Peter Singer on What Billionaires and Others Should Give
Published by Hanno Kaiser December 20th, 2006 in PhilosophyIn his NYT article on What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?, Peter Singer makes the case that the wealthy are morally obligated to give to the poor. Not just to the poor around them, but also, and equally, to the poor on the other side of the world. In practical terms, Singer suggests the following contributions from US residents or families:
[The top 14,400 earn an average of $12,775,000,] with total earnings of $184 billion. The minimum annual income in this group is more than $5 million, so it seems reasonable to suppose that they could, without much hardship, give away a third of their annual income, an average of $4.3 million each, for a total of around $61 billion. That would still leave each of them with an annual income of at least $3.3 million. Next comes the rest of the top 0.1 percent (excluding the category just described, as I shall do henceforth). There are 129,600 in this group, with an average income of just over $2 million and a minimum income of $1.1 million. If they were each to give a quarter of their income, that would yield about $65 billion, and leave each of them with at least $846,000 annually. The top 0.5 percent consists of 575,900 taxpayers, with an average income of $623,000 and a minimum of $407,000. If they were to give one-fifth of their income, they would still have at least $325,000 each, and they would be giving a total of $72 billion. Coming down to the level of those in the top 1 percent, we find 719,900 taxpayers with an average income of $327,000 and a minimum of $276,000. They could comfortably afford to give 15 percent of their income. That would yield $35 billion and leave them with at least $234,000. Finally, the remainder of the nation’s top 10 percent earn at least $92,000 annually, with an average of $132,000. There are nearly 13 million in this group. If they gave the traditional tithe — 10 percent of their income, or an average of $13,200 each — this would yield about $171 billion and leave them a minimum of $83,000.
As much as I sympathize with Singer’s proposal, I am not convinced by his philosophical justification for a universal duty of assistance (which, admittedly, is harder to justify than duties of non-interference). Here are some observations:
What is the source from which a duty for A to assist B arises? Singer states at the outset that a human life has great value (”in the millions”). From that, we can certainly derive a duty of non-interference. A must not, without good reason, harm B. But can we also derive an affirmative duty for A to assist B and a corresponding moral claim of B to A’s assistance if B’s life is in jeopardy? Usually, we require a rather narrow set of conditions to be in place for such affirmative duties to arise, specifically (i) a promise by A to B (either explicit or as a result of friendship, reciprocity, assumption of an office such as that of a firefighter, etc.); or (ii) A’s responsibility for the threat to B’s life, for example because B’s extreme poverty is the result of A’s exploitative behavior. Singer proposes much less situational and demanding conditions for a duty to assist to arise, namely (a) maximum utility for B (”saving B’s life”) and (b) minimal cost to A (”ruining A’s shoes”). In other words, Singer postulates a general duty to optimize total welfare, or at least to minimize certain extreme disequilibria. It is worth nothing that legal systems, at least, are somewhat divided on that score. German criminal law, for example, knows a general duty of assistance to strangers in emergencies, US criminal law (by and large) does not. As much as I sympathize with Singer’s result, the origin of the duty to assist that he proposes is not sufficiently well explained.
Singer makes some implicit claims about morally relevant and morally irrelevant facts, which require closer examination. Let’s take a look at his primary example.
[We walk] by a shallow pond and [see] a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown.
So far so good, with the caveat outlined above. But then Singer continues:
Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.
Singer’s implicit claim is that physical and cultural distance between A and B is irrelevant for A’s obligation to assist B. If that’s true, then virtually everyone who could better the life of anyone in dire poverty anywhere is flaunting his or her moral obligation. (Which may well be the case.) Singer universalizes A’s obligation by extending it to everyone in B’s position everywhere. Alternatively, one could also universalize a more local obligation, e.g., everyone in A’s immediate situation (here, walking past a drowning child) has an obligation to assist. The former way of universalizing the obligation creates billions of overlapping global/universal obligations. The latter creates a global/universal “mesh network” of local obligations. Singer chooses the strategy of creating a universal duty over universalizing local duties, which may ultimately be correct (I am not sure), but definitely requires more explicit supporting arguments.
Should we really treat everyone equally? One moral problem with true equality is illustrated by Singer’s second example.
A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Zell Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger. [Kravinsky acknowledges that we form special attachments with some people, for example our children, but] that does not, in Kravinsky’s view, justify our placing a value on the lives of our children that is thousands of times greater than the value we place on the lives of the children of strangers. Asked if he would allow his child to die if it would enable a thousand children to live, Kravinsky said yes. Indeed, he has said he would permit his child to die even if this enabled only two other children to live.
To me it is more plausible that we owe different moral obligations to different people. Kravinsky’s children, I would argue, have a greater moral claim to his assistance, based on mutual promises, than those to whom no such promises have been made, and who, as a result, don’t have the same justified expectations. That is not to say, of course, that no baseline moral obligations exist vis-a-vis strangers, but if meaningful tradeoffs have to be made, then choosing the interests of the few who are close to us over the interests of the many who are distant is not per se morally deficient.
What if there is no duty of assistance to those in need who are far away? In that case, paradoxically, charitable giving may be even more laudable. Gates and Buffet are not just doing what every decent person ought to do. They act out of kindness to which no one can lay a moral claim. Thus even if optimizing utilitarianism, other forms of consequentialism, rights-based theories, etc. were to fail in justifying universal claims for assistance, we may still owe to ourselves to help strangers in need if we want to lead virtuous lives.
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I believe that, at least from a utilitarian’s standpoint, Singer’s core reasoning is very strong. Still, it isn’t cogent. That is, I’m not as radical as Singer in my interpretation of utilitarianism’s demands, because his proposed mass flight to charity has only a superficial air of consequentialism to it. It is not just the engines of self-sustenance that is on the line (i.e., “my job”, etc), but also the social systems which sustain other people (i.e., my coworkers). Relatively more money must be spent on the market than on charity if these logistical engines are to remain functioning; and these same engines of economics must be functioning in order to carry out any kind of redistributive justice.
I agree with you about associational duties, i.e., duties to one’s children. There is always a “local pull”, and there should be one, to some extent; since a) agency is an incorrigible value, so we can expect objects of our experience to weigh more heavily than objects outside of it; and b) the doctrine of enjoyment requires you to make personal investments.
(PS): In a sense, I don’t believe in virtue. That is, there are those of us who are relatively good at being good, and those of us who are relatively not, and we sit on a spectrum. Still, we’re all morally obliged to always be good.
This means that, if life weren’t so short, we might go around nitpicking decent-people-who-aren’t-quite-saints. But most of our practical efforts go into condemning the bad, and that’s fine. The upshot is that there is obviously something morally deficient in the non-virtuous. If there weren’t, then virtue wouldn’t even be measurable on a moral scale; it would be something else entirely. But for the sake of our collective sanities, given human fallibility, luck, etc., it’s best to leave the ordinary decent folk alone.
I have recently also had issues with virtue in the sense that virtue requires courage, and courage requires a kind of last-minute apathy towards consequences: saying to yourself, “Stop, deliberation is over, it’s time to act”. In that sense, courageous behavior is anti-consequentialistic. This isn’t a knock-down argument, but certainly does throw me the consequentialist a hot potato.
In the context of Hanno’s post, I don’t think we can ignore the divide between normative accounts of morality and positive (or existential?) accounts of morality. The former asks what possible moral frameworks could exist, while the latter attempts to describe the morals that actually guide the behavior of real people.
There may be some sort of evolutionary tension between Singer’s and Hanno’s arguments and intuitions, that can be usefully examined with the help of this distinction. The kinds of duties that Hanno recognizes as legitimate - relating to offspring or nuclear family and friends - seem to spring from sources deep within human biology and psychology. This “local pull” may indeed be incorrigible, as Ben puts it. Accordingly, there is little controversy over the law’s recognition of such pervasive values.
But Singer pushes farther, apparently arguing - through the Kravinksy anecdote - for a principle of non-discrimination between those persons local (and dearer) to us and those more remote, a norm which responds only to the magnitude of need. At a minimum, Singer advocates for a circle of moral concern wider than local, individuated affections. Any law purporting to enforce this norm would be met with widespread skepticism. Two observations spring to mind:
1. Economic efficiencies.
The felt-legitimacy of Singer’s income-graduated giving scheme seems to rest on his willingness to limit his proposed duty to those above a certain income threshold. This makes sense for economic reasons. As a practical matter, the per-dollar efficacy of charitable giving may be greater when individuals give to those within their circle of local affections. This efficacy seems to be a function of three variables: the donor’s knowledge of another’s need (which requires both discovery and accuracy), the magnitude of that need, and the likelihood that the gift will be used to mitigate the need. We tend to know, almost without effort, the needs of those we are close to, far better than any organization (thus reducing information costs and error rates) and also better able to maximize the benefit flowing from our gifts (by, say, controlling the timing of our gifts and attaching appropriate strings to their use). For these reasons, and because those close to us and those more remote are in direct competition for our philanthropic dollars, people without substantial income may do more good by giving locally, based on their own unique ‘knowledge specializations’.
But the same economic logic doesn’t necessarily apply to the wealthy, who are likely to have surplus means remaining after providing for those within their circle of local affections. Because of the diminishing marginal utility of increased donations within this circle, welfare enhancement may be greatest when further donations are directed outside the local circle to poorer strangers, where the greater magnitude of need is likely to offset any discount in per-dollar welfare enhancement stemming from the lesser economic efficiencies of providing remote services to relatively anonymous persons. This is especially true where a universalized “mesh network” of local duties is inadequate to the task of mitigating the greatest needs, due to the distribution of wealth along geographical lines and, within geography, among relatively discrete social networks.
2. Evolutionary tension.
But the above economic analysis describes only facts about individuals’ relative capacities for enhancing the welfare of others by giving. An additional theoretical step is needed to fashion a norm out of these facts. Our biological hardware spontaneously sustains a norm of giving within the circle of local affections through visceral attachments, but may be less naturally competent at sustaining the wider norm Singer wishes to impose on the wealthy. For much of human history, a local norm would have been all that was practical, and under the social and technological constraints of the time, such a norm would have resulted in the greatest aggregate welfare enhancement per donative-dollar. But more recently the material preconditions for efficient remote giving have arisen, and are probably novel in all of human history. The most salient enabling conditions are widespread concentrations of great wealth, coupled with efficient institutional networks capable of delivering donations to the needy anywhere on the planet (both perhaps being manifestations of the same underlying effloresence of widespread capitalist trade). Because these developments are recent, we shouldn’t be surprised if biological evolutionary pressures lag behind social need (the same reason many of us in the post-industrial West must exercise to stay healthy). Our more tribal social instincts may have begun to become a double-edged sword.
The socio-material evolution of norms is not unprecedented. Take the following quote from Richard Posner, dealing with changing attitudes towards the role of women in society:
“As far as our changing attitudes toward sex are concerned, the motive forces were again not philosophical or, even, at root, ideological. They were material. As the economy shifted from manufacturing (heavy, dirty work) to services (lighter, cleaner), as contraception became safer and more reliable, as desire for large families diminished (the substitution of quality for quantity of children), and as the decline in infant mortality allowed women to reduce the number of their pregnancies yet still hit their target rate of reproduction, both the demand for women in the labor market and the supply of women in the labor market rose. With women working more and having as a consequence greater economic independence, they demanded and obtained greater sexual independence as well…. The history of our changing sexual mores is more complex than this, but this sketch will give a flavor of how I prefer to explain social change. Ethical argument plays no role in the explanation.”
I think Posner has his hands around one limb of the dynamic, but there is undoubtedly a phenomenological component that arises from the cognitive (and discursive) processing of social change, with one outgrowth of this processing being the creation of new norms. Without the automatic norm-making power of biology, symbolic discourse flows into the void. This is where normative moral theory comes into play, and more positivist moral theory - which looks to describe “actual” moral duties - fails us. Consequentialist analysis, like my economic analysis above, may satisfy some minds. Others may be persuaded by Singer’s arguments.
In the end, Posner may be right that social facts will determine whether a newly proposed norm gains widespread acceptance. In this case, those facts will likely consist of the voluntary donative actions of the wealthy. And in the end, we might expect the occurrence of those actions to turn, not on reasoned casuistic argument, but on the capacity of human compassion - struggling within its old-fashioned brain - to extend itself into abstractions. Or maybe philanthropy will flower atop the same old individuated relationships, this time transcending spatial limits and insular social networks with the help of the same modern media networks and information channels that make such giving possible.
My guess is that arguments like Singer’s serve a valuable orienting function in the moral evolutionary process, turning our attention to the possibility of new behavior. But ultimately, the norm may live or die according to the hospitality of more ancient and primordial justifications.