1975, Animal Liberation, sparked the animal rights movement.

He's a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and at the University of Melbourne. And to me, he embodies the very best of what philosophers can and should be. He speaks and writes in plain English. He thinks that there shouldn't be a division between the ivory tower and how we practice philosophy in our everyday lives. And in his own life, there's absolutely no disjunct between the moral philosophy that he preaches and the ethics that he practices. So without much further ado, please welcome Peter Singer. Thanks, Joe. Absolutely no disjunct. You said that, I didn't. I think there's always, especially if you're a utilitarian, consequentialist, there's always a disjunct. There are very few perfect saints out there, and I definitely

don't claim to be one of them. Sure, but you are one of the most moral people I know, if not the most moral, and we will talk about that. Change your friends. I want to start on a somewhat unexpected note. I know what I'm supposed to ask you about, your book, The Life You Can Save, which is now in its 10th anniversary edition and freely available online. We'll talk about that, we'll talk about animal rights, but given that we're gathering at the beginning of a new decade, I thought it might be interesting to reflect for a little bit on politics. The

historian Neil Ferguson has recently christened the 2010s as the people's decade, and for good reason. Populism is on the rise around the world. The Tony Blair Institute published a report on Friday last week which found that populist leaders and parties in power have increased five-fold since the end of the Cold War and three-fold since the new millennium. And what's most interesting is that it isn't any sort of populism. It's typically right-wing populism. We've seen Brexit, Trump, an unexpected right-wing victory in the Australian federal election last year,

and Boris Johnson, Trump looks likely to win a second term. This is not unusual. We could have predicted this if we'd known a little bit about financial history. There was a great paper published in 2015 by Manuel Funk and Maura Chularic, which found that in the wake of financial crises, extreme right-wing parties increased their voting share on average by about 30%. And the reason is the appeal is so much more visceral and compelling, whereas the left blames the crisis on the bankers. The right can say it was globalism and it was immigrants. And what is most surprising to me is that despite all of this, we've seen, as Eric Weinstein told me on my podcast recently,

almost no introspection on the left. It appears to be disproportionately preoccupied with privilege and pronouns and political correctness, which is a sign either that Western civilization has reached its decadent phase or that the left needs to get its priorities sorted. So Peter, firstly I want to ask you, do you share my general sense that the left is in retreat across the Anglosphere? Well obviously to some extent it is, yes there are a lot of right-wing governments that have got to power so you would have to say the left is in retreat. The claim that the 2010s were the people's decade, though, seems to me to fly in the face of a lot of facts. So, for example, Trump did not win a majority of votes.

He won because of the peculiarities of the electoral college system in the United States. Hillary Clinton got about three million more votes than he did. And that system is skewed towards the Republicans, the way things work in the United States now because of the disproportionate influence of small, underpopulated states. So that's one thing. You look at the last British election, and if you add up the votes for parties that clearly rejected Brexit that rejected Brexit or wanted a second referendum, so Labor, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, they got more votes than the, the Tories and, uh, the Brexit Party, which in the end didn't get run against the Tories. So, you know,

had we had preferential voting, had the Brits had preferential voting, which we're all very familiar with in Australia, um, it's very unlikely that the Tories would have gone into office or held office. Instead, they held office with a big majority because of first-past-the-post voting. So to call this the people's decade when these things are actually going against, it seems, what the majority views, I think is just a mistake. Yeah, I think he applied that epithet semi-ironically. Okay. But you wrote a book which fascinates me, published in 1999, called The Darwinian Left, about how the left can improve its policy agenda by borrowing insights from evolutionary biology.

And I'd like to ask you about this book. But first first I'd like to define what we mean by the left and I thought I'd read a quote from an article in the Spectator from 2005 by Andrew Kenny which I think is excellent and it's titled The End of Left and Right. Open quotes, is Osama bin Laden left-wing or right-wing? How about Robert Mugabe? Who has a more left-wing approach to women's sexuality, Pope John Paul or Hustler magazine? Consider Fidel Castro. He persecutes homosexuals, crushes trade unions, forbids democratic elections, executes opponents and criminals, is a billionaire in a country of very poor people, and has decreed that a member of his family shall succeed him in power. Is Castro left-wing or right-wing? Explain your answer. End of quotes. And then he goes on, was Attila the Hun right-wing because he was violent and cruel? Lenin outdid him

on both counts. Does the left believe in centrally planned economies such as in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa? Does the right believe in free trade like Adam Smith and Karl Marx? Is it left-wing to hate capitalism like Hitler? Is it left-wing to believe in personal freedoms like the right to bear arms? Is the right racist like the Communist Party of South Africa, whose motto was workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa? So Peter, my question to you is, what does the left even mean? Yeah, there's a lot of good examples there. So, to me, and I think I say this in the book, and by the way, it's interesting that you pick up one of my less well-known books, which is great. I hope other people will become aware of it because of that and will read it. So I think what I talk about is essentially being on the side of the underprivileged,

those who are exploited, those who are weaker. And I think you could, obviously, some of the people who say they're on the side of the weak, and maybe do start out genuinely being on the side of the weak, end up making them worse off. Arguably, Lenin was an example of that. Certainly, you can find other examples. So I think that's really what you ought to be looking at. Are we trying to reinforce the power structure, help those who are already dominant to consolidate their power? Or are we trying to produce a society that's somewhat more equal? I don't believe, and I think I say in that book,

we're not going to achieve perfect equality. I don't think, whatever exactly that would mean. But are we trying to help those who are at the bottom or nearer the bottom rather than those who are already somewhere in power or comfortably off. Does that mean all conservatives are cruel and complacent? No, not at all. I mean, there are conservatives, I've known some, who believe that the economic theory that they're putting forward

is going to make everybody better off. The sort of trickle-down economics idea that we allow free markets to operate, we allow some people to become rich, we encourage innovation, we end up producing goods more cheaply, that makes everybody better off. And that's not, you know, obviously false. I think it's true that capitalism has produced much cheaper goods, you know, much, much more abundant production than other economic systems that we're familiar with. But there are certainly questions about distribution within capitalist economies and things that we can object to about that. So I think we should look at what conservatives say.

We should not just label people and say, well, they're conservatives, so they're bad. We should look at what they say and we should deal with the arguments they're putting forward. Peter, let's talk about how to make the left more Darwinian, the mission you set out on in 1999. I'll quote you from the book. Wood carvers presented with a piece of timber and a request to make wooden bowls from it do not simply begin carving according to a design drawn up before they have seen the wood. Instead, they will examine the material with which they are to work and modify their design in order to suit its grain. What are you talking about there? So I'm making an analogy clearly between social planners who are trying to construct a good society or the perfect society or a society they value.

And I'm suggesting that social planners who do that without an understanding of human nature are like the woodcarver who doesn't look at where the grain of the wood flows and simply goes about the task of producing a standardised object irrespective of the way the wood is constructed and where you can work with it well and where you can't. And that's going to be a very difficult task and I would say it's not going to produce as suitable an object in the end. So a large part of this book is as the title Darwinian Left suggests, is saying the left has often gone about things in this way. Particularly the Marxist left I would say. Because Marx had this view that there is no such thing as human nature,

that what we call human nature is determined by the economic basis of society, and that if you abolish private property and you have a communist society, then you will be transforming human nature and instead of being greedy and egoistic, we will all start to want the good of everyone. We will work from each according to our ability, to each according to their need. And really, as I say, all that's needed to do that is to transform the economic basis of society

by abolishing private property. So I think that clearly didn't work in the instances where Marxist regimes held power. It didn't transform human nature in the way that Marx predicted that it would. And so the left needs to rethink and needs to accept the views of modern evolutionary theory that there is in fact such a thing as a biologically given human nature, which is not to say that it determines everything we do,

just as the wood carver can still do different things understanding the grain of the of the wood so we or social planners can still produce different kinds of societies but um to to simply say there is nothing there um i think is is a is a big mistake and to some extent explains some of the disasters that have occurred when the left has taken power. And again, I'm particularly thinking of the Marxist left here. So in light of Darwinian natural selection, should the left aim for gender equality in every domain of society? So I think the left should definitely aim for equal opportunity irrespective of gender.

But I don't think the left should take the view that suppose, you know, which we often say is, oh, let's look at the people who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or whatever the equivalent might be, companies above a certain value. Oh, we've got, you know got 84% of them are male. That's a figure I just took out of the top of my head. It may be false, but whatever the figure is, it's more than 50%. And so that shows that we are still discriminating against women. I don't think it does show that.

And I'm not saying we're not discriminating against women. There's perfectly good evidence that we do when you send out people's CVs for jobs and you change the gender of the applicant, you do get different responses. So I think discrimination against women is a factor here. But I don't actually personally believe that if you did eliminate all discrimination against women that you would get necessarily a 50-50 distribution there may be biological differences between males

and females which you can go into various kinds of explanations which mean that men are more likely to want to do the kinds of things that lead to them becoming CEOs of major corporations than women. In the book, you quote Garrett Harden and his cardinal rule, which is that public policies should be based on an unwavering adherence to the following rule, never ask a person to act against his own self-interest. Do you still believe that? I don't think I believed it then. I was critical of Hardin. You can read me the passage if you like, the further passage. But look, as I said, you told me a few days ago that you were looking at this book, but

I had a couple of very good American friends visiting, a long scheduled visit, and we were down at showing them the surf coast and the 12 apostles and all that. I didn't have a copy of a Darwinian left with me. Joe here in narrator mode. I think I now understand the source of the confusion between Peter and I. It was probably my fault for not making it clearer in the moment. But Peter thought that I believed that he wrote in the book that we should not ask people to act against their own self-interest, defining self-interest in a sort of crude, colloquial fashion. I would never believe

that because after all, it is Peter Singer, the guy who asks people to give a significant portion of their income to the global poor. In fairness to Peter, he does write in the book, quote, even within the terms of Hardin's cardinal rule, we still have to ask what we mean by the term self-interest, end quote. But I do think Peter was arguing that it would be implausible to ask people to act against their own enlightened self-interest according to selfish gene theory. And if that is what Peter meant, then we do disagree, and you're about to hear why. So the reason I raise Hardin's cardinal rule is this book, written in 1999, was imbued with selfish gene theory. And obviously Richard Dawkins is your friend, the well-known evolutionary

biologist who wrote The Selfish Gene in 1976. And selfish gene theory is kind of like the mortal opponent of what's known in evolutionary biology as group selection. And you make a passing critical reference to group selection in the book where you kind of dismiss it as not being a part of the body of science anymore. But what I want to put to you tonight, and the reason that I wanted to discuss this book, is that I agree the left needs to accommodate

the insights of evolutionary biology and psychology, but I would contend that the science has moved on considerably from when you wrote the book and group selection is now back in vogue we did we did speak about multi-level selection so the next guest uh coming out on the podcast is david sloan wilson who's kind of one of the most important evolutionary biologists of all time who nobody's heard of and he almost single-handedly resurrected group selection beginning in the 1970s and he's responsible for the theory of multi-level selection

along with a guy called Elliot Sober and a number of other thinkers. And I asked David by email, which burning question should I ask Peter for this conversation? And David said, ask him whether he knows about multi-level selection. Now, we were talking before we got started and I realized that in a later book of yours the most good you can do published in 2015 you actually cite David Sloan Wilson on page 76 so so at some point since this

was published you uh opened your mind to multilevel selection or you discovered it? I think I was aware of the idea that there are competing views about that and that there were criticisms of Dawkins' reliance on genes and, you know, selfish genes, which, of course, is a metaphor. Genes themselves are not selfish. So I was aware of that but i accepted what i think was the prevailing orthodoxy at that time that uh group selection was only likely to be a factor in rather special circumstances um and you know let's let's just spend a little bit of time

this people often assume that evolution works things happening for the good of the species. Okay, so they say, well, you know, this is some behaviour and it helps the species to survive. And that's why it happens. But Dawkins' argument and E.O. Wilson's argument as well is that species come in and out of existence fairly rarely and over very long periods of time,

whereas individuals are coming in and out of existence all the time, at least in evolutionary terms, you know, in a very short timescale. So suppose that someone is altruistic to the point of sacrificing their life for others and it would be good for the species if more people were like that. Does that mean that that there are going to be more people selected who sacrifice their life for the good of others? Well certainly not if they sacrifice their life for the good of others? Well, certainly not if they sacrifice their life for the good of others before they've had a chance to reproduce or before they've had a chance to ensure that their offspring

have what it takes to survive, because then the gene is going to be eliminated from the gene pool when that person dies without reproducing or dies leaving infants who don't survive. So that's going to happen much more frequently. So within the species, there's going to be competition and within the species, those genes are likely to be eliminated. And that's going to happen all the time, much more than the species becomes extinct.

And if in fact you have behaviour which is bad for the species, and I'd say pretty clear we have a good example of that, it's using fossil fuels and eating meat seems to be highly risky for the future of our species, but that doesn't mean that it's going to get selected against in any kind of evolutionary way if continuing to use fossil fuels and eat meat is something that helps individuals to survive and reproduce and helps their offspring to survive and reproduce. So I still think there is something in that argument, but I also recognise now, and maybe I've become more aware of that than I was when I wrote Darwinian Left, that for much

of our evolutionary history, we were in quite small groups. So we're not talking about species level selection now, we're talking about the selection of groups. You know, people think that maybe most of our evolutionary history, we lived in groups of no more than 150 or 200 individuals. So those groups might have come in and out of existence more rapidly, relatively rapidly. And therefore, the idea of the evolution of cooperation and, if you like, group altruism, I now think is quite plausible. So if that's what you're talking about, multi-level selection, yes.

I was aware of it before, as you said, but I perhaps didn't think it was all that plausible and I now think that it probably, I now would attribute a more important role to it than I did previously. Yeah. I think it's actually fascinating to realise that Darwin himself made a first pass at group selection in The Descent of Man. Have you read that passage? I'm aware that there is such a passage. I don't currently recall it, so I'll probably read it if you have it there. Let me quote it. So this is from Chapter 5. So quoting Charles Darwin,

when two tribes of primeval man living in the same country came into competition, if other circumstances being equal, the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other. This tribe would succeed better and conquer the other. The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows chiefly from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Selfish and contentious people will not cohere and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe rich in the above qualities would spread

and be victorious over other tribes and then immediately after that he anticipates the main objection to group selection which is the free rider problem which you spoke about which is the idea that incredibly selfish members would get all the benefits of altruistic members without bearing any of the costs so you could be you be proverbially lurking at the back of the tribe during a battle. Right, you go and fight up there. I'm going to attend to this. I'll think about the strategy behind the scenes.

Exactly, exactly. And then the very altruistic heroes die, but that means that they don't come home to father children, and so they exit the gene pool, and then group selection is almost self-defeating. So Darwin anticipates this, quoting again, but it may be asked, how within the limits of the same tribe did a large number of members

first become endowed with these social and moral qualities, and how was the standard of excellence raised? It is extremely doubtful whether the offspring of the more sympathetic and benevolent parents or of those who were the most faithful to their comrades would be reared in greater numbers than the children of selfish and treacherous parents belonging to the same tribe. He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.

And then he offers the solution. And the solution is that we evolve morality, which keeps people in check. And Darwin actually offers a series of steps as to how morality was sort of bootstrapped into existence, which I won't go through. But the idea is that humans develop the ability to suppress free riders. So the guy who worked at the back didn't actually go home to get all the girls. He was ostracized, he was stabbed in the back, and he didn't get the benefits of his treachery. And so to quote Darwin, ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow

men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings and confirmed by instruction and habit. What I want to get across tonight is that most people I speak to who are sort of well read, but they don't have much time to think about these things, and they're not evolutionary tonight is that most people I speak to who are sort of well-read but you know they don't have much time to think about these things and they're not evolutionary biologists like like you and I but their knowledge of evolutionary biology kind of finishes on the last page of the selfish gene because it was you know it's such a well-written and popular book but the

science has has come a long way since then. And there was a survey published in 2014 by a group of researchers. They interviewed 175 evolutionary anthropologists, and 55% were receptive to multilevel selection. So they're still the old guard, you know, Dawkins, Pinker, Matt Ridley, who are determined to go down with their ships. But the younger generation embrace multi-level selection. So it's very much a case of Max Planck's aphorism

that science advances one funeral at a time. Yeah, but let me just say, I don't think it's, you know, are you for this or are you against this? I think it's a question of, you know, as with so many things, what weight do you give it, right? What role does it play? I would accept now that group selection plays some role, but, you know, we can still discuss the role that individual selection plays within the group.

It's still also clearly... Absolutely. And we should think about it as a tug of war between these different levels of selection. And depending on the circumstances at the time during our evolutionary history the ratio was different. So during a period of famine or during a period of tribal warfare perhaps there were more selection pressures at the group level than the individual level. But ultimately we are these

creatures who are to use the moral psychologist jonathan heights metaphor 90 percent chimp and 10 b and we have this groupish overlay and i think it's important not to miss that because if you do you know you end up with something like neoclassical economics uh no offense to the economists in the room but but you you you don't see the very odd groupish things that we do um and i do think you need to understand multi-level selection to come to that conclusion because it's it's a difference in degree if not in kind yeah but i mean i think you know you presented me as a friend of dawkins who holds selfish gene theory but if you look at my works you mentioned famine affluence and morality which is a very early work of mine 1972 uh you mentioned the most good you can do 2015 and you've got uh

the life you can save which originally came out 10 years ago and has now just been reissued um all of those works are talking about altruism, right? They're not talking about what you would expect from somebody who says, you know, oh, yes, he's a proponent of the selfish gene. Now, and there's another book from the 90s called How Are We to Live that also talks about that. You could say in one sense what I'm saying is I'm trying to broaden our sense of what our interests are,

and that's very clear in The Most Good You Can Do and also in The Life You Can Save, because I do think that I'm trying to encourage people to be altruistic in the normal sense of the word, that is, all of those writings, I'm saying once we've taken care of our basic material needs or reached a reasonable, comfortable level of material wellbeing and security,

we ought to be doing a lot more for people in need, in low-income countries, people in extreme poverty elsewhere in the world, also in other writings, of course, for animals. And I don't think this is contrary to acting in your own interest in a broad sense, what Sondheim called enlightened self-interest, where you don't count your self-interest as, you know,

how big is the number in your bank balance, or, you know, how big is your house or what kind of car do you drive, but rather in do you feel, how many, how big is your house or how, what kind of car do you drive? But rather in, do you feel good about yourself? Do you think that your life is meaningful, worthwhile? What do you, what do you, do you feel that you, you get up in the morning and you have some purpose rather than, you know, sort of thinking about what, what will I do next and why? sort of thinking about what will I do next and why, I think all of those things can be seen as self-interested,

but they don't necessarily conduce to your evolutionary fitness. And what I talk about in those books, but also in a somewhat more academic book called The Point of View of the Universe, is the idea that our capacity to reason plays a role here. And in that sense, we're not slaves of our evolutionary nature. We do have choices. We can make decisions to do things which are not going to pass on our genes in the maximal way. And that, that's I think a really important option that we have particularly

now in societies that do provide us with a reasonable level of economic security. Hm. I want to ask you about the implications of multi-level selection for religion. Hm. One of the most interesting things is is there are two different definitions of religion in the literature. One definition is that religion is a set of beliefs and that's sort of the straw man that Dawkins attacks. And then the other definition is that religion is a moral community that binds people together. And if you think of religion in terms of the first definition,

you kind of think of it, maybe we could summarize with the Stephen Weinberg quote that, you know, good people will do good things, bad people will do bad things, but to get good people to do bad things, that takes religion. Alternatively, if you think of religion as a moral community, which is how Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, encouraged us to think about it, you maybe think more in terms of Roy Rapoport's quote, which is that to invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity. And evolutionary biologists now talk about religion

as being an adaptation. I spoke with Brett Weinstein on the phone in preparation for this interview, and he is famous for arguing that religion is extended phenotype, to use Richard Dawkins' language, which just means that it's something that has evolved and something that's adaptive. David Sloan Wilson, who I mentioned I spoke with on the podcast, thinks that religion is clearly an adaptation. And if we think about religion in this way as a moral community, not necessarily as a set of beliefs, the scales sort of fall from our eyes. So I grew up as a Catholic, became an atheist in my teens. And from that point, whenever I saw a group of

worshipers in a church, I would just think that's a bunch of idiots. But I've kind of done a about face now where I think, no, the real miracle is binding people together in a cooperative moral community. And I want to read a quote from Dawkins from March 2012. He was speaking to about 20,000 people at the Reason Rally in Washington. Richard Dawkins. Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood? Talking about Catholics and their transubstantiation. And then he addresses the crowd. Mock them.

Ridicule them. In public. Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt, end quote. My question for you, Peter, have the new atheists outlived their usefulness? I don't think you can say they've outlived their usefulness when religion is still a very powerful factor in many parts of the world. And I think that Richard Dawkins' approach there is compatible with everything you said

about religion being adaptive and being an extended phenotype and so on. He sees it as a mind virus. Yes. Yes, well, you could, you know, it's a meme, you know, calling it a virus, obviously, especially right now. It's very quiet down at the Twelve Apostles, by the way. All the better for you and the Americans.

I guess so, yes. The weather wasn't very nice, though. Anyway, so, you know, because religion also, religion does bind people to do evil. There's no doubt about that. That quote that you gave is right, I think. But it also does bind people to do good. It reinforces, you know, there are communities of people

who are helping other people, helping distant strangers, and they're doing it as part of their religious community and part of what, you know, they think is a religious duty. A lot of religions include the idea of giving significantly to the poor, you know, whether it's tithing or, you know, the Christian, Jewish, Islam, I think all the major religions have something about giving to the poor. So that's, you know, it can bind for good as well. But in terms of, you know, assessing the beliefs... Yeah, I mean, I think Dawkins is clearly right.

Of course. Wine does not turn into blood, and, you know, you can do that chemical analysis that chemical analysis. But he's totally missing the point. Well there's more than one point, right? And to say that religion is adaptive, you know, no doubt true, doesn't help us to deal with those people who are religious, who have religious

beliefs and for whom that justifies them in doing really bad things. And you may say, well, it misses the point to tell them that, you know, their beliefs are false or to ridicule them or to mock them. But, you know, what's your tactic? What's your strategy? Saying if somebody says, you know, let's say the example that I know we all have on our mind, and I don't want to particularly pick on Islam, which has a whole diverse range of beliefs, but, you know, we are aware of a lot of terrorists who have killed people and have thought that that was something that the Koran instructed them to do, and perhaps many of them thought that they would be rewarded in heaven as martyrs afterwards for getting killed. What's your solution to dealing with that problem?

That's the bit of pill we have to swallow, that religion was adaptive in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, but perhaps today it's less so. I do think that, like, the problem with Wahhabism is that there's no separation between church and state. That's probably an example of a meme we don't want to spread. But that's also a religious belief, right? Yeah.

And it's not, in a sense, a crazy one, right? If you really believe the tenets of religion, then if you have the power to take over the state and to compel people to accept your religion, it makes sense that you would do that. In that sense, I think the liberal idea that church and state should be separated is a kind of a compromise.

I think it's a compromise that arose out of things like the 30 years war and all the bloodshed that conflicts between Protestants and Catholics caused and, you know, conflict that we saw in England. And so, you know, you get the Pilgrim Fathers and others who come to the United States and they say, well, we're going to put all that behind us by saying that the state shall make no law affecting religion or whatever the First Amendment says along those lines. Yeah, OK, it's a good political compromise. It's definitely good in that sense.

But is it a logical implication of the beliefs of Christians or Muslims or others? I don't actually think so. Let's bring this back to how do we make the left more Darwinian. At the end of your little book you run through a checklist for what a Darwinian left would look like. So for example a Darwinian left would not deny the existence of a human nature nor insist that human nature is inherently good nor that it's infinitely malleable. It would not assume that all inequalities are due to discrimination. Darwinian left would expect that under different social and economic systems, many people will act competitively in order to enhance their own status, gain a position of power, or advance

their interests and those of their kin. I have an updated checklist for a Darwinian left based on the the logic of multi-level selection that I wanted to put to you so see what you think so an updated Darwinian left would be okay with patriotism would realize that complex systems dislike central planning would recognize that small groups are essential to individual well-being and to the building blocks of larger scale societies. An updated Darwinian left would not sneer at religion and tell believers they're dumb, would not mistake a weak version of homophily for xenophobia, that's a point stolen from Nassim Taleb's Principia Politica and an updated Darwinian left would not accept

Hardin's cardinal rule we spoke about earlier as absolute, the rule that public policy should be based on the fact that you should never ask a person to act against his own self-interest. Would you take up any of those? Yeah, sure. I already said that i didn't again i didn't think that i was really agreeing with with harden on that particular cardinal rule um or if i am it's as i said in that broad and enlightened sense of self-interest that uh allows us or indeed encourages us to be um to be altruistic to others in the sense of working for their wellbeing.

So that's a good point. Religion, we've already talked about in terms of whether mocking religion is sometimes a good thing to do, to get people to see, you know, from an outside perspective, how bizarre and unfounded some of these beliefs are. Because, as I said, religion may be adaptive, but that doesn't show whether it's good or bad um it just shows that it's going

to be harder to get rid of than simply um the kind of rational critiques of religion uh so maybe we need to think of other strategies as well um Perhaps one of the most interesting ones is that we should accept you said patriotism. As opposed to nationalism. Okay, that was exactly what I was going to ask. So yes, I think we can accept the idea that

everybody should you know, is entitled to think about themselves as a member of a community, their community, their country, and to feel that it's good if their country does well and to work to improve their country and make it a better place and to be proud of the achievements of your country.

I don't have any objection to that. It is the idea that, well, our nation is somehow superior to all others and that others of other nations are not entitled to be as proud of their nation as we are of ours because ours is superior. Ours is the one that has the Aryan blood

or whatever it might be to take one particular example of nationalism and racism combined. So I think that we can accept something of that. And the other one that you didn't mention that I do talk about in The Most Good You Can Do and in The Life You Can, is concerned for family and for kin. So clearly I think that's something, and you perhaps didn't mention it because that's compatible with selfish gene theory, that we should have some concern for our family and our

kin. I think that that's the way societies work. Soci's work by families, educating, bringing up children in close loving environments. And that means we can't really expect people to be completely impartial between between others. In, in I think in both of those books, The Most Good You Can Do and The Life You Can Save, I talk about a friend of mine called Zell Kravinsky, who has really tried pretty hard to be impartial between strangers, to the extent not only of giving away, he made a lot of money in real estate, and he gave away almost all of it. Although he had a wife and children, he didn't, you know, neglect them. He did give them, you know, a comfortable middle-class suburban home in Philadelphia, but he could have afforded much, much more because he thought that there were other needs.

And then that wasn't sufficient for him, so he went to a local hospital in an area of Philadelphia, he lives in Philadelphia, that serves mostly African Americans and said he'd like to donate one of his kidneys to whoever was, you know, the next on the list for, on the dialysis list for getting a kidney. And he actually, you know, I've had him talk to my students at Princeton. He's done a kind of a calculation. He's looked at the research about what's the risks you run if you donate a kidney, what's the risk you run that you will die because of that donation, not just in the operation, which is a very, very small risk, but because later on you'll get a kidney disease where

if you had two kidneys, you'd be okay, but if you only have one, you won't be. And it turns out that that's also very, very rare that most kidney disease affects both kidneys. And his research led him to say the chances are only one in 4,000 that you will die prematurely if you donate a kidney. Now, I'm not vouching for that research, but that's what he did. And I've looked a bit at other figures. Maybe it's somewhat less than that, but it's certainly one in several hundred. I think there's no doubt that it's not a greater risk a greater risk than that so his argument is he said to my students if i did not donate a kidney when i could do so when i know that there are people on the dialysis

waiting list well on dialysis waiting for kidneys who are dying because they can't get kidneys i would be valuing my life at four thousand times times theirs. And that's grotesque, he says. And then in one of his writings, he talks about, well, you know, how far would you go? What if, what if I was valuing my life just at twice what someone else is? You know, that, that in fact, you know, there was a 50% chance that I would die, but there was a certainty that someone else would die. Should I do that?

So you know, he, he, know, even Zell has not gone to complete impartiality, but he's gone further than most. So I accept that the way we are, we can't expect people to go to complete equality. Can we expect them to donate kidneys to strangers? Well, not many of them, but actually, you know, he's not the only one. There's now some, last time I looked, I think it was about in the US, about 150 a year doing that.

And in the UK as well, there's a significant number. Slightly smaller, but the population is a lot smaller. So I agree. I think we have to accept these facts about human nature. And so I would extend what I'm now saying about families to, if you like, some degree of concern for our fellow citizens, fellow residents, whatever you want to call it. I don't really disagree with that.

But I think it has to be within certain limits. One final point on religion, and then let's move on. I'm not saying that we shouldn't mock it, but I think we should approach it carefully, given, as Brett Weinstein has said to me before, it's obviously an adaptation. And I'm not convinced that counterfactually we would get the same benefits without religion. That remains to be seen. So, for example, Robert Putnam and David Campbell have a book, American Grace, but they survey believers in America

and they found that by many different measures, religiously observant Americans are better neighbours and better citizens than secular Americans. They are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in their community life. Yeah. Maybe the evidence that we have in the United States

would be interesting to see whether that works elsewhere because one of the things that I noticed going from Australia to the United States about 20 years ago is that it is a much more religious society than ours. In some ways, you know, especially, of course, as you know, more in the South, you know, less where I am in New Jersey or New York or around there, but still, even there, significantly more religious than here.

I have a kind of distant cousin that I connected with who's a rabbi in Mobile, Alabama, not a place with a huge Jewish community. But I went down there, he invited me to speak to his community and I did, although I'm not at all religious. And we got talking and I sort of asked him about his belief in God. And he said something like, well, by God I mean whatever it is in the universe that works for good. And I said, well, maybe that's just good people. And he said, well, maybe it is.

So, you know, I wouldn't really necessarily class him as a theist. And then we talked a bit more about how he'd come to Mobile and to the SAS. And essentially, I think, the explanation he gave was that if you don't have a religious community in a place like Mobile, and I take it a lot of other places in the SAF,

you just don't belong. You just don't pick up a community of friends and supporters and something like that. Everybody asks you when they get to know you a little bit,

so what's your religion? what church do you go to or what synagogue or whatever it might be. And so, you know, it may be that that skews the answers to these kinds of questions in a place where that's how communities work, basically. And I don't feel Melbourne works in that way at all I have to say it's not that there aren't religious communities where that does matter of course but it's certainly not that you can't you know that you're going to be isolated if you don't belong to some religious community

maybe AFL has kind of filled that that's that's that is yeah Peter let's move on to giving if it's okay with you could we run through six quick definitions to help everybody follow along? So the first three are the schools of ethical thought, virtue ethics, deontology and consequentialism. Okay. So let's start with consequentialism. Consequentialism says the right action is the one that produces the best consequences.

If there's two actions that produce identically good consequences, then either of them is right, but that's rare. So otherwise, everything else, every action that produces less good consequences than you could is the wrong action in some sense. It's the wrong thing to do. And consequentialism is neutral as to what those consequences are, what are the good consequences we're looking to produce. Utilitarianism is a specific form of consequentialism, which essentially says it's well-being or happiness or pleasure that we want to maximise and suffering or misery or pain that we want to minimise. Deontological views can be defined negatively against consequentialism.

So deontological views are those that say sometimes it's wrong to do what will produce the best consequences. And typically that would be because, you know, because you broke some rule, there's some rule that says it's always wrong to kill the innocent. Or some deontologists think it's always wrong to tell a lie. You know, other people might say, well, there are human rights that mean it's always wrong to torture, even if torturing is the only way to get the terrorist to tell you where he put the atom bomb that's going to kill a million people in three hours unless you find where it is. So it's those sorts of kind of rules that say sometimes it's wrong to do what will have the best consequences. Virtue ethics is a little bit more, perhaps more difficult to grasp, but basically it's focusing not on either the consequences nor the rules, but on your character.

And it says, rather than talk about what's the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, what we ought to talk about is what is a virtuous character. And that has a particular place if you're asking questions like, how should we bring up our children? But, of course, a consequentialist might say well yes it's good to think about what is a virtuous character when we're bringing up our children because then they'll act so as to have the best consequences but the virtuous says no it's not just that, that's

where morality is, that's what's good in itself, what is a virtuous character. Okay, that's where morality is. That's what's good in itself. What is a virtuous character? Okay, that's the quick definition. There's a lot more to be said, obviously. Thank you. Definitions five and six, preference utilitarianism and hedonistic utilitarianism. Okay, so as I said,

utilitarians think they're consequentialists. They think we ought to do whatever will have the best consequences. And broadly speaking they say best consequences are those that maximise welfare or wellbeing and minimise losses of it. And then the difference between hedonists and preference utilitarians in their understanding of what is the maximised wellbeing. The classical utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill,

said it's happiness. It's a state of consciousness. What we want is to maximise those intrinsically desirable, pleasurable states of consciousness and minimise the intrinsically undesirable ones like pain and suffering. Preference utilitarians said, well, you know, maybe some people don't mind suffering so much

they have other preferences to do other things, like to write great poetry, even if that means that you'll be spending your life starving in a garret because no one wants to buy your poems and you'll have a miserable life. And even though you might produce great poetry in the end you really won't be enjoying your life and but if that's what you prefer the preference utilitarian says then that is actually maximizing your well-being so preference utilitarian say what we want to do is to the greatest extent possible to

satisfy the preferences of people who have them for whatever it is. Now obviously there's quite a lot of overlap in practice between hedonistic and preference utilitarians because most people have a preference not to suffer pain or to experience pleasure or happiness but to the extent that they differ then they do go in different ways. Final quick definition effective altruism quick definition, effective altruism. Okay, so effective altruism is the view that doing good for others ought to be one of the aims in our lives, not necessarily the only aim. As I said, we don't expect people to be saints,

but it ought to be a part of all of our lives to think about how can I do good for others. That's the altruistic part. The effective part says, whatever I'm putting to doing good for others, whether it's money I'm donating to charities, whether it's time I'm volunteering or skills that I'm offering to work pro bono for some organizations, something like that, whatever it is, I should use them as effectively as possible. So the most obvious example is if there are two organizations that I could give my money to,

I should do some research or I should go online and find research other people have done, which will tell me which one will do more good with the given sum of money than the other, and I should give it to that one. Great. And you don't have to be a utilitarian to be an effective altruist. Nevertheless, a lot of utilitarians find a natural home in effective altruism. That's correct, yeah. I think if you are a utilitarian,

it does follow that you ought to be an effective altruist. But the reverse doesn't follow. And the reverse doesn't follow because you could be a deontologist, for example, but you might have just a couple of rules. So I mentioned never kill an innocent human being, right? So if you think that's an absolute rule and you would never do that,

even if that was a way to save a large number of lives. You know, somehow you had to kill this innocent human being to prevent some catastrophe. And suppose you think even so it would be wrong to do it. But let's say that's the only rule you have. So you're not a consequentialist. You are a deontologist. You're not a utilitarian but in all the circumstances where you don't have to kill an innocent

human being to maximise good, you can still act as a utilitarian you can still do good and I've never come across circumstances where I thought it would be best for everybody if I killed an innocent human being. So I could have accepted that rule and in fact lived an identical life really to the one that I have trying to be a utilitarian. Now late in life you switched from being a preference utilitarian to a hedonistic utilitarian. Can you summarise why you had that change of mind? Yeah, summarize, yeah. So that's something that I do talk about in that book, The Point of View of the Universe, which I should mention is a co-authored book, so

give credit to my co-author, Karagina de Lazari-Rudik. It was part of the stage of thinking about that book, which is a discussion of the views of Henry Sidgwick. I mentioned Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill as famous hedonistic utilitarians. The third of the great 19th century utilitarians was Henry Sidgwick, who you haven't heard of unless you've read some philosophy.

But he's actually the best philosopher of those three. Of course, he was, you could say, standing on the shoulders of the other two because he came later. He was at the end of the 19th century. And he was, spent all of his life at Cambridge. He was an academic who had a lot more time for thinking. Both Bentham and Mill did a lot of other things. But we were looking at, you know, we were both sort of fans, Mike Haworth and I, of his work, and we decided to write a book where we'd look at his views

and see to what extent they can still be defended. Now, he was an objectivist about moral values. That is, he thought that there are some ethical statements that are self-evidently true and others for which you can have some argument which should convince rational people uh and uh he thought that he had arguments to show that um the only things of intrinsic value are states of mind so states of consciousness uh and that's really what what matters so uh we we talk in the book about both the objectivism and the arguments for intrinsic value.

And essentially, I suppose, we discuss both non-objectivist views, and for some time I wasn't an objectivist, but I also became an objectivist. You said late in life. Well, it depends a bit how long they still have to live I guess but yeah not that long ago certainly within the time after I went to Princeton so certainly within the last 20 years I although I don't become even before that somewhat uncomfortable with my non-objectivist views. I abandoned them sometime during the last 20 years. And that sort of opened up various other possibilities because I'd been a preference

utilitarian partly because I thought preferences are really all we have. We can't, we don't really have other objective values. We just have the preferences people have. And I became uncomfortable with that. I also started to think that there are preferences that don't really have intrinsic value, the satisfaction of which don't have intrinsic value. So John Rawls has an example. John Rawls does have a view about well-being. He's not a utilitarian,

but he has a view about well-being in terms of preferences. So, you know, what about somebody whose preference was simply to count the number of blades of grass in various lawns? So you take a nice lawn that somebody has and you say, yeah, I really want to know how many blades of grass there are in that lawn. And you say to him, well, is it going to make you really happy when you know that? And he says, no, but I have a preference for knowing how many blades of grass there are in as many lawns as I can before I die. So is it important? Is there value in satisfying that person's preferences? I started to find that hard to say that there is. So it was

partly that kind of argument against preference views. And then of course people might say, well, it's the preferences you would have if you're irrational, and this guy is clearly not rational. But then you need judgements about what's a rational value and what's not, and you're going down towards an objectivist view. And then we can look at the arguments that Sidgwick and various other people have put up about objective values and you know so it seemed to me that hedonism was a better option which is

not to say that I'm convinced that it's the the best option and you know that I will necessarily die a hedonist who knows but I might I'm open to other arguments but but it seemed to me that I couldn't really stick to preference utilitarianism anyway. Right. In preparation for this conversation, I asked the moral psychologist John Haidt which one burning question he would ask Peter. And he said, ask Peter what he thinks about Durkheimian utilitarianism, which is another phrase for everyone to learn. I want to ask you about that let me let me just briefly explain what it is and this will be my last kind of long quotation for the evening maybe but uh so emile durkheim we mentioned earlier the french sociologist uh who saw our groupishness who kind of intuitively understood through his anthropology the

consequences of multi-level selection for human societies. This is John Haidt describing what a Durkheimian society would look like. A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialise, reshape and care for individuals who if left to their own devices would pursue shallow carnal and selfish pleasures a durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression duty over rights and loyalty to one's groups over concerns for out groups so durkheim realized that societies at least non-weird societies, weird Western-educated, industrial-rich, democratic,

were very much about social conventions, hierarchy, loyalty, traditional gender roles, and that was the observation of Durkheim. John Haidt talks about Durkheimian utilitarianism. So this is the final quote from Haidt. Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham have focused intently on individuals. They try to improve the welfare of society by giving individuals what they want, but a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognise that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve. A Durkheimian utilitarianism would be open to the possibility

that the binding moral foundations, loyalty, authority and sanctity have a crucial role to play in a good society. I think Jeremy Bentham was right that laws and public policy should aim as a first approximation to produce the greatest total good. I just want Bentham to read Durkheim and recognise that we are homo duplex, that is, the products of multi-level selection, before he tells any of us or our legislators how to go about maximising that total good, end quote,

from the righteous mind. What do you think about that? Okay, so firstly let me say that utilitarians ought to be open to any factual information that is well-grounded about what will lead to human flourishing. I think the quote you said talked about, well, we need to have these various social groups and multi-level things for human flourishing. I think the quote you said, you know, talked about, well, we need to have these various social groups and multi-level things to, for human flourishing. So that's, that's a factual claim to really, I mean, of course you say what counts as human flourishing,

there's a value judgment in that, but I think we all have a reasonable idea of that. And certainly people who are starving and not flourishing, um. People who are in extreme poverty in various ways and can't get any health care are not flourishing. Who are ill, you know, whereas we can recognise people who are flourishing. So good information about what will lead to people flourishing, I think any utilitarian, Bentham included, would welcome. And that, of course, does ultimately feed down to the individualism that you mentioned,

that is, that individuals in these societies will have higher welfare, will be happier, will have less misery. So it doesn't really affect the fundamental value judgments of utilitarianism. It affects the empirical input that you use in order to decide what are the best actions. And I think that, you know, I don't deny that there's some truth in this importance of groupishness and importance of different levels. I already talked about the importance of family and friendship groups I talk about in some of these books as well. So, sure, all of that is important. There are a number of adjectives, loyalty, authority.

Sanctity. Sanctity, right. I'm not, you know, some of these I think get taken too far. We had a debate in Victoria a year or so ago about whether we should allow medically assisted in dying. And the opponents of that were people who talked about the sanctity of human life, the wrongness that it's wrong to help anyone to end their life by writing them a prescription that they can use to end their life, even if they're terminally ill, even if doctors agree that they have less than

six months to live, and even if that is their carefully considered request, considered over some period of time. So I think to invoke the idea of the sanctity of human life against that is a mistake. I support the legislation that the Andrews government introduced and that seems to be spreading in a number of other parts of the world as well. So it all depends what you mean by sanctity and how you're going to apply it. And similarly, the other thing that I guess I have some trouble with is the claim about, you know, we should expect people to be loyal to their groups and not to

add ciders. I don't think he's making a normative claim. It's simply how we should expect human nature to be is it? Yeah and also we should recognise that that contributes to human wellbeing so it should be a part of our utilitarian character. Okay, alright, well that's good. But then, of course, we have to consider how much it contributes and how far we ought to push it. Because, you know, if people use it, and I've had a lot of discussions with people, obviously, since writing The Life You Can Save, about people who say, well, charity begins at home, you know, that you know I support my local various local charities

I'm trying to help my own community and people say this to me in the United States and they say it to me here but and that's you know in a way that's that's good but our local communities already everybody in it already has certain basics that they can take for granted. So, for example, they have safe drinking water. Not a problem. They have some basic level of health care. Better in Australia than the United States,

but even in the United States, even if you have no health insurance, you're not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, you turn up seriously ill in the emergency room of a hospital they legally cannot turn you away until you are able to get out of there without a risk to your life so you know it's not great but it's something which a lot of people in the world don't have we have free education for our children. We have some kind of social security welfare report, welfare support, or whatever it might be. And there's a lot of people in the world

who don't have any of this and whom we can make a huge difference. And going back to the definition of effective altruism that I was talking about before, our donation will actually do a lot more good impartially considered to people who are in extreme poverty in low-income countries than they're likely to do if we give to organizations working within Australia. So the question is, what's the kind of discount rate for the fact that they're not part of our group? And I think our discount rate is far too high. So, you know, we could get high multiples of amounts of good by donating more to effective charities that work in poor countries than by working here.

So that's the kind of, you know, thing that we ought to consider as well along with the idea that we are groupish and that we maybe will, you know, other things being equal, be happier if we have a group that we support and work with. Let's talk about global poverty then, Peter. Firstly, give us a sense of the scale of the problem. And then secondly, paint a qualitative picture for us of what it's like to live as somebody below the poverty line. Okay, well, the scale of, let's say I'm talking about extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank.

Extreme poverty means you don't have enough income to reliably meet your basic needs or your basic needs and those of your dependents, where basic needs include, of course, getting enough to eat, having shelter, having some minimal level of health care, being able to educate your children. And the current, currently the World Bank uses something roughly around $2 to US dollars per day. So know you could say two dollars fifty or seventy five or whatever that converts to in Australian dollars and that's actually what the World Bank calls purchasing power parity so it's not like you say oh look you know when I go and give my three dollars to a bank in some low-income country it goes a lot further buys a. No, that's not what we're talking about.

We're not talking about the currency exchange. We're talking about the amount in whatever country it is that purchases as much as $3 will purchase in Australia. So it's a very low income level. Now, having said that, fortunately, the scale of the problem has been reducing. So when I wrote the first edition of this book 10 years ago, there was something like 1.4 billion people in extreme poverty,

according to the World Bank. It's now just a little bit over half of that. The figure I quote in that is 736 million. So it's a big drop in about 10 years. It's probably a little bit more than 10 years because the figures I had were not when the book was published, obviously. Similarly, other things that reflect that drop, the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund,

UNICEF's figures for deaths of children before their fifth birthday. That was 9.7 million 10 years ago. It's now 5.3 or 5.4. So again, almost halved. So we are making actually surprisingly good progress in that. I think there's a major risk that that progress will slow down if climate change gets out of control. And certainly some of the initiatives that are being taken by more populist governments are not helping this either. So that's roughly the scale of the problem. You also asked about the quality. Well, I think the quality follows from the way I've defined it. You're struggling constantly to get enough to meet your basic needs.

And what that means in part, and this relates to why you can be so effective, is you can't save enough to do various things that otherwise you might, because you're living on this sort of $2 a day, pretty hand to mouth. And let's say you're living in a rural African village and your roof is made of thatch. So you can get grass and you can thatch your roof. It's somewhat labour intensive. It may not be completely free. You may have to pay something for the thatch, but it's cheap.

The alternative, if you had the money, would be to have an iron roof. That would be better in keeping the rain out because the rain gets through the thatch and sometimes it will spoil your grain stores or something like that, apart from being uncomfortable being wet. And it's actually, in the long run, it's cheaper because it will last at least 10 years and the cost is less than 10 times the cost of replacing your thatched roof, which you have to replace every year. But you can't save the $300 or whatever it might be that you need to buy the iron roof when you're living on $700 or $800 a year. So, you know, that's – and similarly, if you had this idea that you could start a little business, you can't save the capital that you need to start that little business, whatever it might be. So that's why life is a constant struggle and you can have a sense of hopelessness about that because of that struggle and a sense of powerlessness to really change your circumstances.

Quoting Peter Singer from The Life You Can Save, quote, when we spend our surplus on concerts or fashionable shoes, on fine dining and good wines, or on holidays in faraway lands, we are doing something wrong, end quote. Explain. Well, again, you know, I think that we're making the wrong trade-off there. We're being too concerned for our own interests and not even real... ..not necessities, not things that really ought to be important to our wellbeing. And we're doing that at the cost of not making a really life-changing,

life-transforming difference to some of the people who I've just described. Because the money that you spend on those things could be enough to change someone's life, to help them to set up in this small business, to get the iron roof, or if we use it for health initiatives, to buy a number of bed nets to protect children against malaria, which will mean that malaria is a major cause of those 5.3 million deaths

of children under five each year. So their children may die because of that. We may be able to restore sight in somebody who's blind because of cataracts. You know people who get to my age often make cataracts, their vision gets cloudy. Here in Australia you go and see your doctor who says yes we can remove your cataracts, no problem. You don't have any money to pay for it, no problem. You know Medicare will pay for it. But there are millions of people in the world who have cataracts who can't who don't have Medicare, can't afford that, and also people who become blind because of not having available preventive steps that could prevent them being blind. So when you think about those things, aren't they more important than whether we're wearing the current fashion in shoes. No, the principle which you first elucidated

in Famine, Affluence and Morality is that if we can help someone avoid harm or suffering without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, then we ought morally to do that. That's right. And that's a pretty demanding principle, I have to say. And one of the chapters in The Life You Can Save talks about, you know, how demanding some sense I still think the principle that you just described is right how can we justify doing things which are not of comparable significance for us

when there are other people in such great need I also raise the question well does that mean you should torture yourself with a guilty conscience if you're not living up to that principle fully? And my answer is no. I think what we should be trying to do is to raise the standard of what it is to live an ethical life, and I think that standard needs to be a lot higher than we are now,

than we have now. But I don't think it necessarily means you have to go as far as I said in family affluence and morality and I propose a kind of a scale of giving that I think doesn't involve great sacrifice from anyone. It's like a tax scale. It starts at 1% for people who are only just sort of, you know, above a sort of comfortable level and don't have much that they could spare. And then it goes up to a third of your income for people who are very wealthy. But I think at all of those levels, you're not really making any serious sacrifice. And hopefully,

getting back to this point about enlightened self-interest, you're actually feeling good about yourself, that you're making this difference and you're helping to make the world a better place. So how much does it cost to save a statistical life? So there are different estimates around that. One of the best research outfits is something called GiveWell, which you can find at givewell.org. They've talked about the bed nets one point they cost that at about three thousand dollars to save uh the life of a child by giving out bed nets bed nets themselves of course are very cheap they're you know just two or three dollars um plus a little bit to distribute them to educate the families in how to use them but um you do need to give out quite a few bed nets to

be confident that you've saved a child's life because children obviously aren't all dying in these areas or there'd be no people living in those areas um you will in addition of course so in addition to that three thousand dollars it's not just that you're you're getting one life child's life saved you're also preventing quite a lot of cases of malaria which i happen to have had many years ago when I went up to New Guinea. And it's very unpleasant, even though my life was never in danger. So you are doing other good things as well. Then there's another program that, you know, in that book, I recommend a variety of other programs. There's a chemo prevention program for malaria that the research suggests is actually somewhat cheaper. It gives people preventative drugs during the malaria season.

And that, I think, was about $1,200 or $1,300 per life saved, if I remember rightly. So there are, you know, the estimates will depend. And then even Givewell himself said, but in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the rate of malaria is higher where we're against malaria foundation is currently working so it's down to 2,000 there for them they said so you know the figures will

fluctuate depending on exactly what you're talking about but you could say somewhere in the range of one to three thousand dollars would save a life now for people who are financially comfortable, you say that they should aim to give about 5% of their annual income? Yeah. As I say, I've got a sort of sliding scale, so it depends a little what you mean by comfortable, but I think many people who are middle class or above

in countries like Australia or the United States, affluent nations of Europe, can give 5% and it's not really going to affect their quality of life in any significant negative way. And as I say, it may affect it positively. And you currently give 30 to 40% of yours? Yeah, I'm around that range. I began by saying you were one of the most moral people I know. You told me to get better friends. I was hoping you could tell us the story of the time in Balliol College at Oxford when you sat down to a nice bowl of bolognese.

Right. Okay. Yes, that's a different issue that I'm happy to talk about. So I grew up in Melbourne and went to University of Melbourne, did a BA and a Masters and then I got a scholarship to go to Oxford. So like most people in Australia, I went to Oxford in 69, like most people in Australia I'd grown up eating meat and enjoyed the quality of meat that you get in Australia and And as it turns out, rather ironically, a lot of people said to me when you go to England,

ah, you'll find the meat is terrible and very expensive. So I'd been there about a year, and that was probably pretty much true. But I happened to have lunch with somebody, a Canadian, I was a graduate student, a Canadian graduate student who I was a graduate student, a Canadian graduate student who I just basically met after a class because we both asked questions in the class about some topic was about free will and determinism. We both asked questions and we decided we had similar views and I wanted to find out what his thoughts were.

So he said, sure, let's talk about this over lunch because the class finished just before lunch. Come to my college, Balliol College, and we'll talk about it over lunch. So at that time, you walked into lunch and you had a choice of two things you could pick up. There was a hot dish and there was a cold salad plate, which was usually some lettuce leaves and some cheese. The hot dish this particular day happened to be spaghetti

with a kind of reddish brown sauce on the top of it. And I picked up that because I knew the salad plate wasn't enough for me. I needed something a bit more substantial. And Richard, my friend, said, can you tell me is there meat in that sauce? And he was told there was meat in the sauce, and he picked up a salad plate. So we talked about free will and determinism for a while, and then I said, so why did you ask, you know, what's your problem with meat?

Now, you have to remember, this is 1969. I had never had a conversation with a vegetarian at that time. It's a bit hard to imagine nowadays. But that's the way it was. You know, I'd probably, perhaps I'd met a Hindu or something who was a vegetarian. But, you know, I knew that I wasn't going to become a, become a Hindu and that, whatever that reason was, wasn't really going to, to work for me. But, you know, so I was interested in this.

And I did expect some pretty cranky sort of answer, I must admit. You know, I thought maybe he's an absolute pacifist who thinks that it's always wrong to kill and that this includes killing animals. It turned out that actually his view was something that I found much harder to reject. And that is, he said, I don't think that the animal that was turned into that, you know, the meat you're eating, I don't think that we're justified in turned into that, the meat you're eating, I don't think that we're justified in treating animals the way that animal was treated. And I sort of said, oh, really? Why not?

Because I had this somewhat naive view that animals, you know, live out in the fields and have nice lives, and then, sure, they have one bad day when they get rounded up, taken to the slaughterhouse, and they're killed. But, you know, that's okay, given that they have nice lives and then sure they have one bad day when they get rounded up taken to the slaughterhouse and they're killed but you know that's okay given that they have nice lives but um you know he told me that a lot of things that that was you know not the case for that a lot of animals have been

taken indoors factory farmed um chickens and pigs particularly some veal calves as well um and that others went through various mutilations, hot iron branding, castration with that anaesthetic, and a number of other things. So, you know, that really started me thinking about, you know, here I am, I'm a philosopher, I was already specialising in ethics or moral philosophy, I was interested in things like that, is there

an ethical issue about eating meat that has never even really occurred to me? So he said, I'll introduce you to a couple of friends of mine. He had a couple of other Canadian friends who were also vegetarians. I talked to them. And there was one book that had been published on the factory farming at that stage. It was a book called Animal Machines by Ruth Harrison. And I read that and that was very convincing because it was largely quotes from farming magazines about how to get more productivity out of your animals by bringing them indoors, not letting them roam in the fields, confining them in various ways.

And essentially her idea was that cruelty is acknowledged only where profitability ceases. And the profitability of a method of raising an animal is quite independent from how good that method is for the animal's welfare. And she had very convincing examples to show that that was the case. And so then the question is, well, you know, what is the moral status of animals?

Are we entitled to keep animals this way? But I was already sympathetic to the general utilitarian idea that pain is a bad thing and pleasure is a good thing. And actually I discovered then after this, while doing this investigation, I'd never been aware of it before, that Bentham himself has this footnote about anticipating a day when we might recognise that animals have rights, that it's not justifiable to hand them over to anyone

to torment them as you wish. This was at a time when there were no anti-cruelty laws really anywhere in the world, not in the United Kingdom, not in Europe. So, you know, basically it didn't fit within my moral framework to say, yes, but, you know, they're animals, so their suffering doesn't matter. If they do suffer, and I was convinced that they can suffer,

and I think most people are, then I had to take that into account. And when I looked at what we were doing to turn them into food, I couldn't defend that anymore. Yeah. Peter, my final question is about moral progress. So today we look back on slavery as obviously abhorrent. 500 years hence, what behaviours and practices of ours today will our descendants look back at and shake their heads? Well, we've just been talking about one, of course. I hope it won't take 500 years. I think we've already made some progress in greater recognition

of the importance of animal wellbeing and not making them suffer. And I'm hoping that this wave of vegan eating plant-based products more widely available in the supermarkets still more products to come out definitely over the next decade hopefully getting economically competitive with meat and dairy products as well but that's really going to cause a big shift and that that will lead people to say exactly what you just said. They'll look back when they're not eating meat anymore and they'll say, how could people

treat animals this way? How could they disregard their interests and their wellbeing? I also hope that it will happen with the indifference that people show to extreme poverty, that extreme poverty will have been eliminated long before that. And people will again say, well, how come people were so comfortable in what they were doing and spending money on all sorts of frivolities rather than helping others in great need? And thirdly, and again, I hope this won't take 500 years because we certainly need it more urgently I hope people will think about how we could ignore

the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions because that's really urgent and you know unfortunately it's possible that people will be living in a much worse world where things are much more difficult where sea levels have risen and inundated

cities and coastal deltas where sea levels have risen and inundated cities and coastal deltas where lots of people live and where the bushfire season that we've had will be commonplace in many areas and there'll be more extreme weathers, more extreme droughts and so on. And then people will look back and say, how could they have ignored this so long

when the scientists have been telling them since the 1970s that this is a dangerous thing to do. Peter Singer, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks, John. Thank you. So I think we're going to open to audience questions now. Will, do you want to grab the roaming mic? It's just up the back here.

So if you want to ask a question, just throw up your hands, and we'll bring you a mic, because we're recording all this, so eventually this will be released as a podcast. So does anybody have any questions to start us off? Yeah. Let's start at the very back, just while you're up there. Hi, guys. Thank you for that. That was really interesting. So, Peter, the question is how to think about consequentialism

when we consider that second and third order effects of what we're looking to affect, might be very difficult to calculate. Yeah. It's true that we can't look at the ramifications of all of these effects indefinitely. But we can often have a good idea of the reasonably direct effects of what we're doing.

And my view is that if we're ignorant of what you call second and third order effects or more distant effects, if we're ignorant of them, then they can't count either for or against the action. They cancel each other out. Or our ignorance means that we don't know that the effects will be bad, we don't know that the effects will be good, so we're entitled not to take them into account. And if I know that the effect, let's say, of my donating a certain sum to the Against Malaria Foundation is that a child is less likely to die and that people are less likely to get malaria, and that's clearly a good effect.

And I don't know what the other effects are. I have no reason to believe that they're more likely to be bad than good. Then the right thing to do is to act on the consequences that I can reasonably foresee. Great. Next question. Yeah, just over there. Hi, Peter, I just wanted to ask, you were talking a bit at the start about group identity politics.

It's a very big issue on the, especially on the left at the moment. And I wanted to ask you about how you thought we should distinguish between useful good identity politics and when it would tend to become morally dubious. You know, for example, we can all agree that Nazis are bad, but how, how should we distinguish between the practice of identity politics when it's useful and when does it become toxic? You know, you do have to look at it on a case-by-case basis, I think. So again, going with what I said about the left, and I do regard myself as on the left,

where there are people who are disadvantaged and where identity politics can help them to reduce that disadvantage, then I think that that's something that's important and that is, is worth doing. And you know, certainly there are various forms of discrimination that we can become more aware of. What troubles me, I guess, is when identity politics gets to the point where it is a kind of political correctness where you simply, you know, if you say certain things, you'll get attacked. One of the things we didn't talk about but that I think is really important is that we maintain freedom of speech and freedom of thought and expression. So I don't like identity politics where people get up and say, you can't say that, you mustn't say that, or, you know, protest against the fact that you're invited to

speak because you've said something that challenges something about their identity that they find offensive. That's part of it. The other thing I think you have to think of, is that I do think we ought to look at the larger picture. So if you look at American politics today, I think the crucial thing is, you know, you said Trump is likely to be re-elected or something. I hope that's not the case. I think it's crucially important that Trump not be re-elected.

I think that's pretty much an overriding priority in American politics for a variety of reasons. But, you know, one major reason clearly is climate change because he's not doing anything much on climate change. And many of the Democratic nominees are supportive of strong action on climate change. So where you have identity politics that is likely to alienate a significant portion of the electorate from voting for you,

you have to think, how important is that? And so one of these issues is about, you have to think how important is that? And so one of these issues is about, you know, who gets to use which bathrooms, right? Now, I think we should have unisex bathrooms personally and people should get to use the bathrooms they choose, but would I make that a major election issue, aware that, you know, Trump is going to ridicule that and that there are no doubt

significant number of white working class people who will think that that's pretty silly or won't support it, but who you might be able to win for a progressive democratic candidate. So, I would say, I would still vote for a democratic nominee if I were, you know, voting in a primary who said, that's not an issue I'm going to talk about or not an issue I'm going to campaign about,

even if I think actually, well, you know, there is a real issue here, but I think you have to be realistic and you have to get a sense of perspective. And, and what are the,

what are the big questions that we really need to fight and win on? And what are the other things that, you know, are not going to be so disastrous if these reforms get delayed by a few years or a decade or so. Did you have a question? Yes, I did. Will, just down the front here. You once stood for Parliament for the Greens, right?

Twice, actually. Twice, yes. Are you still a card-carrying member? I don't have a card on me. I still support the Greens. So I guess I haven't really been in the United States. I haven't paid a membership fee. So I suppose I'm not.

But I do vote for them. I should say I vote for them because we have a preferential voting system again here. I would not have voted Ralph Nader, you might remember, stood as a Green in the 2000 election, those of you who remember that, and got something like 60,000 votes in Florida, which was the decisive state that George Bush won by about 500 votes. So you have to assume that the majority of those 60,000 votes that Nader got would have elected Al Gore.

Al Gore, of course, you've seen the inconvenient truth, would have had a much better policy on climate change as well as better policies on, probably would not have invaded Iraq, I guess. So, you know, the world would have been a much better place if Al Gore had got elected. And I think Ralph Nader, who was one of my heroes I should say when he wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, the book about attacking big car companies for their disregard for safety, I think that was disastrous.

So I'm agreeing in places where there's preferential or proportional voting and not in a place where there's first-past-the-post voting. Hi Peter, sorry this question just occurred to me so I can't remember the exact quote proportional voting and not in a place where there's first-past-the-post voting. Hi, Peter. Sorry, this question just occurred to me, so I can't remember the exact quote or who said it. But given that you mentioned climate change, I recently, or not so recently, heard a quote saying basically that there are no more political solutions, there will only be technical solutions. And based on your understanding of ethics and obviously as well human nature do you think that that's true? I hope that well I mean I'm very happy if there is a technical solution of course and I agree that you know it makes sense that people like Gates

putting money into finding technical solutions and I hope other people are because that you know we need to do that because there is a serious risk that we won't find a political solution I haven't given up on finding a political solution if you know if Trump is not reelected the United States goes back to supporting the Paris agreement you know I think it's again it's a great pity that we re-elected the Morrison government, which is not very supportive of that, but it, you know, maybe it can be shamed into doing a little more. So I, I don't give up on political solutions. I think we have to keep working for that.

But yes, it will be great if we get forms of electricity generation that are cheaper than fossil fuels and that therefore put the fossil fuel industry out of that particular business. If we then develop better electric cars that put it out of that business as well. If we move away from meat coming from whole animals that are emitting a lot of greenhouse gases,

that's another technical solution as well if we have more plant-based economic alternatives. So I certainly support that. I think we need to have every strategy that we can to try to make sure that we slow climate change. Obviously, we can't really stop it anymore. It's already happening, but that we keep it within some sort of manageable level. So we have time for two or three more quick questions. Just here. Thank you very much for a fascinating conversation.

As a philosophical educator, I'm wondering at a very broad level, are people today more interested in philosophy than when you started your career? Is it exactly the same or has it perhaps decreased? I think it's increased. I think we've had these movements of people doing philosophy at a popular level. We had this start of the philosophy cafes, which was kind of a worldwide movement where people started having conversation just like the one we're having in cafes and events like this. And that's great. And now, of course, also we have through the

internet, we have all of the blogging and we have the podcasts and all of those. So I think there's a lot of philosophical conversations going on. Some of them at a pretty high level, you know, the effective altruism movement has a lot of philosophical conversations as well about effective altruism, about concern for the long term future, which, you know, those sorts of things. So I think there's a lot more philosophy actually going on outside the universities than when I was a university student and for a decade or two afterwards. I do, I'm of course also pleased that philosophy itself, academic philosophy, has become a little more accessible and a little more focused on really important topics.

There was a danger, I think, when I was doing philosophy that philosophers will really only talk to each other. And there were some philosophers, A.J. Eyre is an example, you know, held a chair at Oxford, one of the best known philosophers from the 30s on to the 60s. And he's, you know, I quote him in one of my things, he is saying that, you know, people who look to philosophers for moral guidance are making a mistake. That's not the business of the philosophers. We can leave that to the politicians and the preachers. Which is a funny thing for Eyre to say because he was an atheist. So why he wanted to leave ethics to the preachers, I don't really know.

Group selection. There's been a significant move of philosophers to discussing not just theoretical, you know, questions about the meanings of moral words, moral concepts, but actually substantive applied ethics. And that's, I think, helped to bring academic philosophy and a broader universe of people interested in philosophical ideas together. How many more people have questions? One, two, three. So let's get all three. Do you want to go to you first and then we'll go across? Hi, Peter. Under what conditions do you think that eco-terrorism against the fossil fuel industry would be morally permissible given the inaction by democratic governments around the world? I'd need to be convinced that it's going to work and it's not just going to provoke a backlash. And by when you say eco-terrorism, I'm assuming that you're talking about damaging property rather than killing people, which has a lot of

questions. But my sort of views on this are greatly affected by the period in the sort of i guess 80s really um when there was a significant at burst of of terrorism for the animal movement um when i say significant i don't mean that it was a lot of widespread stuff and in fact most of it was property damage to labs and things like that, to fur farms. But there were a couple of incidents, there was a pipe bomb sent to an experimenter which was opened by his secretary and injured her hand, fortunately didn't do any more serious damage.

There were a couple of incidents like that and there were certainly a lot of threats made that frightened people and their families and that led to the movement that was defending animal research. This was mostly directed against animal research, some of it as I say against fur farming and so on. It led to them being able

to portray the animal movement as terrorists which really I think produced a big downturn in popular support for it. And I worry that that eco-terrorism would mean that that would happen as well to the movement for climate change. So that's why I say, you know, my condition really is that it really would be a way of making a significant positive impact that you couldn't make in any other way. Next question. Hi Peter. My question's about, so there's lots of commentary at the moment about whether it's ethical to have children given the unsustainability of climate change and

overpopulation. And I always think to my favourite,, one of my favourite movies, Idiocracy, which basically says that people who have those feelings will not have children and people who don't have that feeling will have children and it kind of just leads to a decline in the intelligence of the human race. So I'm just wondering your thoughts on the ethics of that. I think there is a real point there.

I don't know the film that you mentioned, actually, so I'm interested. It's a great film. Okay, I'll Google it. But it's not necessarily intelligence. You said it will lead to a decline in intelligence. Essentially what it's selecting out is people who have concern for the world as a whole and the future of the world. And whether that's a matter of intelligence

or a matter of something else, we don't really know. Whether it's genetic or whether it's something that we impart to our children through their upbringing, we also don't really know. But either way, it seems that it is a short-term strategy. You know, definitely you're saving in the short term the emission of greenhouse gases. But if people with those attitudes don't have children,

it's less likely that those attitudes will spread and will prevail in future generations. So I do think that that's a genuine argument against the otherwise legitimate point that, you know, we in affluent countries are emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases and if our population grows, that's going to mean more. Thanks.

And final question up the back there, if we could pass the mic over. Thank you. I was just wondering, I did aid work from about the age of 17 to 22 in India, in Calcutta, until I realised that it was purely contractual, it wasn't sustainable, that whilst I was there face to face, I was creating an impact. But then when I left to come back to Australia based on my visa, I wasn't creating sustainable

change. And so I got into consulting in health economics and social policy. But now I've realised that the work that I do is purely based on what the government and organisations are willing to do and the work that they're willing to engage consultant or professional services to evaluate the programs and how we're supporting the health and wellbeing of marginalised and poorer communities. And I wonder what you think that we can do

to raise the global conscience in a sustainable manner so that people share the same altruism as some people like me. Okay, great. Good question. So if one thing, you know, there's a sense in which what you were doing was not sustainable because it would not continue when you left, but maybe somebody else was going to go and work in that community or, you know, do some similar work. And in terms of, you know, the consulting that you're doing and the policies, obviously

we need more people to be aware of those policies. And I do think that people who have roles like that and who have commitment to doing the most good that they can, as effective altruists do, can make a difference in various ways and in various positions. But, of course, you're right that we need to try to spread those ideas, and that's what the effective altruism movement is trying to do. It's what I'm trying to do by this book. And, by the way, you did say, Joe, that it's available free'm trying to do by this book and by the way you did say joe that it's available free and it is all you have to do is go to the life you can save and if there's an australian branch of that the life you can save.org.au and you can download either the ebook version of this or an audio book which is read by a number of celebrities, people like Kristen Bell, Paul Simon, Stephen Fry.

We have an Indian actress, Shabana Azmi. We have an African woman reading a chapter. So we have a lot of people who've contributed their time to promote it. So you can have both the audio book and the e-book, if you like. And please do not only do that yourself, time to promote it. So you can have both the audiobook and the e-book if you like. And please do not only do that yourself but tell other people about it because the reason we're doing that we got the rights back from the original commercial publishers is precisely because we want to spread those ideas. So that's what I'm trying to do

and I hope that other people will think of other ways of doing it, you know, using your social media and people who have other people will think of other ways of doing it, you know, using your social media and people who have other great ideas about how to spread it even more, sure contact me, contact thelifeyoucansave.org.au we're trying to do that and we're open to whatever good ideas there are for doing it Great, well that's all we have time for

thank you everyone from the bottom of my heart for coming along, two little things as the bottom of my heart for coming along. Two little things as a token of my gratitude. We're going to reopen the bar tab up here, so if you want to stick around for a drink, you're welcome to do that. Also, on the table on your way out, there are these jars of honey with the Jolly Swagman podcast logo on them. There's a guy with a company called Muscle Honey, which produces raw Australian bush honey.

He listens to the podcast and just started sending me jars of honey. So he sent us 48 jars. His name's Harpeet. He sent 48 jars to the event. So thank you so much to him. Little gifts to you guys on your way out. No bees were harmed in the process. And please join me once more in thanking Peter Singer.

Thank you so much for listening. For show notes and links to everything we discussed, you can find those on my and continue the conversation there. My handle is at Joseph N Walker. And if you do enjoy this podcast, I would beg of you to leave a rating and a review. I know everyone asks, but it does help people find us and it helps me get some of the hard to get guests on the show. Until next time, thank you for listening. Be well. Ciao.