SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is a podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rod Davis, and this week we've got an interview, a great one, with Emma Saunders Hastings. Now, Emma is an assistant professor in political theory at Ohio State University, and someone whose work looking at uh the kind of philosophical implications, particularly around uh philanthropy's role in democracy, I've been following for a long time. Um and she's also recently uh brought out a book called Private Virtues, Public Vices, Philanthropy and Democratic Equality, which I really, really enjoyed. And I think it's one of the best sort of political theory, political science uh looks at philanthropy that that's out there at the moment. Um so it was great to get a chance to talk to Emma on the podcast. And we had a really interesting uh conversation about the book and some of her wider work. And so we talked about the idea of inequality and how that relates to philanthropy, and particularly the argument she makes in the book that it's not just the sort of distributional inequality at a macro level that we should be concerned about, but sort of relational inequality, the inequality between people and the role that philanthropy plays in kind of perpetuating unequal relationships. Um and we talked a bit about why that idea hasn't been as prominent in thinking about philanthropy, even though actually historically, when you look at people like John Stuart Mill and Jane Addams, that's the issue that they were really concerned about, and we sort of have slightly forgotten it and it's not quite clear why. And we also talked about how it's necessary when thinking about philanthropy to try and guard against dealing in overly idealised terms and retaining some level of sort of pragmatism about working with the world as it is in the sort of reality of philanthropy, and being able therefore to kind of acknowledge the good that philanthropy does, even where you're being critical of it from a sort of theoretical standpoint. Um we also talked about the idea that philanthropy can play a positive role in a democracy, um, as what you know Tockville would have called a nursery of democracy, teaching people skills of civic engagement and um and kind of uh citizenship, uh, and whether that applies to all philanthropy or whether it's just to do with particular forms of philanthropy or particular cause areas. We talked about how the work that Emma's done and some of the arguments she developed relates to actual examples of philanthropy out there at the moment, particularly around um what Mackenzie Scott's doing and also around the kind of field of participatory grant making and whether both of those examples are kind of more immune from some of the criticisms that are leveled at other forms of philanthropy. Um we also talk more broadly about the value of taking a philosophical and a historical view and what that brings to the table for practitioners in philanthropy. Uh, and then we also had a really interesting conversation at the end about effective altruism and how the critiques that that Emma outlines in the book about uh philanthropy and relational inequality might apply to EA in particular. Um so without further ado, we'll get into the conversation now. Hope you enjoy it. I certainly did, uh, and I'll be back at the end for the usual bit of housekeeping and tidying up. Okay, great. I'm here with Emma Saunders Hastings. Hi, Emma.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

Hi Emma.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Um thanks very much for finding some time to come on the podcast. Um so for anyone listening uh who doesn't already know, uh Emma is uh an assistant professor in political science at Ohio State University, uh, and most crucially uh for the purposes of this conversation, the author of a great new book called Private Virtues, Public Vices, Philanthropy and Democratic Equality, um, which I'll put links in the show notes too so that you can find it. And I heartily recommend getting hold of a copy. Um, but probably the best place to start, Emma, is um just if you tell us a bit uh in your own words about what the book's about, what led you to write it, and what you hope people reading it will get out of it.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Sure. Well, the book uh attempts to think about philanthropy from the perspective of political theory, which is my discipline. And I have a long-standing interest in philanthropy. I was at university at a time when there was sort of this sudden explosion of really high-profile giving, including Warren Buffett's request to the Gates Foundation. And I was struck at the time and since by the disconnect between what seemed to me the practical importance of philanthropy, perhaps the growing practical importance of philanthropy, and sort of the silence about it in political theory and democratic theory. You could find philosophers, moral philosophers writing about it, but not a lot in political theory. I think the past few years have seen more attention to philanthropy, just in public life generally, as well as within political theory, but it seemed to me that the existing criticisms and responses to those criticisms were missing something important. So if we think about some of the most common criticisms that you hear in both academic and popular writing about philanthropy, um, they tend to fall into a few categories. First, there's the idea that philanthropy, at least when it's practiced by the very rich billionaires, uh, is covertly self-serving rather than genuinely altruistic. There's one set of criticisms that focuses on donors' aims and intentions, and responses to those criticisms aim to vindicate the idea that philanthropy really is altruistic, really is public-spirited. Second, you sometimes hear that philanthropy is producing outcomes that are substantively unjust or otherwise objectionable. So you get objections to the sort of immediate effects of donations on who owns what or where resources are going. And third, there's the idea that philanthropy is itself the product of unjust inequalities, and maybe that it plays some ideological role in people's acceptance of inequality. So my starting point was to think: well, if we accept, as I think we can, that philanthropy is often well-intentioned or public-spirited, and that it often uh leads to outcomes that are in some important senses good. Is that all there is to say about it from the point of view of political theory? Is that the end of the discussion? And I think it isn't because there's another set of values that's gotten much less attention in the debate so far, but that I think are politically important. So I'm interested in the way that philanthropy interacts with democratic values, about how people should relate to each other as equals in social and political life, and how even well-intentioned philanthropy and philanthropy that really does, in some sense, produce good outcomes, can contribute to unequal social and political relationships.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Yeah, absolutely. And and um it one of the things I found fascinating reading the book was that I think on on the one hand, you're almost um more forgiving or accepting of philanthropy as it's actually practiced than some other people coming from a critical point of view from within philosophy or political science, in the sense of that you acknowledge that plenty of good can be done through philanthropy, and as you say it can be well-intentioned, but then also you're actually in some ways less um willing to let philanthropy off the hook because the specific criticisms that you draw about um um relational inequality as opposed to distributional inequality, it seems actually kind of harder to escape those uh even when you are doing philanthropy in a well-meaning way, and that kind of avoids some of that criticism. Um, I wonder if you could say a bit about what that distinction that you draw between um distributive concepts of inequality and relational uh concepts of inequality actually is, because it seems so sort of fundamental to the arguments in the book.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Sure. So there's a long-standing um debate in political theory and theories of justice about this. Distributive conceptions are generally conceptions of justice or inequality that accept that justice requires there to be something that people have equal or equal enough amounts of. And what that thing is can change between different theories. It could be income, it could be some pool of resources, uh, it could be access to some set of opportunities. Um, but the idea is that we could identify a distribution of resources, opportunities, goods, um, and that's the task of a theory of justice to pick out the right or appropriately equal distributions. Uh, relational theories of justice, sometimes called social or democratic theories of justice, think that the task of a theory of justice or equality is a bit different. It's to identify what it means for people to relate as equals in social and political life in appropriate ways. So obviously, in a lot of cases, these two theories can overlap and go together. People who are committed to relational conceptions of equality often also want to equalize resources, partly because they think that'll help people to relate as equals, that huge economic inequalities can hamper people's ability to relate as equals. And people with distributive conceptions of equality often have some conception of what that'll do to social and political relationships. But I think the point is that relational conceptions can identify ways that equal relationships can be undermined, even if goods are in some sense flowing in the right direction. So for a theory of philanthropy, what that means is even if philanthropy has the effect of making a distribution of goods or resources better relative to the distributed status quo, depending on how that's achieved, we might identify new inequalities that are objectionable. So the two kinds of relational inequalities that I focus on in the book concern democratic control and the ways that philanthropy might undermine people's shared control over outcomes that affect them in common. And secondly, paternalism, that philanthropy can result in paternalistic relationships between donors and the people they're trying to benefit.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Yeah, absolutely. And just to kind of uh to crystallise that, so is there a sense in which if you know if we had a thought experiment in which assume philanthropy actually produced as good, if not better, uh a distribution of resources within society as a mechanism of taxation and redistribution, and we were comfortable with that, it could still be the case that actually it fails the test when it comes to relational inequality because the way in which those those outcomes or those goods have been uh produced actually relies on there being people with differential um uh kind of positions within society and standing in relationships of patronage rather than equality to one another.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

And another thing I sort of was thinking when I was reading the book is it it struck me it raises a question that I've wondered about in the context of talking to people about some of what's going on in philanthropy at the moment when it comes to trying to shift power and address some of these uh kind of power asymmetries by uh employing things like uh participatory methods, and which is the question of to what extent does that as a goal for philanthropy or as an ideal trump all other ways of measuring um its value? And I always the the question to me is is always if that if there is a way of measuring independently the the good of the outcomes produced through philanthropy, um is there a point at which actually you could produce such good outcomes that it was will it was acceptable to trade off some level of um of relational equality uh in the sense of being able to get those better outcomes for that group, even if actually it kind of democratically was less good for them? Or does that presume that in in some sense it's ever better to sort of do things on people's behalf than to empower them to do it for themselves?

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Yeah, so I don't think that the relational egalitarian values I focus on in the book are absolute values. Obviously, human well-being and I would say not just human well-being are extremely morally important. Um, and so I think it would be um it wouldn't make sense to exclude the possibility of trade-offs. I think sometimes there could be real trade-offs between producing good outcomes and um fully pursuing relational values. So then the question I suppose is well, where do you locate the compromise between them? And I think that there are important benefits of thinking about these relational egalitarian values, even if we don't um sort of maximally pursue them all the time. In the first place, I think it's important to register the trade-offs that we're making, right? To say that because this outcome is so important, we're gonna trade off some measure of democracy or some commitment to people's equal autonomy. Um I acknowledge that that might sometimes be the right thing to do, but I think we still want to register the trade-off and not deny that something is being lost as well as gained. Then we also want to think about when um trading off these relational values are actually necessary to producing the good outcomes, right? I think it's a common theme in the history of philanthropy that donors can be a little bit quick to assume that uh engaging in paternalistic models of giving or bypassing democratic decision making are going to be the best ways to produce outcomes. Sometimes that might be right, but sometimes it might be wrong. So I think that these values can be useful as heuristics as well. And then I guess sort of the objective in the book is not to get everyone to agree with me about the exact point at which we locate the compromise between welfareist values and relational egalitarian ones, but to push people to take the relational values more seriously than I think we have in recent years.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

And in a practical sense, do you think part of the problem there often is that those are things that don't get measured? And so actually the the measures that we use, certainly within the world of philanthropy, focus very much on those kind of uh external outcomes and what are perceived as being the kind of the goals of philanthropy, but actually the outcomes produced through the process of actually achieving those goals and whether those um promote equal relationships and kind of uh good democratic norms. If they're not getting measured, it's difficult to even assess the trade-off. Do you think it's just that actually we kind of need to be more conscious of them and make sure when we're thinking about approaches to philanthropy, we're measuring all of these things so that we can make some of these decisions in a more conscious way.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

Right. I think that even when we're just thinking about the outcomes that we're imagining trading off against other values, it's easy to have a narrow conception of that and one that is maybe biased towards what's easily quantified.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a thing, you know, plenty of people are kind of aware of in this philanthropy world at the moment, that the challenges of overly narrow conceptions of measurement and the ways in which those can kind of you know uh create perverse incentives or drive behaviour. And this this seems like you know, one one very kind of important example of that. Um another thing I wanted to ask, actually, that comes up in the book that I thought was was fascinating, um, is tied to this idea of uh promoting an idea of um relational inequality is is the idea that actually we need to think of philanthropy more as a duty of justice rather than something that is done as a matter of of choice and and charity, which is obviously a kind of an idea with a with a rich history. And in in talking about that, you make the point, which I think is really important, that actually one of the things that this implies is that we might need to get away from the idea of expecting gratitude on the part of the recipient of philanthropy, because if we're viewing these relationships in a different way, they're more equal and actually they have an expectation rather than sort of a relationship of gratitude. Um, do you think sort of in practical terms that presents a challenge at all? Because it seems so fundamental to understanding of charity and philanthropy that it is about gifts graciously given and thankfully received, that actually, if we're sort of saying we need to get away from that conception, it's going to be difficult for people to adjust that mindset.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

I think it could be important here to distinguish between different kinds of gratitude. So I don't think that gratitude itself is necessarily poisonous to egalitarian relationships. You can imagine kinds of gratitude, maybe the kind I have with my neighbors, if they look after my host when I'm away and I do the same when they're gone, that are reciprocal, that are symmetrical, and that aren't um subordinating for the person who feels gratitude. And in fact, donors themselves often express that gratitude is part of their motivation for giving, that they've received benefits from society. And so a sort of gratitude for that, want to give that. So I guess the question for me is what kind of gratitude are we asking of recipients? Is that one that asks them to defer to somebody else's conception of what would be good for them? And that to me is the real worry and threat to social and political relationships. And so maybe instead of saying we need to do away with gratitude, that this is necessarily a problem, just ask what the appropriate kind of gratitude is for people in this situation. And does it require them to defer to donors the way that um they often have in the past?

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a really good point. And I mean, does it start then to take us into territory that that kind of blurs the lines between the the traditions that we might think of more historically as philanthropy and charity, and those that that we might think of more as kind of mutual aid or or solidarity relationships, which I know there's been a lot of focus on recently. Do you think do you think actually, as part of this process of reimagining philanthropy, maybe we need to bring those two conceptions back together more?

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Yeah, uh so I think that the difficulty in doing that is that um mutual aid traditions, uh community organizing traditions, this set of sort of different models of private provision of public goods that I talk about a bit in the book often um occur within relationships that are in material terms more equal. We're not talking about sort of a rich donor supplying goods and then people deciding among themselves how to use it. And so I suppose the question for big philanthropy is to what extent is it going to be possible to model those kinds of more reciprocal, more egalitarian relationships when the background inequalities are that much greater? Um, and I think they're pretty significant. So someone like um Mackenzie Scott, who I take to be interested in a lot of these problems, right? She's written about um trying to give in ways that de-center her, that feed the focus to the community groups that are trying to work and that have been working in a long-standing way on problems. Um, but of course, for nonprofits and organizations that need resources, that's really powerful incentives to do the kinds of things that you think will get you a gift from Mackenzie Scott. So I think that some of the problems that arise within um asymmetrical, non-reciprocal relationships can come about even when the donor is sincerely motivated to try to take a step back just because of the structural incentives for groups that need money and people who have it.

SPEAKER_00 20:31

It feels similar, I guess, to that uh phenomenon that gets noted in the context of the relationship between philanthropists and foundations and perhaps social movements, where even when the funding is done with the best of possible intentions, the sheer uh gravitational field of the funder and the size uh imbalance means that they they uh inevitably uh kind of accidentally skew the focus of of the movement. Um and as you say, for an individual donor, even if they're striving to have um uh a kind of uh relational inequal uh equality with with their recipients, that can be difficult. In in practical terms, I mean you you mentioned there about uh Mackenzie Scott being someone that sort of I agree clearly seems to uh grasp these these challenges and is trying to do things about them. In terms of her approach and approaches you've seen from from other uh individual philanthropists and and funders, do you think there are things people are doing that that you feel kind of address some of these concerns and are are genuinely trying to move philanthropy towards models that that uh could achieve some sort of relational equality?

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Yeah, so um Mackenzie's guide is one example. Since uh the book was written, there's also been a sort of surge of interest in so-called trust based philanthropy. I think people are still working out what exactly that means or the different things that it might mean. But um the kinds of words I'm writing about here aren't ones that I invented. Or picked out of the air. They're ones that I think people working within the nonprofit sector are aware of and trying to think about. And so I do see areas where people are trying to respond to the concerns now how successfully I think it's probably too early to tell, but that's definitely a set of developments that I'm following with a lot of interest.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yeah, and it I mean something I want to come back to later on, just the kind of broader question of the value of taking a philosophical view of philanthropy and that that um line between academia and practice, but it feels that the particular perspective you're you're taking on these issues actually is much more relevant to the concerns that I know lots of people within the philanthropy world are already grappling with, perhaps, than some other discussions about philanthropy. So I think it's um I think you know there's a lot for people to kind of um uh to take on board from this. Um I just wanted to pick up on on some of the sort of wider discussion in the book about um uh some of the arguments around the role of philanthropy within a in a democracy. And I know in a way some of these are uh relaying arguments that are not themselves kind of the the core of the book, but but kind of um outlining them to make people aware uh of those arguments and sort of what um some of the responses might be. Um but but you obviously make the point that um a lot of the focus of around the relationship between philanthropy and and democracy seems to hinge on the idea that big money giving in particular is is anti-democratic simply because the the scale of it allows people to have a disproportionate uh effect on uh on kind of public discourse and public policy. Um one of the things I found really interesting, and I'd love to hear more about was you you kind of you go straight on to look at the argument sometimes made that actually the solution to this is simply to focus more uh on everyday giving and kind of mass giving at a at a um uh at a normal level. But actually, you kind of raise a question about whether that genuinely is a uh a kind of um a solution to this problem. And I wonder if you could just say a bit about about that.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

I think there are good reasons for thinking that big giving is in some important ways different in the democratic risks or concerns that it presents. So the degree of kind of concentrated control or influence, this gravitational pull we've just been talking about, is going to be stronger for um a huge endowed foundation uh than it is for a lot of cases of mass giving. Um, but not necessarily, right? So I think one point I try to make in the book is that there are times when an aggregation of small donations could produce effects that raise similar worries to those um posed by big philanthropy. So one example I give in the book is um Catholic hospitals in the United States, where because of um legal rules around government funding, in cases where a Catholic hospital is operating, government is encouraged to direct resources elsewhere, right, to treat that as a substitute or as an adequate hospital in the region. So there are a number of regions that are served exclusively by these hospitals. But of course, they don't provide the same range of services that public hospitals do. It's often a lack of access to uh reproductive health care as well as treatment for sexually transmitted infections. These are just a few examples. So in some cases, I think the concern really does have to do with the fact that it's a privatized, non-democratic uh decision making about how to use resources rather than specifically the fact that it's endowed by a large donor.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

And at what point I guess the the counter that some people would would make to that is that it does seem as though there's value, and lots of people have recognized it through the ages, in the role that philanthropy can play in allowing a greater variety of expressions of public choice and things that can sort of counter the tyranny of the majority, if you will, by allowing even minority views to find expression and potentially influence the overall kind of nature of public discourse and public policy eventually. You know, do you do you think that is a balance that we have to take into account? I mean, is there a positive story to be told about the fact that even when it's seemingly anti-democratic, sometimes with hindsight, the ability of philanthropy, whether that's individual big money philanthropy or or sort of much smaller groups of donors uh in aggregate going against the grain in some sense is a good thing, even if it's not strictly speaking democratic.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yes. So the one correction that I would make to that is something that you find commonly in discussions about philanthropy, where philanthropy is positioned as the counterweight to majoritarian decision making. And I guess living in the United States right now, I'm not sure that we can assume that the outputs of government policy reliably track the preferences of majorities. So that doesn't mean that there's no value to alternative uh conceptions of the public good and alternative ways of funding it. But the tendency to position philanthropy as the expression of minority voice versus government as the expression of majorities, um, I'm not sure that always maps onto reality. Now, worries about the tyranny of the majority aren't the only reason for wanting pluralism and diversity. So I think the case for philanthropy can still stand in some cases, but I think we might need to adjust the sorts of justifications we offer from it to better reflect the reality that maybe it's sort of one expression of minority voice among many.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

I know I I totally agree. And I think your the point you make there and and in the book um which which reminded me about the fact that the the way the argument is often presented as one of um almost sort of uh ideal theory, again, where you you have democracy functioning properly and representing the interests of the majority and then philanthropy as its counterweight. As you say, actually, in many circumstances, it seems as though actually we have minority views uh reflected through democratic workings. And what I definitely wouldn't want to fall into the trap of going along with the narrative of those who have managed through philanthropic and other means to make their minoritarian views seem as though they represent the interests of the majority. Um absolutely. So I think no, I think you're right. We need to be very careful about that.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

So having said that, I guess I think there's a couple of other questions we can ask when we're deciding or weighing how how worried we should be when we see um maybe somewhat troubling, somewhat undemocratic philanthropy, but also want to take account of the goods or the goods we might lose if we uh try to discourage it. So, one question I asked is how symmetrical are the groups of people engaging in decision making about this uh and the people affected by it, right? I think that the more sort of decision-making power and control rests with people who are affected by giving or people who need not be affected by giving unless they choose to be, um, that's going to significantly mitigate the democratic worries. And then related to that, is philanthropy in a given context providing an additional option for people to access if they choose? Or as in the case of the hospitals or some of the educational choices, um, is it crowding out or replacing the unique option that was previously provided by government or replacing some other option that people also had so that there may be a gain but also a loss? And those cases, too, I think are also going to be more complicated than ones where it's a pure sort of extra option for people to take or leave.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Yeah, no, I think that's a really uh important point to bear in mind. And it it reminds me another thing I wanted to just pick up that you discuss in in the book, which I know kind of goes to um quite a lot of of debates I've seen over the last few years about this whole potential tension between philanthropy and democracy, is the idea that philanthropy can play a positive role, not just as a counterweight to the views of the majority, but but through the process of engaging in voluntary action or philanthropy being in some sense a way of teaching democratic skills and this sort of Tocquevillian idea of philanthropy and voluntary action is a nursery of democracy. In the book, you you give that idea, I think, relatively short shrift, or kind of, you know, raise some pretty significant reasons to be cautious about those arguments. And I wonder if you could just sort of say a bit why that is.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

So I think philanthropy can be a nursery of democracy. I suppose, in some ways, the thesis of the book is that philanthropy can be a nursery for many different kinds of political relationships, depending on how the philanthropy is organized and conducted. So I think that the nursery of democracy idea arises from Tocqueville, who has in mind something closer to what we've been talking about before, is sort of mutual aid or community projects. People who, in Tocqueville's eyes, at least, were very equal in their condition to each other, uh, deciding together how to provide things for often their own communities, sometimes externally. And in fact, Tocqueville positions uh this kind of associational activity as an alternative to what you see in Britain, which is where he says in England, uh, some great lord would do the same thing, and in France the government would do it. In America, where there are no great lords, no powerful private people anymore, you have to have associations do it. So already that looks kind of different than a lot of the models of philanthropy that we're talking about today. Uh, and I think for Tocqueville, big philanthropy, it would be natural to see as just as plausibly a nursery of aristocracy or oligarchies and as democracies. So, what I would say is it depends on the kinds of relationships, the kinds of structures of control and deference that you see within philanthropic activity, people could learn very different kinds of relational lessons from philanthropy of different kinds, such that it could be a nursery of different things.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

Yeah, absolutely. And uh, you know, I think you're right, actually, in in terms of it's very easy sometimes in within these arguments for different conceptions of philanthropy uh and the distinctions between them to become elided. And actually, quite often, if we're talking about uh elite giving and big money given by individuals versus uh voluntary activity and and kind of non-monetary forms of giving, actually they're they're two very, very distinct things and not necessarily the same uh conclusions can be drawn from them, but often people sort of fudge those distinctions, I think, sometimes. Um I I wanted to ask a kind of um uh a sort of broader question at this point. I think one that that I mentioned earlier, which is in in all of these uh discussions, I think obviously you're kind of looking at things from a perspective of uh political theory and sort of you know to an extent kind of political philosophy as well. Um, you know, obviously that that is your your day job. So in what in one sense the answers to this question is you know, is is kind of an obvious one. But why do you think that perspective on philanthropy is valuable, not not just for people who share your academic interests, but for practitioners perhaps and for philanthropists?

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Well, I think we all necessarily take philosophical perspectives on philanthropy when we make judgments about whether and why it's valuable and what it's worth trading off against. I think the value of um of my disciplinary training or of approaching philanthropy from the point of view of academic political theory is that I hope it can help us uh clarify and make more precise the kinds of values that we're appealing to. So um, for instance, I think the worry that philanthropy can be, in some sense, paternalistic is an extremely long-standing worry uh in the history of charitable practice. And you see it going back centuries, and people often appeal to it today. Often this is a reason why philanthropists don't want to say they're doing charity, we're doing philanthropy instead, because in the United States at least, that has the connotation of being sort of more respectful, less paternalistic. So people are sort of alert to this concern, but I think often people invoke it without having a very clear sense of what exactly that means, what paternalism is, and why it's objectionable. So that's a place where I think political theory can contribute some value by saying, look, here's different ways that people have understood paternalism and its wrongness. Here's how I think those concerns apply in the case of philanthropy. Um, and then I think here's where thinking about philanthropy can also contribute value to political theory as a discipline, that this sector or important sphere of life and activity that maybe we haven't thought enough about can help us gain clarity on the political concepts that we appeal to, but often thinking just sort of about the state or individuals.

SPEAKER_00 35:10

And and just picking up on something that you were were saying there about, you know, some of this um these ideas and concerns about things like paternalism do have rich histories. And one of the things, I mean, you say yourself in the book, and I I was thinking very much, uh, as somebody who kind of goes out their way to try and take a historical perspective on philanthropy, is that the your focus particularly on the on concerns about relational uh inequality uh in the book, and then sort of the the imbalance in individual relationships, you you seem to be reaching back almost to a sort of literature on philanthropy that that uh seems to have slightly gone by the wayside. So you you talk at length about some things that John Stuart Mill said and some things that Jane Adams for, for example, wrote. Absolutely fascinating things and then you know, enormous richness in there. Um and they were grappling with very similar sorts of issues, and there were, you know, there was debate going on between people, and then all of a sudden it seemed to have dissipated to some extent in in the philosophical discourse. I wonder why you think that is, and and you know, whether, you know, the the case, what the case is for needing to revive it at this point in time.

SPEAKER_01 36:21

Yeah, that's a great question. I think about it a lot. I mean, it it really did strike me the more I got into this literature that contemporary political theory engagement with philanthropy has often focused on some of the least interesting parts of the history. Um so I have a few hypotheses, maybe I'll throw them out and see what you think about them. One is I think at least this sort of set of 19th, early 20th century thinkers that I'm especially taken with. So um, Mill and Adams also and some other work I've done, Frederick Douglass. Um, I think there's something important about the fact that they're all engaged in real politics, that um they they have other day jobs, you put it. And so the division that's sometimes made in contemporary political theory between formal political institutions, which are the appropriate subjective principles of justice, versus civil society, which is the realm of freedom and people can do what they like. Um, all these people recognize that that division doesn't necessarily hold that philanthropy and voluntary activity can be extremely politically consequential, not just in their immediate outcomes, but as sites for people to negotiate relationships with social and political facts. So I think that their engagement in the work of real politics is part of the reason why they have such interesting things to say, not just about philanthropy in their own time, but I think that speaks to philanthropy today. Um, I also think that sort of the division of academic disciplines uh leads to philanthropy maybe falling between the cracks a little bit. And so that political theory in the second part of the 20th century, first part of the 21st, really does focus um much, much more on either, on the one hand, government institutions, maybe especially legislative institutions, and then to some extent on um questions like civil disobedience and activism. But again, there's this in-between thing that keeps sort of sliding out of view, I think, with exceptions, of course, but that just doesn't get the prominence that um other people more directly engaged with it gave it.

SPEAKER_00 38:36

I yeah, I I mean I would absolutely, I think, uh accept both of those arguments. And I think, I mean, it was something I wanted to ask about the kind of the challenge in terms of seeing philanthropy as a coherent academic discipline often seems to me is that it's sort of it's by its nature multidisciplinary, which makes it fascinating but can make it quite challenging to make it seem coherent. And also it inevitably uh crosses boundaries between practice and theory, because it is essentially a sort of practical discipline, um, but one where you know it does benefit from taking a theoretical point of view. I I wonder also if there the other thing that's kind of inherent to uh philanthropy that makes it interesting but but sometimes problematic is that it's at one and the same time about individual relationships and kind of individual gifting relationships, but then at aggregate about systematic redistribution of resources in in society. And uh shifting between those two different perspectives can be uh quite difficult. And actually, in a way, I feel like a lot of the uh political theory and political philosophy about Trump is tended much more towards the let's look at this stuff at the aggregate systemic level, um, and seeing the individual as at best the the business of moral philosophy or ethics. Um and actually I think what I find fascinating about your book is you're kind of rejoining the two and saying, no, actually, there is a valid and important perspective from the point of view of political theory and political philosophy at the individual level as well, uh, and kind of rejoining those two. And I and I wonder if that that is the thing that that people sort of need to um to realize again so that we we don't see them as two separate uh domains.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

Right. Well, to me it's partly about reconceiving what it means to think about philanthropy even at the individual level. I think we're used to thinking about it as um, well, what that means is I'm thinking about um Bill Gates and deciding if I think he's a good or bad person, right? That it's these sort of ethical judgments about individuals. And to me, it's just there's a kind of solid system about that, I guess. So that what we're doing when we think about philanthropy is evaluating social and political practices that we're implicated in, sometimes in complicated ways. The same people can be donors and beneficiaries and observers and citizens. Um, but in these different roles, I think we do have a stake in evaluating what's the right place and the right way to try to conduct and judge philanthropy, accepting that it's going to play an important role in society.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Um, absolutely, I agree. Um you mentioned in in passing before the um uh work that you've done on Frederick Douglass, and I couldn't couldn't let this go sort of uh past without picking up on it, because I I I read the the paper and I absolutely loved it. I'm I'm particularly sort of fascinated on the whole history of the notion of of tainted donations and the ethical questions around sources of wealth, and I wasn't aware of this this piece of history at all. And I thought what Douglass did and what he had to say about the campaign against the Free Church of Scotland was absolutely fascinating. Uh I wasn't quite sure what question to ask about this um without going off on a whole tangent that uh whole podcast in its own right. And I guess just what I what I wanted to get a sense of from you, maybe, is you know, what does this say about the value of a historical perspective for uh academics and also practitioners in thinking through its views today? Because it the issue answering I take a donations is a very live one for people within the sector who are both giving donations and receiving donations. And it struck me that the Frederick Douglass's views about it were remarkably close to some of the best examples I've seen of advice on how you should approach these questions in a practical sense. Um and I just sort of wondered, you know, you you seem in your work to be constantly searching for historical examples and trying to sort of extract lessons from them. You know, is that something you think we should strive to do more? Um and is there also, I guess, you know, grit in the oyster, reason to be sometimes cautious about relying too much on historical examples?

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Sure. I of course would not want to say, like, look, Frederick Douglass gave you um a to-do list of best best practices that you can adopt today. I don't think that's the value of it. I mean, the value is. It's quite close to me.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

It's very good.

SPEAKER_01 43:08

Um, I mean, I think the value is partly um intrinsic. They're spectacular speeches, so it's just fascinating to read them. And then I guess um part of the interest for me is observing someone integrate um so in in such a compelling way, their criticisms of government injustice and their perspective on the role that philanthropy is playing. Um, so again, these are people who who aren't distinguishing between political injustice, the business of government, and then philanthropy is the domain where we evaluate the ethics of private individuals. Um Douglas kind of combines these in creative ways. So his criticism of the free church accepting slaveholders, mining Isn't just one is personally tainted whenever one touches money traceable to slavery. And for that reason, he's also not much moved by the criticism. Why don't you focus on every other comparable instance of people benefiting in some sense from the relationship to slavery, which in the Atlantic economy at the time could potentially include huge losses of people. What he says is look, acceptance of donations conveys important messages about political status. It elevates the social and political status of some people, in this case, slave holders, and that's objectionable. And it communicates a denial of the social and political status of other people, enslaved people whom the free church is treating as not sufficiently important to justify refusing a connection with the donors. That's the critical thrust. And then by the same token, he's using these philanthropic transactions as an opportunity to shed light on political injustices that concern him. So it's a very um creative project that he has. And what's interesting, I suppose, in part to me is the way that something that the slaveholders on Douglas's reading hoped would become a source of legitimacy for them, becomes in his hands and through his speeches a vulnerability, right? A source of opportunities to shame them and to engage more people uh in the fight against slavery.

SPEAKER_00 45:26

Yeah, absolutely. And it feels, I mean, you in the paper, um you you go on to uh draw some parallels with the modern context and particularly around examples of people like the the Sacklers, um, which obviously the kind of poster children of tainted donations these days, but it does feel as though again um there is that similar phenomenon of something that was thought to be a foolproof mechanism of uh buying legitimacy or bolstering relationship actually becoming the Achilles heel in in the end and the thing that that kind of led to uh to the downfall. So it's a it's a fascinating paper, and I'll certainly put links in the show notes so that people can can find where to read that. Um I'm aware I'm in danger of taking up altogether too much of your time. I just um before I uh give you a chance to uh to uh plug any things that you've got coming up, I just wanted to ask uh a question that that occurred to me when I was reading the book, and I think has become sort of more pressing in my mind um since, because there's been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about uh effective altruism, um, partly off the back of a separate discussion about long-termism and uh Will McCaskill's book that he's got coming out. But I was wondering when I read the book, actually, what the critique from the point of view of relational inequality would be as applied to effective altruism. It feels as though, in a way, most effective altruists would probably not see it as a particular set of problems that were central to what they're mostly concerned with. But actually, it felt as though EA would be particularly susceptible in some ways to your critiques because it's inherently quite a top-down way of looking at philanthropy that does prioritize the the sort of power and intelligence of the donor to both sort of set what the problems are and identify the solutions to them. Do you think if we kind of take the criticisms that that you've outlined seriously, actually EA has quite a lot to answer?

SPEAKER_01 47:22

Yeah, so this is one that I find quite difficult and where my intuitions sort of pull me in different directions because there's a lot about EA that I find very morally admirable. I think these are people who are who are very serious about doing good and are willing to incur more personal costs than most to do it. On the other hand, as you say, it is that very seriousness about doing good and the way they conceive of the good to be done that does open particular risks, right? Because well, we were talking earlier about trade-offs, right? That if we recognize, as I think reasonable people should recognize, that some kind of distributive or welfare value is important, but that relational values can be important as well, how do we balance them? I think there's going to be less room for that in EA than in some other perspectives. They could recognize the instrumental importance of some relational values. So democracy's record on famine prevention maybe is good evidence that democratic relations matter instrumentally for protecting people's well-being. So it's not saying neglected entirely. But because small differences in expected well-being produced can swing judgments about what to do so dramatically, there's not going to be a lot of room to give more weight to relational values. One place I think you saw this is I don't know if you saw just last week, Give Well revised its list of top recommended charities to remove give directly, which is an organization that provides direct cash transfers to poor people. And their new policy dictated is that we're only going to recommend as top charities programs that we expect to do 10 times more good than giving people cash. One of the new charities that did make the cut is called New Incentives, which is an organization that provides conditional uh cash transfers that is not unconditional, like give directly, that gives money to people if they bring a child to have the child vaccinated. So I've been reading about this and thinking, and my worry is that under some set of assumptions, it's going to be trivially easy to increase the value of intervention by attaching conditions to them. Right. That if what you want to do is maximize uh well-being produced, well, then of course, don't give cash unconditionally, give cash on the condition that people do a set of other things that'll promote well-being. But that really does open the door to the kinds of uh worries about paternalism that I write about in the book. And that I think was less present in some of these early uh areas of focus. So bed nets, for instance, are an in-kind good, they're not cash, that's sometimes associated with paternalism and lack of trust. But at the same time, it's something that people sort of opt into on an individualized basis, and there's no durable relationship of control. So that's a case where I see the concerns as fairly low relative to the benefits produced. Um, but the idea that producing sort of 10 times greater benefits is a reason to uh look for other opportunities to impose welfare maximizing conditions, is sort of the worry I have coming out of this change in give well policy.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

Yeah, it's really interesting. I and I it makes me wonder in in some sense, actually, as you say, in the the early days of EA and sort of focus on on addressing problems that most people would agree are pretty pressing and solutions which again most people would agree make sense, seem less problematic than the more it's shifted towards a kind of search for quite contrarian uh solutions or almost kind of uh almost sort of moonshots. And I think, you know, the the desire to not to fund things that would otherwise be funded, which in a sense is admirable, leads uh I think further towards putting the power in the hands of the donor to decide how best to address problems and takes that that power away uh from from those who would have been the recipient. So maybe does become more worrying. Um I also I wondered, I I I did see actually caught this the story about um uh about uh GiveWell Um and uh Give Directly. Um and I hadn't looked into the detail, but it did it just struck me as you were saying there, it's it really fascinates, and I will look into it more because I'd sort of uh it had been an interesting situation to me that actually for entirely different reasons, people who were interested in relational equality and concerns of that type and power dynamics within the sector had probably thought that unconditional cash giving was a good thing. And then for an entirely separate set of reasons, lots of very, very hardcore effective altruists had also, because it happened to be a good way of producing outcomes, but actually, if they're severing that link, it it's sort of it's really interesting if if now by making it cash transfers but conditional ones, you know, that there won't be that that common ground anymore. So it'll be it'll be really fascinating to see how that develops. Um but before I finally let you uh go, Emma, I just um, you know, thanks ever so much for finding time to come on the podcast. It's been great having a chance to talk. And as I say, I really thoroughly recommend that people uh get hold of a copy of the book and and read that. Um, is there anything else that you've got coming up that you'd like to flag up to people, either kind of related to the book or separately?

SPEAKER_01 52:49

Um see, I'll be speaking at a couple of conferences about the book this fall that are probably mostly of interest to professional political philosophers. Um, but I am continuing to work on a lot of these questions, following them uh with interest and hoping to do more work on dirty money specifically. Um and so yeah, uh look out for that. And thank you so much for having me on. I have been a consumer of the public goods you produce uh on the internet for a long time. So it's a pleasure to talk to you.

SPEAKER_00 53:21

Great, and I will absolutely keep my my eye out for what you do in the future, particularly anything around dirty money and tainted donations, which I'm I cannot get enough of. So I'll be very interested to see what you what you do next on that. Um well, take care. Thanks ever so much for coming on.

SPEAKER_01 53:34

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 53:43

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Emma for finding time to go on the podcast, uh, particularly as uh we actually tried to record once uh and had all sorts of problems with connection, and Emma was kind enough to rearrange. So my thanks to her for that. Um I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can find Emma's book and also the paper that I was talking about and also a few other things that she's written and I've written that might be relevant. Uh if you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, uh you can check out my website, uh www.yphilanthropymatters.com, where you can find all of the episodes of this podcast and loads of articles and guides to all kinds of interesting things to do with philanthropy. Um you can also follow me on Twitter if you want something slightly more lowbrow at Rodri underscore H underscore Davis or at Philiteracy if you want something mildly more highbrow that's a bit more about kind of the history of philanthropy and and theory about philanthropy. Um other than that, you can drop us an email, get in touch via the website if you've got ideas for things we could cover on the podcast in future, or people that I could talk to. Uh, other than that, just like, subscribe, tell all your friends about it, leave us a nice review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and I'll see you next time. Bye, but I'm gonna go to the book.