What is philosophy?

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis. And this week it's just me, no interviews this week, although I should say that we've got some great ones already in the can lined up for coming weeks, so keep an eye out for those. But this week it's going to be just me talking and doing a deep dive. And I'm really excited slash slightly trepidatious about this one because it's something I've been meaning to do for ages. And today we're going to be looking at the philosophy of philanthropy. Now, before anybody just immediately turns off the podcast and throws it in the bin and sets fire to it, I know that makes it sound like I'm going to read out a series of those kind of god-awful inspirational quotes about giving and generosity that you get littering sites like LinkedIn, but that's not what I'm going to do at all. That's really not my kind of bag. What I want to look at is how, and indeed, if at all, philanthropy has been dealt with as a subject of proper philosoph philosophical inquiry through the ages, what the big questions are, if so, and how this might inform our current understanding of philanthropy, both in theory and in practice. There's a couple of reasons I wanted to do that. One is it seemed like a neat tie-in because the day on which I'm putting this out is World Philosophy Day. Um so I thought that would be good. And as I said up front, this is something I've been meaning to do for a long time, um, partly because my background is in uh philosophy. So at university I did mathematics and philosophy, and for a while I started going down the road of being an academic philosopher, well, that must be said in an area not particularly collected uh connected with philanthropy, it was more philosophy of maths and and logic, so it was uh you know really uh pretty mainstream stuff. But I've always maintained my interest in it and particularly in kind of taking a philosophical approach to questions, including those that I now find myself uh kind of thinking and talking about in my day job uh with philanthropy. And I've always sort of found it odd that there isn't as much literature as you would think that approaches philanthropy from that kind of perspective. And this is something I'll come on to in a moment to sort of ask why that might be. But it seems like a gap, and so I thought what I would do today is try and gather together what we do know about what philosophers through the ages have said about philanthropy and try and sort of tease out from that what some of the key thoughts and key questions that they've uh they've covered are. So I guess first it's maybe worth just saying a little bit about what philosophy is. Um now that could be the the uh topic of an entire, not just podcast episode, but podcasts that ran for series and series uh in itself. It's uh a very difficult thing to describe and to define exactly, ironically, a bit like philanthropy, and um the first episode of this very podcast was on the question of how we define philanthropy. And much uh as we kind of um concluded there, uh it's not necessarily a term that has a fixed definition, but it's one that is um sufficiently well understood in its various different aspects that it can be used in practice. I mean there's no real clear agreement among philosophers as to what philosophy means, and they can spend a long time arguing about it and probably quite like to. I mean the literal meaning of the word is love of wisdom, and at its core, philosophy seems to involve ideas like critical thinking and notions of sort of focusing on fundamental questions. So, I mean, just as an example of some of the ways in which people have tried to not necessarily define but give a sense of what philosophy means to them. So the Oxford Companion to Philosophy says philosophy is thinking about thinking, which is quite a neat way of putting it. I think it's one of those clever phrases that as soon as you start to kind of pick at it, you think, what does that actually mean? But I think it's quite a good starting point. Uh another quote I saw from the philosopher Alan Buchanan says, um, I don't think it's any one thing, but I think generally it involves being critical and reflective about things that most people take for granted, which I quite like. There's another one from uh a philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards saying, I regard philosophy as a mode of inquiry rather than a particular set of subjects, which I think is a good point. Um I regard it as involving the kind of questions where you're not trying to find out how your ideas latch onto the world, whether your ideas are true or not in the way that science is doing, but more about how your ideas hang together. This means that philosophical questions will arise in a lot of subjects. And again, that's an important point. It's almost the idea that philosophy is a way of approaching things or a set of tools that you can then apply across a range of domains. And it's worth saying, you know, we get branches within philosophy as an academic discipline, um, so it's not just one monolithic thing, and they're quite distinct often. So you get things like metaphysics, which is basically about kind of what there is in the world and what's real and what's not, uh, epistemology, which is about how we know stuff about those things, uh, ethics, which is about the laws that govern how we should behave, um, aesthetics, why things are beautiful, uh, logic, what the laws governing rational argument are, and so on, and there's many more. And so some of the best known questions in philosophy that kind of fit into those various different categories are things like, you know, what is the nature of existence? Uh, how can we know things? What does it mean for something to be true? How do we lead a good life? And so on. I mean, basically the kinds of things that you can imagine, you know, a series of um slightly stoned teenagers sitting around asking each other in a kind of slightly wide-eyed way. Actually, that's quite a lot of the time the sorts of things that that fundamentally philosophy is trying to get to, although it very quickly gets a lot more complicated and a lot more dry than that usually. But also, I guess, as we've already said, there's there you also get disciplines in which a philosophical approach is applied to other disciplines, so almost sort of meta uh disciplines, to ask fundamental questions about the content of those disciplines, the nature of the knowledge we have about them and the methods that they use. So you get things like philosophy of science as a discipline, philosophy of maths, even philosophy of history, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of economics, biology, that kind of thing. And so my question in this podcast really is is there such a thing as the philosophy of philanthropy in that sense? And if so, what are the key questions and themes within it? The short answer to the first question about whether there is such a thing as philosophy of philanthropy seems to be no. So you'd be quite hard pressed in all honesty to find many philosophers, either living or dead, who would describe themselves first and foremost as philosophers of philanthropy. And perhaps that is a part of a wider problem with philanthropy as an academic discipline, which is that by its nature it kind of cuts across quite a lot of traditional academic silos. So, as we talked about in the first episode of this podcast, you can look at uh philanthropy through the lens of many different academic disciplines, whether that's philosophy, whether it's psychology, whether it's political theory, history, economics, and so on and so on. So, even within philosophy itself, you know, that kind of maybe means that even where philosophers touch on issues around philanthropy, they wouldn't necessarily see it as a core um topic of study in its own right. Also, I think there's something to be said here about something that is fundamental to philanthropy and something I will probably come back to many times on the podcast because I'm quite boring about it, uh I have to say, which is that there's a kind of at its core, philanthropy is quite an odd thing because it's at one and the same time about the individual choices of people sort of freely made about where to put their resources at at a kind of micro level. But then if you if you zoom out to a macro level, add it to aggregate, it's about a sort of system for redistribution within society that sits alongside the state and the market. And if you look at it from these two different perspectives, it lends weight to quite different sets of ideas and kind of core concerns. So it's an individual level, you start to ask questions about choice and freedom and liberty. Whereas at that macro level, often that's where you start to think about things like equity and justice, and there are tensions between those things. And also within philosophy, you know, at that individual level, you're probably talking more about moral philosophy and ethics, because it's about kind of how people should behave. Whereas at that macro level, perhaps you're talking more about um political theory and political philosophy. And again, there are people who straddle those disciplines, but often there are people who sort of they sit in quite separate silos. I think it's worth saying among this small handful of philosophers who have written specifically about philanthropy, it's actually, you know, it's quite a common theme to hear them lament that it's not better served as as a subject. So for instance, um JB Schneewind, um, who uh edited a collection that's that's one of them, the main ones you can still find about the sort of philosophy of philanthropy, which I will put links in the show notes to, um, including, you know, a whole bibliography of things that are relevant to this episode. But Schneewind said, um, so uh he kid modern philosophers have not ignored it, philanthropy, but when they have considered charity, and it's not been a major topic of investigation, they've tended to center their discussion on its relation to justice. And uh Rob Reesch, who is one of the philosophers uh today, a political philosopher, whose work we'll talk about a little bit in this episode, who's probably best known as a philosopher of philanthropy, in his book Just Giving, he says in passing, you know, Aristotle notwithstanding, philanthropy has rarely been a topic of serious inquiry, especially in contemporary philosophy. So, you know, is there is this even worth doing? You know, are we going to find anything of interest? Well, I think we are, and I kind of know this from my work. Um, so over the years, you know, I've got increasingly interested in the sort of history of philanthropy and how philanthropy is represented in other disciplines and in literature and that kind of thing. And some of you may know, I run a Twitter feed called Philiteracy, where I kind of gather together interesting writing and thoughts on philanthropy from some of those different places and share them. And I do lots of kind of you know on this day things. It's like on this day, so-and-so was born or died, and here's something interesting that they said about philanthropy or charity. And in the course of doing that, and given my particular proclivities, I've covered lots of philosophers. So I know from that that many well-known philosophers have touched on issues relating to philanthropy throughout the ages, even if only in passing, but but there's very little that you can find that sort of systematically pulls it together and gives you a sense of how the philosophy of philanthropy might work as a discipline, and that's you know, uh somewhat ambitiously what I'm gonna try and do in this podcast episode. Um, I think it's worth saying, you know, we can also look in other places as well outside of what might be thought of as traditional um academic philosophy. You know, given the deep intertwining of religion and philanthropy for large parts of history, I think we need to venture into theology as well to find relevant thoughts. I think we can also look within philanthropy itself and kind of take into account the views of philanthropists themselves or those who've worked in philanthropy who have maybe explored some of the issues that that arise in a philosophical way. I think I should say, you know, the challenge in doing that is that the more generous you get in expanding the boundaries of what constitutes a philosophical approach, the more you might start failing to define what you're actually talking about and just ending up looking more generically at interesting thoughts about philanthropy rather than the philosophy of philanthropy. So I've I've tried to avoid that danger by sticking as far as possible to sources that to me kind of clearly address fundamental questions of a philosophical nature, even where those sources are not from within the traditional academic sphere of philosophy. And I've tried to focus as much as possible on where the thoughts have been directly related to philanthropy or charity, because again, there are many broader issues within philosophy that are relevant, but if you go too far afield in sort of talking about them without relating them back to philanthropy or charity, it becomes a bit nebulous. And yeah, I should say, you know, within that that philosophy, as you see, there's kind of quite a skew probably towards the individual perspective and towards sort of ethics and moral philosophy, which is natural. There's a bit of political philosophy in there too, and we'll try and kind of cover both of them. Before I get into the the meat of the episode, you may think I should already have done so, but I just want a couple of caveats as well. I should say I'm going to I should acknowledge really that I'm pretty much talking about Western philosophy here, and that's not because other philosophical traditions aren't equally valid and don't have things to say about philanthropy, because they definitely do, but it's partly just to keep things manageable, because already I'm mildly concerned about getting this episode done properly. Also, you know, I should acknowledge my background in philosophy is very much kind of skewed towards that Western tradition. So in you know, personally, just in terms of pulling it together, it gave me a slightly firmer starting point, rather than having to kind of entirely educate myself about other philosophical traditions from scratch, which would have made this even harder. I should also acknowledge, I think there were probably some issues in terms of the gender balance of the people that I am going to be quoting uh as I talk about this. I've done my best to bring in uh the views of women as well as men, but you know, as with a lot of things, as soon as you start looking historically, you know, there is a bit of a gender imbalance, which is partly reflective of the fact that there's, you know, poor representation in general of women in all sorts of areas for a lot of history, and that includes uh philosophy. I should also say if your favourite philosopher isn't represented here, I'm sorry, uh, particularly if you feel like they've got something really important to say about charity or philanthropy. I've done my best to try and bring in as many different perspectives as possible, but it's already developed into something more like the planning for a book or a PhD thesis, in all honesty, rather than a podcast, so I had to draw the line somewhere. Where I have talked about philosophers, if you disagree with the way in which I've represented their views, apologies for that. You know, I've done my best to try and be fair to the views that are represented and to tie a lot of information together into a narrative that hopefully makes sense and still remains interesting to a general listener. But to be honest, some of the things the philosophers said are just pretty complicated, and some are also contested, and some are both. So, you know, I'm looking in the direction, for instance, of John Locke's views on the nature of property rights here, which wow, getting a head around those is uh quite a thing. So, you know, I've done my best and I've also I'll do my best to keep things breezy and hopefully uh it will make for a fascinating listen uh that isn't too off-putting for everybody. So, okay, uh without further ado, let's get into the actual substance of the podcast. So

Is it human nature to be kind? Egoism vs Altruism

SPEAKER_01 14:47

the first question that I want to talk about in terms of the kind of key questions that philosophy has addressed when it comes to philanthropy, is the one of, you know, is it human nature to be altruistic? And this is basically the kind of the fundamental question in a lot of ways. And it's often framed as the question of altruism versus egotism or egoism, which is, you know, fundamentally left to our own devices. Is human nature basically selfish and that we would all kind of compete with one another, stab each other in the back, and try and kind of get the best for ourselves? Or would we collaborate and cooperate and sort of form perfect utopian communities? And philosophically speaking, I mean in terms of the former view, the obvious reference point here is um Hobbes, so Thomas Hobbes, and in his book Leviathan, which is in many ways kind of the original work of political philosophy, he makes an argument for the necessity for a state and a kind of you know a government that can uh that can rule by consent, because you know, precisely because he says that that human nature is selfish, and he talks about you know the the the state of nature being one of being red in tooth and claw, and that in that state of nature life uh life would be nasty, brutish, and short. And sort of he then argues that that's why we have to make agreements based on contracts for the establishment of a state that can then oversee things like uh enforcing rules of justice and property and and this kind of thing, and and making sure contracts are carried out. So that's definitely one view, but there is a counterpoint to that view, and it comes mostly a bit later, and I think is sort of tied into the development of evolutionary theory. And an interesting example, a good one of this kind of counterpoint is the Russian uh anarchist political philosopher Peter Kropotkin, who has come back into vogue quite a bit recently because he talks a lot about mutual aid, and obviously, sort of during the pandemic, there's been a lot of focus on mutual aid. And Kropotkin's argument was that, and well he said, the mutual aid tendency in man has so remote an origin and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. So he sort of his argument is actually fundamentally collaboration and cooperation is is the basis of human nature. And if you were in that state of nature, actually what you wouldn't see is everybody sort of, you know, stabbing and killing each other to get ahead, but people starting to form communities and and support each other through principles of mutuality and uh and solidarity. And he sort of says, you know, the conscience of human solidarity begins to tell. And although society life is so arranged as to stifle that feeling by thousands of artful means, it often gets the upper hand. And then they try to find an outcome for that deeply human need by giving their fortune or their forces to something which, in their opinion, will promote general welfare. So he's talking about philanthropy there and saying actually, despite the fact that you know society is often structured along the lines of a political theory like Hobbes's, actually the fact that it human nature fundamentally has as its core kind of altruism and a desire for mutuality and solidarity means that that often comes through. And that's why we see things like philanthropy continuing um, you know, within the context of a state that's been imposed. Um and there's a paper by uh Marius De Gaius um talking about Kropotkin's theories and relating them to Hobbes, and he says um Kropotkin sharply understood what the consequences of Hobbes' arguments would be. They were a strong weapon in the hands of the defenders of a central state and of authoritarian government. If warfare and oppression were accepted as the very essence of human nature, the call for a powerful Hobbesian sovereign authority which enforces peace in society would become plausible. Anyone, on the other hand, who would be able to show that solidarity and mutual aid were the main factors in history, would have a convincing argument with which to renounce a dominant state organization. So you can see actually this is this is a kind of abstract debate within uh philosophy in some ways, but one that is very much has implications in the real world in terms of politics, and actually, you know, it's a dangerous idea to promote the idea that fundamentally cooperation is the basis of human nature, because it provides an argument for perhaps you know different modes of government, anarchism or things like this. Um, and so uh oft obviously the governments that are in in charge at any one time are likely to be less keen on these sorts of ideas. It's worth saying actually this question of altruism versus egoism, as I as I alluded to before, became more of a of an area of debate, particularly because of the development of um Darwinian theories of natural selection and evolution within evolutionary biology, and also sort of development of anthropological ideas, because this gives some sort of empirical basis to a lot of these arguments. You know, instead of just asserting that human nature is this or that, you can start to point to evidence from, you know, the anthropological history of human communities or the evolutionary theory in the natural world to kind of back up your argument. So uh a famous book in in the sort of anthropological study of giving is the book that Marcel Mauss wrote, and he looks a lot at the idea that gift giving is a shared characteristic of soci any society beyond a certain point of sophistication. But interestingly, he's he sort of makes the point that it's often in these cases done with sort of embedded notions of reciprocity and status rather than straightforwardly for altruistic reasons, so it's kind of not necessarily as clear-cut as, oh, the fact that all these people give gifts shows that altruism is kind of basic to human nature. But where this has become a real debate in you know recent years, although it's a relatively long-standing one, is in evolutionary biology itself. And this sort of takes us a little bit away from philosophy, but I think it's relevant. And here the distinction is between those who kind of believe that fundamentally egotism or egoism is the driving force behind natural selection. So this is the sort of selfish gene idea propagated by Richard Dawkins and others, which is, you know, actually fundamentally the thing that drives natural selection and evolution is that our desire to make sure our genetic material and our kind of genotype is uh is continued, and that's what drives sort of competition. But the problem is there, you know, there is altruistic behavior in many different sort of communities and within the natural world, and this is difficult to explain within that context. You know, if if your driving force as a as an organism is to make sure that your genotype is uh maximally expressed, why would you ever care about doing things for others with no expectation of return if that might actually sort of harm your own self-interest? And some people, you know, those who kind of uh try to maintain the selfish gene idea, uh, one way in which they've done that is to expand to the idea of something like kin selection and saying that actually it's not just about the individual, but it's about you know also recognising that if others are sufficiently closely related to you, you still have an element of self-interest in uh making sure that they survive as a population, so it actually is still selfish behaviour. But then there are others who would say, actually, no, we need to go back to the sort of fundamental idea here and acknowledge that there is such a thing as group selection and that things can operate at a group level. And latterly, um, writers such as uh E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, and also people like David Sloan Wilson uh as well have kind of gone back to this idea of altruism as a more fundamental uh property within the natural world. And should just say, actually, kind of in the Victorian era when This became sort of a topic, very much a topic of mainstream debate as a result of the writing of Darwin and the work of people like Thomas Huxley. It filtered very much into philanthropy. So, philosophically speaking, a lot of this came through the writings of a man called Herbert Spencer, who was a very well-known writer and philosopher at the time, and he's sort of highly influential writing on altruism. And he, if you look at his work, it's interesting, he kind of argues that there is an evolutionary basis for egoism, but he also argues there's an equally strong one for altruism, and that that you know had become stronger in an industrial society. And we'll come back to Herbert Spencer a little bit later, because actually like his real legacy in many ways was the focus that he brought on the idea that altruism was important and a sort of fundamental part of human nature, but it needs to be shaped and controlled. Um, and we need to give in a in a way that uh embodies kind of ideas of discretion, because actually, this is the whole idea that like indiscriminate giving to those who don't really deserve it is worse than no giving at all. And these points of view that were informed by this idea of the tension between altruism and egoism were very influential on people like um, particularly Andrew Carnegie, who was a huge sort of disciple of Herbert Spencer. And because of the importance of Carnegie as a figure, by extension, it sort of had a shaping effect on the whole of um 20th

What is the nature of property?

SPEAKER_01 23:20

century philanthropy. Okay, so what's what's the next question? So let's move on from that one. Um that was kind of about um the idea of kind of altruistic behaviour in general, but what about the idea of actually giving things and sort of um particularly money, which again is not all of philanthropy, but it's a very important kind of core part of it and in terms of the way we understand it. And one of the key questions here is what is the nature of property? Um, and that might seem like a sort of broader question that's nothing to do with philanthropy, but actually how we think about the nature of property is fundamentally important. Um, as Schneewin says, um, he says, you know, for obvious reasons, a serious history of thought about charity would be inseparable from a history of thought about property. Precisely because a core part of philanthropy is about gifts of property, and how we understand the nature of that property and the kind of responsibilities that come along with it very much defines how we view the nature of philanthropy and some of the questions that we'll come on to a little bit later about whether it's a choice or a duty and in kind of what kind of duty it is. So here there's kind of a few things to say. One is that the view, you know, the medieval view of property, for instance, was one largely of stewardship. So the idea was that property had been put on earth by God and the distribution was kind of determined by him. So there were some rich people, there were some poor people. But where those people who had more wealth, um, the rich people, they were merely stewards of that wealth, not necessarily owners. So there wasn't such an idea of ownership. So they whilst they had the wealth, and that was fine because that was God's plan, there was also a responsibility to look after that wealth during their time on earth. And part of the deal there was that they had to give back to the poor through alms giving. So uh for instance, uh Thomas Aquinas says, you know, on the part of the giver, it must be noted that he should give of his surplus that which remaineth, give alms. This surplus is to be taken in reference not only to himself so as to note what is unnecessary to the individual, but also in reference to those whom he has charged. So this is kind of uh uh Aquinas' idea of uh defining um how much people should give, which again is something that we should uh come back to in a little bit. The purpose of this sort of medieval arms giving, and again, we'll probably come back to this when we start talking about notions of justice in a while, wasn't to ensure that there are no poor people anymore. So this idea of poverty here is not that sort of poverty is a problem to be solved, but that it is kind of a part of God's plan. Um so it wouldn't really make sense to say that you know the purpose of giving back through philanthropy or arms giving was to kind of make sure there were no poor people anymore. In actual fact it was often argued it was a good thing that there were poor people, firstly because there was a view that poverty was somehow holy and people were closer to God when they weren't burdened with sort of material wealth, and also because the existence of those poor people provided a focus for the charity of the wealthy. And then, philosophically speaking, views on the nature of property started to change as you move kind of into maybe the sort of 15th, 16th century, and you get the development of secular humanism and then the enlightenment, and you get a notion of ownership of property that's no longer seen as conferring duty in the same way. So you get people here like Hugo Grotius and Samuel Puffendorf, um, and then John Locke, who talk about property more as a natural right and something that doesn't necessarily confer any duties upon it, including the duty to give. So um, in talking about this, Ford says, you know, the theories of Aquinas Grotius and Puffendorf demonstrate how the character and grounding of the property rights affect one's view of the duty of charity and its counterpart, the right of necessity. Compared with these predecessors, he's talking about Locke, he says Locke gives the personal property right more solid grounding. Individual property is not of human institution. It requires no man's consent. It's a creature of bare, unmodified natural law. Individuals create property by their first act of sustaining themselves in the state of nature. Natural law commands others to respect property gained by simple appropriation. So Locke's views on property are by sort of notoriously extremely complicated, but essentially he's like a very important figure in this because he argues for the idea of property from natural rights, so he's sort of saying it's not something necessarily that's put there by God, but it is an im it's a fundamental part of the sort of state of nature that if you uh claim for yourself property by your own industry and you kind of carve it out of the world, it belongs to you and there is a sort of natural right to it. So again, it's kind of it hasn't been put there by God and he hasn't conferred a duty of stewardship on you. If you claim it from the world, it it belongs to you. And obviously this has quite an impact of uh, as we were saying, on what uh what the view is about the nature of um property. So in terms of what Locke actually said, I'll just read that out. He said, you know, God gave the world to men in common, but since he gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, and labour was to be his title to it, not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. He that had as good left for his improvement as was already taken up, needed not complain, ought not to meddle with what was already improved by another's labour, which is pretty dense stuff, but basically making that point, you know, saying that if you kind of claim for yourself and lay claim to property by using your own industry to get something from the natural state of the world, it thereby sort of belongs to you, and other people don't have a right to then just sort of uh take it from you. And this opens up the idea, as I've said, that giving, you know, where it exists might simply be a choice and there isn't actually a compulsion. But that's very far from the end of the story, and we'll come back to that in a sec.

Why should you give?

SPEAKER_01 28:55

So the next question, I guess, which will bring us on to that is why should we give? Uh and this is obviously a pretty important one. And there's a whole range of views here. So for instance, uh somebody like Bishop Butler, um, he's basically sort of arguing that the reason that we should give um is to you know absolve from sins, and so he writes, Um Several copious and remote reasons have been alleged why such preeminence is given to this grace or virtue, that of charity. Uh some of great importance, of none of them perhaps without its weight. But the proper one seems to be very short and obvious, that by fervent charity, with a course of beneficence proceeding from it, a person may make amends for the good he has blamably omitted, and the injuries he has done so far as that society would have no demand upon him for his such his misbehaviour, nor consequently would justice have any in behalf of society, whatever it might have upon other accounts. Thus, by fervent charity, he may even merit forgiveness of men, and this seems to afford a very singular reason why it may be graciously granted him by God. So this is I mean this is actually kind of one of the few places you can find that very clear view that it's like actually charity or you know the giving giving beneficently or philanthropically is kind of uh one of the main drivers for it is that it's a way of absolving yourself from your sins, whether those are kind of sins of omission for not having done things or sins of action, you know, actually having done bad things, which is obviously very relevant in the present day to uh things like the question of tainted sources of wealth and whether you can put bad money to good uses, which is something that is still sort of raging on today. And you know, Butler would seem to be uh putting forward the view that you very much can, and that's almost sort of the purpose of philanthropy. But in terms of other ideas of why we should give, so you know, one that touches on what we've already said about property, there's giving basically is kind of compelled by divine law. So, you know, Aquinas' view that it was part of the fundamental nature of property, that it conferred uh a duty upon you to give. And various efforts have been made to kind of come up with secular alternatives to this. Many of these focus on the idea that giving is somehow compelled, at least in part, by a duty of justice, um, which we'll look in more depth at in a moment. You know, an interesting example here of an attempt to explain uh that sort of duty of altruism without reference to God is um G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, which was a wider attempt to sort of form a coherent system of ethics without appeal to a divine being. And in that, in the discussion of altruism versus egoism, Moore came down actually, I mean largely on the side of egoism and can actually concluded that the greatest good in life was one's own happiness, so one was basically justified in directing all of your actions towards maximizing that goal. So Moore says, egoism is undoubtedly superior to altruism as a doctrine of means. In the immense majority of cases, the best thing we can do is aim at securing some good at in which we are concerned, since for that very reason we are far more likely to secure it. And critics at the time suggested, you know, this was just part of a ploy by Moore to provide an intellectual underpinning for a system of ethics that allowed him to have sex with whoever he felt like, which is probably not an unfair accusation, because he was part of the the fabled Cambridge Apostles group, which sort of you know prona propounded ideas of sort of sexual freedom and different lifestyles and things, and just sort of intellectualising around that. But it's very clear, I think, that the general gist of Moore's idea that we should prioritize uh egotism uh is still alive and well in political and economical thinking, as I've already said, and it kind of takes us back to that whole question of whether the fundamental nature of hu of humans is altruistic or egoistic. But subsequent philosophical critics have taken issue of that kind of conception of ethics as well. So uh G Elizabeth Anskam, uh, for instance, so she wrote a paper called Modern Moral Philosophy, and she questioned the idea that we could have moral obligation outside of the framework of religious law in which there wasn't a divine legislator. So basically, her point here is sort of going back almost to uh someone like Aquinas and saying that actually, you know, if you're going to have a coherent system of ethics, um, it needs to be fundamentally based on what is it that kind of dictates that these things are ethical principles, and she argued it's very difficult to have any meaningful moral obligation outside the you know the framework of religious law in which there is a divine legislator. Uh and Anskom said, so she said, those who recognise the origins of the notions of obligation and the emphatic moral ought in the divine law conception of ethics, but who reject the notion of a divine legislator sometimes look around for the possibility of retaining a law conception without a divine legislature, uh divine legislator. This search, I think, has some interest in it. Perhaps the first thing that suggests itself is the norms of a society. But just as one cannot be impressed by Butler when one reflects what conscience can tell people to do, so I think one cannot be impressed by this idea if one reflects what the norms of a society can be like. That legislation can be for oneself, I reject as absurd. Whatever you do for yourself may be admirable but it's not legislating. So she's again this is sort of the point she's saying, if you if there are kind of ideas that are imposed by society about what you ought to do, that's fine, but that's problematic because we all know that there are societies that kind of suggest uh problematic norms, so it's not a good basis for ethical law. And if you're trying to use just what you feel as an individual as the basis for ethical law, again, that's kind of problematic because what you do for yourself uh in some cases might be admirable, but it's not the basis for a sort of legislative view. Um and some people have uh defended uh Anskom's view here on the basis, you know, saying she's not arguing we can't know how to act in a secular sense, only that we shouldn't speak of those views having a moral force. But others take issue with her and argue, you know, this is a conception of morality that's very backward looking, um, and actually it undermines our notions of charity and justice. So an interesting example here um is uh the philosopher Simon Blackburn back in 2005 reviewed a collection of essays by Anskom, and this sort of gener and he took, you know, really took a sort of pop at Anscomb on this point, and this generated uh a kind of heated exchange of letters, including from Anscomb's daughter, uh I think uh it's the sort of argument you only ever really get among philosophers where everybody gets very, very uh worked up about things, uh, and they're not seemingly that that important. But but in terms of uh sort of basing a claim for duty on giving on something other than an appeal to divine power, there are other other examples as well. So, for example, uh Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, he makes an argument for altruism as a rational choice, and he's got a whole book called The Possibility of Altruism, where he sort of tries to argue, no, no, it's not, you don't need to appeal to divine law or to anything else within kind of humans, it's just it's the rational choice, it's almost kind of dictated by rationality, and it's an interesting one, it's a very dense argument. Peter Singer, for instance, uh well-known uh utilitarian philosopher and someone whose work we'll come back to in a little bit when we talk about effects for altruism, he interestingly does make a strong moral case for the necessity for giving, because he sort of says he has this famous argument about uh a drowning child and and the kind of drawing an analogy between walking past a pond or whatever in which a child a child is drowned drowning and and your um the moral compunction on you to do something if you're able to at that point, and the case in which you know that a child in the developing world is dying and you have the the possibility to kind of give your resources or your money to help. And this is you know a very influential argument that lots of people take lots of different views on, but but Singer's point is he sort of says if it's in our power to prevent something very bad from happening without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought morally to do it. An application of this principle would be as follows. If I'm walking past a shallow pond and see a child a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. I mean it's less clear sort of on what basis that moral force comes, because he's not determining between, you know, I I would imagine you know, Singer certainly is not making appeal to uh a higher kind of religious uh entity here to make that moral force. He's just sort of saying there is kind of a clear moral force that compels one to take action. And this brings us, I think, to quite a fundamental question within what we can determine as the philosophy of philanthropy, which is is giving a choice or a duty?

SPEAKER_05 37:08

Yet today is not far distant when the man who dies, leaving behind him millions of available wealth, we force me for him to administer during life, will pass away, unwitted, unhonour, and once this link is great, guys, this place, this place.

Is giving a choice or a duty?

SPEAKER_01 37:54

So he's giving, you know, merely a free choice to something we can kind of we're free to choose to do or not to do on how we do it, or is it a duty of some sort? And if so, what kind of duty? So lots of people have argued that it is a duty in some sense, even if not one uh that's compelled by law. So you go back to to Aquinas, for instance, um, and he says, you know, actually he says further it's lawful for everyone to use and to keep what is his own, yet by keeping it he will not give arms, therefore it's lawful not to give arms, and consequency arms giving is not a matter of precept. So this is in one of the objections he kind of uh outlines to the points he's making, and that this is the argument that actually it's your choice whether or not to give, so it can't be a matter of law. But he also goes on to say, further, what a man gives, he either he gives either as being due or as not due. But a benefit conferred as being due belongs to justice, while a benefit conferred as not due is gratuitous, and in this respect is an act of mercy. Therefore, every benefit conferred is either an act of justice or an act of mercy, therefore it's not an act of charity. So here he's saying this takes us somewhat into the the question we'll consider in a moment about the relationship between justice and charity, because it's quite difficult to disentangle the question of whether giving is a a duty or a choice and the question of justice and charity, as you will see. But here Aquinas is acknowledging the point, you know, that's saying actually in giving, if you are doing that that if that's a duty that belongs to justice, it shouldn't really be understood as an act of mercy. So actually he's sort of saying giving's not necessarily an act of charity, because if something is demanded as a duty, it can't be seen necessarily as a virtue or as a choice. And this is kind of an important point that we'll you know that we'll see goes through a lot of the discussion on this. And a really important point to be made here is a distinction, I think, between different kinds of duties. And the distinction here is the one between perfect duties and imperfect duties. And a i I'll just gonna read here from Schneewin talking about Hugo Grotius, um, uh, because it's Grotius who sort of first introduced this distinction, and then it was developed much more by Samuel Pufendorf. Um so he says Hugo Grotius bought into modern secular discourse a new way of viewing individual human rights. Instead of seeing basic rights as coming to someone because the person occupies a position in a complex social structure, he took them to be qualities belonging to each of us simply as individuals. What rights do is to make it possible for us to have or to do something. Sometimes the quality is fully present, or is, as Grotius says, perfect. Sometimes it's only incompletely present or imperfect. Perfect rights are modelled on the rights arising from contracts, such as the rights conferred by credit or ownership, or the rights of a master over a slave, which is obviously a sort of historical example there. These rights can be specified with considerable precision and give rise to correspondingly precise duties. Justice, strictly speaking, is concerned with these rights. He says there is another equally important domain concerned with those virtues which have as their purpose to do good to others as generosity, compassion, and foresight in matters of government. Here too there are rights, but they are imperfect. Their possessors are worthy of certain kinds of treatment, for instance, a beggar is worthy of or has an imperfect right to arms. And this is a very important distinction. So often in the arguments you'll see that giving is taken it it's rare to see giving kind of characterized as a perfect duty. So one where it can be very clearly specified, not just that you need to give, but to whom you need to give and kind of what the their their claim on that giving is. What you more often see is people saying, Well, there is a duty to give of some sort, but if it's an imperfect duty, so there's a duty to do it, but it doesn't specify exactly why and who and how. And this to some extent kind of squares that circle between saying people have to give, um, so there is a kind of uh compunction for giving, but they are free to choose how to to distribute or how to kind of discharge that duty, and that's why you have kind of donor choice. And this seems pretty close actually to the kind of commonsensical idea that lots of people have about giving today, which is, you know, as I say, squaring that circle and saying actually is some, you know, that giving is something that we should uh see as a duty that's compelled by some moral force or by some sort of social contract, but that actually in terms of how people choose to discharge that duty, that is up to them. So it kind of allows for that bit of uh free choice and individual uh liberty, which also seems like an important part of philanthropy. I guess the interesting question here is can you subdivide that further? So is there some portion of giving that is a perfect duty? So that's compelled by uh clear claims of justice on the parts of recipients, um, and particularly, I guess, you know, you'd be thinking here of sort of uh claims that are made as a result of um the nature of inequality and the fact that there are some people who are in poverty and others who have excess. And so is there some part, you know, if you've got a certain amount of money, is there a perfect duty on you to kind of give some of that money to address that uh as a result of a claim of justice? But then is there an excess bit that can be seen as a choice or an imperfect duty? And I guess in in terms of that first, this is where the relationship between taxation and philanthropy comes in in some ways, because tax maybe is that bit that deals with those perfect duties that we have, and uh then giving is that bit that that relates to those kind of imperfect duties. And quite often here, if you're reading in the literature, you will hear mention of the idea that giving is um what they call super-erogatory, which is kind of you know above and beyond what is demanded of you. So it's kind of that's getting at this idea that giving is the bit that is a sort of free choice. Um there's an interesting uh, I think pulling these ideas together, there's a good quote here from uh paper by Alan Buchanan on charity and justice about this sort of idea that there might be a demand uh of perfect, uh sort of perfect duty, and that then becomes what is the basis for taxation, and then maybe there's a bit above and beyond that. So he says in the absence of institutions for collective beneficence, aid to others can only take the form of independent. uncoordinated individual acts of charity. Since one individual cannot be expected to aid all of the poor, the idea that duties to aid are imperfect makes perfectly good sense. It's up to the individual to choose what sort of aid to provide, how much of it to give and upon whom to bestow it. But once an effective institutional infrastructure is in place to perfect imperfect duties, and once a sound ethical rationale is available for grounding positive general rights in the same sorts of considerations that are reduced to justify negative general rights, the path's clear for the first way of extending the realms of justice. Justice is now thought to include some general positive rights. Indeed, the very recognition that it's feasible to create institutions that can perfect imperfect duties seems to bring with it an extension of our obligations, a widening of our moral horizons. For once it's seen that institutions for specifying, fairly distributing and effectively enforcing positive duties can be created, it's hard to evade the conclusion that we have an obligation to lend our support to their creation. So this is this is really important I think because this is sort of saying actually if you recognize that there is a duty that underpins philanthropy and the need to give, if in part that is an imperfect duty i.e one that doesn't specify how you have to do it, because we don't have the mechanisms to make it a perfect duty, if those mechanisms do exist, then that's arguably you know they do exist in the form of taxation. Part of the the job then is to ensure that you lend support to kind of making sure that those mechanisms work properly. And in practical terms I guess what this means is is part of the responsibility on on philanthropists according to this conception of the duty that they should support you know the development of fair progressive systems of taxation as part of that duty and then you know pay their share through that and the bit that's left on top of that, the bit that is supererogatory, yes they have free to have kind of um you know their own choice over how that's distributed. There's a a good paper here from George Meade as well and he says you know in a word charity carries a certain burden that ought in any case to be met. Those whose incomes include a surplus above the necessities, whether their souls are stirred by the suffering or not, may well recognise a responsibility to bear their part in meeting this community obligation. When this point's been reached there arises a logical demand that this should be met by the community in the same manner in which it meets its other obligations through taxation. So he's sort of saying there actually you know there's that bit where you need to have taxation because that kind of that accounts for the duty that may not necessarily be met by all people sort of feeling philanthropically motivated. And even those people who are philanthropically motivated need to kind of meet that duty through taxation. But then those who do feel so there's they're free still to have the bit on top of that. So it's almost seen as as extra. And this goes onto question I think of whether you know giving should be seen as a virtue or not in that if it is merely something that is demanded entirely by justice, probably not. It's just something we should expect. Whereas if it is something that is super irogatory in some sense so people are kind of going above and beyond then perhaps you know we should see it as a virtue and perhaps it's about something you know where we should kind of express gratitude.

What is the relationship between charity and justice?

SPEAKER_01 47:07

And this brings us on to kind of one of the big questions which is what is the relationship between charity and justice and things here like I think you know does justice demand philanthropy or demand charity? And this very much ties into what we were talking about already about um the question of whether giving is a duty and whether there are kind of corresponding rights. And you have people uh for instance so um uh Leibniz says something like justice is not nothing other than the charity of the wise man that is to say doing good for others in conformity with wisdom and wisdom in my sense is nothing other than the science of happiness. So he's sort of saying actually you know when you give it a rational thing and it's because there is a demand you know made by justice and rationality and in kind of uh seeing out that duty you are kind of turning uh charity into justice. But I guess it's important here to say like what kind of justice are we talking about and what doesn't justice mean here? And again I think there's you know going back to what we were saying about property earlier I think there is a there's a medieval Christian conception of justice about something that exists within that's seen as something that exists within fixed societal structures. So as I say it's kind of you know your role as a wealthy person was one of stewardship and to give to the poor but it wasn't fundamentally about trying to do anything about those structures. And interestingly I think you know that's different from the conception that you get within as within something like Judaism and the the notions of tsidaka which are doesn't directly translate as charity but is the kind of philosophical underpinning about giving within Jewish tradition. And this more kind of acknowledges ideas of justice and their centrality and it also acknowledges structural flaws and the need to kind of address structural flaws that lead to inequality. So actually you get more radical elements within that like debt cancellation and things like this. And then later on with the work of people like Locke and Grotius and Puffendorf you get justice there is the idea of kind of the enforcement of property rights. So if you know property is something where people have a natural right justice is making sure that that those rights are kind of enforced. But then you get I think the more interesting view of justice in many ways when it comes to the question of charity which is the sort of enlightenment view of justice which involves addressing structural issues and acknowledging this is tied in with the idea that sort of poverty is not something that is inherent to the to the kind of the system of the world and the way the world's been structured but is actually a kind of problem that reflects failures of of the way in which we've structured society and can be addressed. And it's very important for philanthropy because the idea that poverty is something that can be fundamentally addressed rather than just the symptoms of it treated is an important part of the sort of shift from what might be termed the charity mindset to the philanthropy mindset. And there's lots of interesting writers here. So people like I mean Kant is a very important one here. So in his lectures on ethics for instance he says we have an impulse to benevolence but not to righteousness. This impulse makes a man merciful and charitable to his neighbour so that he makes restitution for an injustice of which he is quite unconscious, though unconscious of it only because he does not properly examine his position. Although we may be entirely within our rights according to the laws of the land and the rules of our social structure, we may nevertheless be participating in general injustice and in giving to an unfortunate man we do not give him a gratuity, but only help to return to him that of which the general injustice of our system has deprived him. So again sort of taking issue in a way with Locke here and saying no, even if you are entitled to your property by the the sort of rights of justice, there may be a more general injustice within the structuring of that system that you have benefited from and so in giving to someone you're not necessarily sort of doing that out of the the the good of their favour and giving them a gratuity but actually you are kind of only doing a part of returning to that person what they could really expect by right or make a claim of justice upon. And other philosophers have very much sort of taken these ideas as well further so Mary Wollstonecraft who is sort of famous early feminist and writer on on feminism and other things she famously said you know it's justice not charity that's wanting in the world and things like she said also the rich and weak, a numerous train will certainly applaud your system and loudly celebrate your pious reverence for authority and establishments. They find it pleasanter to enjoy than to think, to justify oppression than correct abuses. The rights of men are grating sounds that set their teeth on edge, the impertinent inquiry of philosophic meddling innovation. If the poor are in distress they will make some benevolent exertions to assist them. They will confer obligations but not do justice. Benevolence is a very amiable specious quality yet the aversion which men feel to accept a right as a favour should rather be extolled as a vestige of native dignity than stigmatise as the odious offspring of ingratitude. So she's saying there essentially actually you know rich people in giving money and expecting gratitude for it because they believe it to be something that is entirely down to their kind of choice and benevolence are wrong and that actually when the poor do not express gratitude and actually sort of demand that money that should be applauded because they are recognizing that they have a right to it because they are the victims of a of an injustice and that you know the philanthropy and the the giving that they are the recipients of is just merely a one mechanism for kind of redressing that that imbalance. And interestingly Wollstonecraft's husband William Godwin who is a another sort of philosophical political writer very much said similar things. So he said the effect which is produced by this accommodating doctrine is to place the supply of our wants in the disposal of a few, enabling them to make a show of generosity with what is with what is not truly their own, and to purchase the submission of the poor by the payment of a debt. Theirs is a system of clemency and charity instead of a system of justice. It fills the rich with unreasonable pride by the spurious denominations with which it decorates their acts, and the poor with civility by leading them to regard the slender comforts they obtain, not as their incontro incontrovertible due, but as the good pleasure and grace of their opulent neighbours. And similarly Thomas Paine is to throw in one more because this is a pretty kind of rich seam here, he says, you know, it's not a charity but a right, not bounty but justice that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it as it is unjust. It is absolutely opposite of what it should be and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it which is like whoa Tom and that's why lots of people found Thomas Paine a bit scary. And the end result often of a lot of this thinking was you know not even just to do philanthropy better or in different ways but naturally to sort of seek things like systems of taxation and at this point obviously when people were talking taxation wasn't something that had really been established and so a lot of these arguments here were to say you know society cannot be cannot rely on beneficence and philanthropy as the basis for ensuring that justice is done. Actually you need you know something else. And again going back to our earlier point it might well be that you have that system as we do now but then there is still space for philanthropy on top as the extra bit but again that's you know a con a whole different question. But I guess another point about charity and justice is not ju is not just kind of you know do we is philanthropy dictated by justice or demanded by justice? Are the two kind of uh slightly in um intention and actually we need sort of justice before we do philanthropy. There's another point which is you know the stronger argument that some would make which is philanthropy actually actively gets in the way of seeking justice. So you know it is it is philanthropy not just a bad way of delivering justice perhaps because it kind of reflects unjust systems of property and wealth but it actively presents an impediment to the work required to achieve true justice and here you'll get more radical writers arguing. So Friedrich Engels for instance obviously a kind of author with Karl Marx of the Communist Manifesto he said and I I do like this quote which is why I read it he said philanthropic institutions forsooth as though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very lifeblood and then practising your self complacent pharisaic philanthropy upon them. Placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundred part of what the hundredth part of what belongs to them. Charity which degrades him who give more than him who takes charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society shall first surrender that last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow. So I think it's pretty clear what Friedrich Engels thought about philanthropy here. But there are others as well I think who would make this argument in probably slightly less intemperate ways. So interestingly Bernard Bertrand Russell very famous philosopher didn't write much about charity but he did write one short article that I found and he sort of takes a similar view about this relationship between charity and justice so he says there are a few ways in which the moral sentiments of intelligent people have changed more than as regards what is called charity. It's difficult to refuse money to a beggar if his need seems genuine, but the act of giving is uncomfortable and inclined to cause a blush. There is inevitably the reflection that society ought to be so organized as to make it unnecessary for anyone to beg. So far from feeling self satisfied because of giving, we feel our social conscience pricked because we profit by a system which reduces others to such wanton humiliation. A hundred years ago in a society now extinct, the point of view which puts charity above independence now seems to us grotesque, but in newer forms it still survives and is still politically powerful. It's this very same outlook which makes large numbers of people think it better that the unemployed should be kept alive by private benevolence than that they should have the legal right to support by the public authorities. In a just world there would be no possibility of charity. So it's an interesting one because that's you know Russell's expounding I think a view that you still very much hear today which is people you know sort of arguing that actually the desirable end result if we kind of acknowledge the structural flaws in society and address them and there was more kind of inquality and we got rid of you know wealth inequality would be that there would be no need for charity anymore. Now again we haven't got time to go into that here all I'm sure it's something we'll come in onto in another podcast but I think this this betrays a slightly kind of narrow conception of the purpose of philanthropy and charity. You know I think there is an an argument there that if you address those systems there would perhaps be less need for some of that charity but certainly I don't think it's ever something that would be that would entirely disappear. I guess the the interesting point to come to now is can we some perhaps square that circle and what does that mean for how we do philanthropy? And I think this is very relevant to modern debates where instead of acknowledging that there is this tension perhaps between charity and justice or between philanthropy and justice, but instead of saying you know and what that means for taxation and the need to have sort of fair progressive system of taxation that people pay that money but also they're not simply throwing the baby out with the bathwater and saying oh well we need to just do away with philanthropy and focus all of it on structural reform because if we do that there will be no need for any of this charity or philanthropy. I think you know here the view of somebody like Martin Luther King is really important where he sort of said you know philanthropy is commendable but it must not cause us to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary and he was relatively pragmatic about this and I think you know he's got a sort of spiritual successor in somebody like Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation who's written a lot about the shift from generosity to justice. And here the idea is kind of how do you make philanthropy something that acknowledges the the centrality of justice and the nature of claims for justice and use it as a tool to support that and maybe to kind of dismantle the systems that made the inequality possible in the first place. And this this is really interesting I guess in terms of the question of things like the interaction of philanthropy and foundations and philanthropic institutions with grassroots movements and kind of mutual aid groups, which is something I'm sure we'll talk about a lot more and there are kind of challenges in doing that but I think that is one of the ways in which sort of philanthropy can can attempt to seek more justice. I just want to finish this section by just reading a bit from a paper by Thomas Hill Jr. which is I think kind of captures a lot of what I'm trying to say here. And he says it's obvious that considerations of justice constrain the way we should give help to others, but how? Some points seem clear enough. Most obviously Kant held that we should not use unjust means in our efforts to promote happiness. Legitimate states even if imperfectly just impose enforceable perfect juridical duties that define particular rights that individuals have, a presumably perfect but indirect ethical duty to respect. General beneficence, so philanthropy and giving, is only a wide imperfect duty as we've talked about, and one that must not violate a perfect duty simply to further the happiness of others. But he says more controversial is whether the rich whose wealth was acquired by unjust means are required by justice to give substantially as reparations to those disadvantaged by their own unjust acts or by the past injustices from which they profited in order to acknowledge the injustice, express remorse and to try and repair the damage. Most of us would probably agree that Andrew Carnegie, JD Rockefeller and JP Morgan were morally obliged to share the wealth they acquired with callous disregard for the harm they caused, and many would add that they should have been legally obliged to do so. And this is really interesting point I think it takes us in this question of philanthropy and justice to perhaps the most kind of extreme conclusion. Again, philosophically speaking this is one that Chiara Cordelli, the political scientist has kind of expounded where she argues that actually we should see philanthropy as a duty but one of reparative justice. So it's not that the duty of philanthropy is I mean she's sort of shifting towards it almost being a perfect duty in that she's saying it's a duty is a duty to give but also it's clear what that duty is and it's a duty of reparation on the part of the donor to sort of make good for the injustices that were the basis of them having that wealth in the first place. And so she says kind of philanthropy should be understood foremost as a duty of reparative justice. Donations are the most effective means available to the well off to repair a particular kind of absolute harm to the worst off for which the former can hold liable says this account starkly contrasts with common understandings of philanthropy as a form of altruistic gift giving. It also contrasts with the kind of compensatory enlightened enlightened self-interest that's at the core of Carnegie's gospel of wealth argument for philanthropy. So she acknowledges that it's kind of in a relatively sort of extreme view, but it's um it's a very interesting one you know even if you don't agree with it to kind of take into account. And I think these views are very relevant to some of the modern debates at the moment I think about kind of the need to shift power as well as money when we're doing philanthropy.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:46

At Meeting of Industrial Leaders in Washington here's Julius Rosenwald most people are of the opinion that because a man has made a fortune that his opinions on any subject are valuable.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:03

Don't be fooled by believing because a man is rich and he is necessarily smart there is ample proof to the contrary

What should we give to?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:19

okay the next question in our whistle stop tour or perhaps not so much whistle stop tour given how long I'm uh going on talking about this stuff in terms of the kind of key questions in the philosophy of philanthropy is what should we give to? So we've talked about you know why should we give and is there a duty to give and what's the relationship between philanthropy and justice. So for those who believe in a sort of strong sense perhaps that giving is a choice or that it's uh supererogatory, maybe it's not such a question what we should give to because you might hold that people can just choose whatever they want to give to and that's fine. But in reality even where people have kind of thought that giving is a free choice they've rejected the idea of total donor freedom and certainly in the cases where people have thought that there's some sort of compunction to give um often on top of that they think that actually there are sort of at the very least there are better ways of giving and not such good ways of giving. So taking a more normative approach about what we should give to and this often is basically the story of efforts over many hundreds of years in one way or another to make giving more rational and more effective um over hundreds of years. And in terms of the philosophy here I think there are a few relevant angles. So we mentioned earlier on in the in this discussion Herbert Spencer um and Darwinism and the kind of impact that that he had. And this is where they kind of led into a very dominant view within the late 19th and early 20th century that was behind what was known as the charity organisation society movement and also the scientific charity movement. And the the argument here was um about the the need for charity to be kind of discriminating and this was based very much on a sort of quite moralistic and judgmental view on the nature of poverty and an important or distinction that was seen as important between the deserving and the undeserving poor. And really this is sort of you know for the first time the poor weren't seen as are as the victims of injustice or as something to be kind of pitied or as something holy indeed but rather as a group that could be blamed for their own situation through lack of effort. And this was part of sort of very you know kind of muscular doctrines of self-help and sort of survival of the fittest. This gave a a very kind of paternalist view of philanthropy that you will see you know if you read Carnegie's Gospel of wealth it's a very interesting document but it's pretty problematic from a modern point of view and I think this often gets missed by people you know putting in posts on LinkedIn saying like wow Carnegie's gospel of wealth I mean yes he did say rich people had a duty to give but in terms of how he thought that duty should be discharged his views are very much that inequality was not not only not problematic and not the basis for for the need to to give but actually was better because he said you know that allowed that money then flowed into the hands of those who had sort of demonstrated through their business acumen and their ability to accrue wealth that they were sort of better suited to make decisions about how money should be spent and that therefore you know it was better that there was gross inequality and that the poor were helped through philanthropy because the money was then sort of in the hands of people you know their their betters who knew who knew what to do rather than giving the money to people themselves which it would obviously in Carnegie's view and the view of other people who very much sort of believed in the side of uh scientific charity and uh not giving in discriminately that it would just be wasted or spent on things that were sort of actively harmful. Um so it was a very kind of you know disempowering view of philanthropy the other obvious thing to mention here in terms of the question of kind of what we should give to is the the thread of utilitarian thing which has tried to answer the question of what we Give to. And there's a kind of rich tradition of this going back to people like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and Henry Sidgwick and others. And much more, you know, recently we have people like Peter Singer and the whole kind of effective altruism movement. And we'll come on to effective altruism specifically shortly, so I'll park that for a moment. But basically, here the argument of utilitarianism is that what we choose to give to should be dictated by a kind of basic objective principle of doing the greatest good to the greatest number. And there are, you know, there's a whole kind of philosophical literature on uh utilitarianism and critiques of utilitarianism, some of which we'll touch on in a moment. For

How should we give and how much?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:40

now, let's just skip on to a related question, or two related questions in a way, which are not kind of what should we give to, but how should we give and how much? Um which are again the you know questions that have sort of popped up in the philosophical literature here and there. In terms of how we should give. I mean this kind of takes us right back to the beginning philosophically, because this is something Aristotle had things to say about in his uh Nicomachian ethics. I mean he talks about giving and charity as part of liberality, and he sort of says, you know, the liberal man therefore will give from a motive of honour and will give rightly. I mean to proper persons in right proportion at the right times, and whatever is included in the term right giving, and this too with positive pleasure, or at least without pain, since whatever is done in accordance with virtue is pleasant or at least not unpleasant, most certainly not attended with positive pain. And he's basically sort of so this part where he's saying about giving to the right people, which obviously kind of echoes what we were saying there about some of the debate in the Victorian era about kind of indiscriminate giving, although Aristotle doesn't really go into it that much, and there's a whole thing to be said about the nation notions of poverty and charity and in uh the classical world and how they differ from ours, which again I think we touched on in the first episode of the podcast, but but is relatively complex. But I think the interesting thing here I want to point out is that he sort of says, you know, in terms of that question of how much we should be giving, Aristotle's view is very much, well, you know, you should you should give and that's fine, but you shouldn't leave yourself out of pocket or indeed feeling uncomfortable. Uh and then actually it would be actively bad, because then you tip over from liber liberality into sort of profligacy if you give away too much and leave yourself or your family or those who rely on you for support without enough money. And this is, you know, kind of the basis almost of what they call kind of pathological altruism. And you see people actually in this day and age who have neurological disorders who are kind of compelled to give away all of their belongings up to the point where it sort of leaves their families and themselves destitute. But you know, Aristotle is kind of arguing on a point of theoretical principle. Um, and this is echoed later on uh in the work of Thomas Aquinas, which is unsurprising because he kind of refers quite a lot to um uh to Aristotle, um, and he sort of says, you know, we should give, as he said, due to the responsibilities of wealth and the demands of justice. But that definitely doesn't mean we need to give away everything, and we can not only keep enough to have a sort of basic life for ourselves, but we can justifiably keep enough to maintain a comfortable existence. So he says, uh, you know, further, whoever gives away what he needs himself squanders his own substance, and and that is to be a prodigal, according to Aristotle. But no sinful deed should be done. Therefore, we should not give arms out of what we need. And in terms of this, like a kind of my maybe slightly more detailed view on it is to be found in the Jewish tradition. So Maimonides, uh Moses Ben Maimon, who's also known as Rambam, uh, who is a kind of very famous uh Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, um uh 12th century possibly, I can never remember, 13th. But anyway, he he he uh expounded these eight levels of giving, which are sort of the basis still for the Jewish tradition of Siddaka. Uh and within that he kind of talks about um how much it is to give, and and there are kind of, you know, as you go up the levels, these are kind of better forms of giving. Um and this is the basis for you know setting a kind of expectation um of levels of giving that's still there within the Jewish tradition. Uh, and similar tradition uh similar kind of expectations are there in other religious traditions like Islam uh within zakat and still within some Christian traditions where tithing is practiced, although that's obviously sort of become less prevalent. Uh Maimonides is interesting as well because he kind of brings in a couple of other aspects that we'll just very briefly mention. One is around the question of anonymity versus transparency, so you know, should you be open with your giving or is it something that's better done privately? And and kind of historically it was often thought to be the latter, and then actually the best form of giving for Maimonides was one in which, you know, the the giver, the the one, the recipient of the gift was never aware who the donor was and sort of, you know, never in a position to thank them. And so giving done ostentatiously uh was problematic. And again, you see this in other religious traditions, and it has quite a shaping effect on the sort of nature of how giving is still done in in when it's motivated by many of those religious traditions. And this is obviously interesting at this point in time when there are sort of competing demands to make giving more transparent because of concerns about you know its role within a democracy and kind of the accountability that's required. The the other question here, just in terms of how we give, that's worth touching on, um, although not so much, I guess, has been said about it in the philosophical literature, is is the one of is it better to give while you're alive or wait until you die to do it? Um and there the most interesting quote I think I found on this is from um Sir Francis Bacon, um, so the sort of uh 16th century uh natural philosopher. Um so natural philosopher obviously meant he was more of a kind of polymath scientist, almost a you know kind of sorcerer, alchemist really, but he did a lot of writing and thinking about kind of moral and ethical questions as well. But he said, men leave their riches either to their kindred or to the public, and moderate portions prosper best in both. A great state left to an heir is as a allure to all of the birds of prey about to seize on him, if he be not the better stabilized established in years and judgment. Likewise, glorious gifts and foundations are like sacrifices without salt, and but the painted sepulchres of alms which will soon putrefy and corrupt inwardly. Therefore, measure not thine advancements by quantity, but frame them by measure, and defer not charities till death, for certainly if a man weigh it rightly, he that doth so is rather liberal of another man's than is of his own. So it's interesting this, so he's both saying it's kind of it's better to give well with smaller amounts than to just give loads for the sake of it. And he's also saying it's better to do that during your life rather than wait until death. And

Are perpetual endowments justifiable?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:32

that brings us on to another issue that that probably is has been talked about more in the philosophical literature that's to do with the idea of philanthropy and death. Um and this is perpetuity and uh related to this almost the sort of uh question of intergenerational justice. So the debate here is one about the ethical and sort of political um theoretical legitimacy of inherited wealth, but also the perpetual structures that go along with that, so particularly kind of endowments and foundations here. And you can find critiques of these over many years. It's kind of the earliest ones maybe are sort of tied in with the kind of thinking that was uh behind the French Revolution. So the uh economist and thinker Anne Robert Jacques Turgo um wrote a paper called Fondation, and in this he said um public utility is the supreme law, it must not be tempered by a superstitious respect for the so-called intentions of the founders, as is as if individuals, ignorant and limited as they are, have the right to subject unborn generations to their caprice. Let us conclude that no work of man is made for eternity, and since foundations, continually multiplied by vanity, would ultimately absorb all wealth and private property, we must be able to destroy them. And this sort of idea was picked up by campaigners in the UK where it became a very big issue, most notably maybe Sir Arthur Hobhouse, who was a uh kind of pro um liberal uh r reformer and a campaigner around things like educational issues, but also around charity law. And he wrote a whole book called The Dead Hand all about this question of endowments and perpetuity. And he said, To me it seems the most extravagant of propositions to say that because a man has been fortunate enough to enjoy a large share of this world's goods in this life, he shall therefore, and for no cause, for no other cause, when he must quit this life and can enjoy his goods no longer, be entitled to speak from his grave forever, and dictate forever to living men how that portion of the earth's produce shall be spent. So, you know, there's a clear kind of case against perpetuity. I guess in philosophical terms, the most notable person to get involved in this argument and stick an ore in was John Stuart Mill, and he wrote an essay on endowments, and he kind of took on board these arguments that endowments were problematic, um and particularly perpetual ones, but he also made a positive case that they could be they could continue to be justified on the basis of supporting uh sort of civil society plurality. So what he said was he said, you know, the truth needs reasserting and needs every day more and more, that what the improvement of mankind and of all of their works most imperatively demands is variety, not uniformity. What is called tampering by private persons with great public interests, as if it meant obstructing the government in what it thinks fit to do for public uses with the funds at its disposal, means trying to do with money of their own something that shall promote the same object better. So he says because an endowment is a public nuisance when there's nobody to prevent its funds from being jobbed away for the gain of irresponsible administrators, because it become may become worse than useless if irrevocably tied up to a destination fixed by somebody who died five hundred years ago, we ought not on that account to forget that endowments protected against malversation and secured to their original purpose for no more than two or three generations would be a precious safeguard for uncustomary modes of thought and practice against the repression, sometimes amounting to suppression, to which they are even more exposed as society in other respects grows more civilized. So he's sort of saying there, obviously, that whilst you should acknowledge there are problems with kind of truly perpetual structures, and then he sort of says obviously that they maybe we should argue for them being time limited to two or three generations, we shouldn't get rid of them because actually as a kind of bulwark against the tyranny of the major majority in any one age, they perform at their best an important role. And this takes us on to one other question that I wanted to touch on briefly, which uh comes up in some of the sort of philosophical literature and brings us more into the kind of political theory realm, which is the the importance of kind of civil society plurality. And here just to kind of touch on who the main thinkers are, I mean, one would be Alexis de Tocqueville, who obviously wrote in Democracy in America and others this kind of celebratory idea of voluntary association as an important part of democracy because it represented a mode of kind of involvement and civic engagement. And also you find it in the work of um someone like Hegel, uh, who talks a bit about sort of civil society, although to be a bit careful in that what he meant by civil society was not necessarily what we meant by it. And also more recently, I think the person who's done the most to kind of bring the idea of civil society as a concept to the fore has been uh the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas or Hebermas. But there's also an interesting one I think that I came across in the work of um Hayek, who's um usually best known as the kind of intellectual underpinning for the economic approach within kind of Thatcherite and Reaganite um approaches, but actually made an interesting case for civil society plurality and the importance of it. So he says, you know, organized efforts have to be set in motion by a few individuals who possess the necessary resources themselves, who or who win the support of those that do. Without such men, what are now the views of only a small minority may never have a chance of being adopted by the majority. Uh, what little leadership can be expected from the majority is shown by their inadequate support of the arts whenever they have replaced a wealthy patron. And this is even more true of those philanthropic or idealistic movements by which the moral values of the majority are changed. And so he's you know making quite a strong case there that actually the ability of philanthropy um to play a role in kind of overcoming the tyranny of the majority by by supporting marginal ideas and taking them from the margins to the mainstream is kind of fundamental. And you know, this is an idea that's uh certainly got a lot of cachet still today in terms of arguing about the positive role of philanthropy within a democracy. And bringing us into that sphere of sort of political uh philosophy and political theory, I think it's you know it's worth acknowledging here the work of uh Rob Reesch, um who, as I say, is kind of one of the best known philosophers of philanthropy, I guess, today. And his focus is um from a sort of political theory perspective. And I've spoken to to Rob on a previous podcast when I did the Calf Giving Thought podcast, and I'll put links in the show notes uh to that so you can listen to that if you want, and I'll talk to him in depth about some of this stuff. But his work sort of focuses on the question of what the role of philanthropy within a democracy and particularly a kind of liberal democracy is and should be, and what the kind of justification for allowing, you know, the the distribution of resources that gives rise to philanthropy and some of the structures that are used philanthropy, particularly kind of foundations, might be. And without going into a huge amount of detail, I mean, relates to some extent about what was just said about civil society plurality, because uh at a lower level, in terms of sort of more modest amounts, I think Riesch argues that there's an argument for philanthropy within a democracy on the basis of the decentralisation of public choice, so that kind of you know giving a plurality, uh people allowing people the the means and the resources to kind of associate and support a range of different causes uh in order to provide a sort of plurality of of ideas and approaches and to kind of therefore you know enrich and enhance democracy and sort of civic life. And also, I guess at that higher level, he echoes somebody like Mill in arguing that the role of foundation should be one of discovery, he says, which is kind of you know almost taking that role of testing ideas and innovating and and kind of pushing forward society in ways that government can't uh always because it's kind of more limited by the accountability that comes with um kind of um the the electoral mechanism. So, as I say, kind of you know, very much somebody who is talking about these issues at the moment now and from sort of political theory point of view, and certainly do you know check out uh his his writings and certainly the conversation that I had with him if you're interested in that.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:24

Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire, playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, genius billionaire playboy philanthropist Genius, genius, genius.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:55

And then I

Effective Altruism: why is it so influential and should we be concerned?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:56

guess finally, very much finally, because this is gonna end up being a very long podcast, isn't it? I just wanted to talk briefly, or as briefly as I can, about effective altruism, because um I think it's an interesting one in itself. Um it brings together quite a lot of the issues that we've already talked about in more general terms about the kind of key questions around what might be the philosophy of philanthropy, but also it it's had huge growth and success um in recent years, and it's it's very influential, particularly among sort of philanthropists from a tech background, and also seemingly policymakers recently. And so I think in terms of that question of is there a philosophy of philanthropy and what would it mean for philanthrop for philosophy to inform philanthropy, in a way the answer to that question is perhaps yes, and maybe it's effective altruism. And I think there are reasons to be concerned about that, not necessarily that I think effective altruism is fundamentally terrible, although I think there are kind of justifiable critiques that could be made of it, um some of which we'll kind of touch on in a moment, but more that if if that is seen as the only game in town when it comes to applying a philosophical lens to philanthropy, that seems to me problematic because I think it um it represents one uh viewpoint on many of these issues and actually doesn't necessarily kind of take into account some of these wider questions that have run through the history of of philosophy um when it has kind of considered philanthropy. Um so just for those who sort of you know don't know, although to be honest, if you've got to this point in this podcast episode and you don't know what effectual altruism is, I'm you know, well done for sticking with it. But it's you know, it sort of stems from the work of the utilitarian philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer, and then it's sort of developed um by others, so people like Will McCaskill and Toby Ord. Um, and it's sort of centered around a group of Oxford philosophers there, and it's also linked to other areas that are also sort of centered around philanthropy, which are things like long-termism, so thinking about the sort of far future of humanity, and also things, you know, kind of ethical issues like transhumanism. So, what would it sort of look like for humans increasingly to kind of either by genetic enhancement or by integration with kind of you know technological advancements to move beyond our current understanding of humans and sort of what are the ethics around that? I should say it's a kind of it's it's an interesting one for me personally, because I have almost a sort of minor personal link to this in that when I was at Oxford and particularly when I went back there to do uh sort of postgraduate stuff, I was very interested in this kind of thing. And I went along to some relatively early workshops of what is now the Future of Humanity Institute. And, you know, there's definitely a sort of alternative reality sliding doors version of things where I very much would have gone down that road, I think, and become, you know, probably died-in-the-world effective altruist. So, you know, it's gonna I find it it interesting, kind of, you know, assessing and critiquing some of this stuff, because I can kind of I feel like I can put myself in back in that mindset and sort of understand why some of these ideas are appealing. But having worked in you know the the practical reality of philanthropy now for you know a nearly 15 years, I also kind of can approach it very much from that perspective. So, just in terms of what some of the critiques of effective altruism are, because I think it's worth just kind of picking up on these. Although, again, this is an entire podcast episode in itself, really. And in fact, again, when uh I was doing the CAF Giving Thought podcast, we did do an episode um outlining some of these, and I'll put links in the show notes to that where you can get a more kind of uh developed version of some of this. But I guess the main critiques that you can find are, well, firstly, that it doesn't reflect the reality of philanthropy. So this is basically the argument that effective altruism is fine as a kind of debating point in a philosophy graduate seminar, but it it doesn't actually tell you much about philanthropy as its practice because that's not how people, you know, that's not what motivates people to give, and it's not how they give. And I should say, you know, the idea of effective altruism uh is basically the one that, you know, it's a utilitarian point of view, but it basically says you should be entirely agnostic as to even the cause areas that you're giving to, and the only guiding principle should be doing the greatest amount of good with you know the available resources, and that that good, again, this is a contentious point, but sort of originally that was based on measures of things like quality adjusted life years, that has been sort of developed and made more sophisticated over time, but essentially it kind of boils down to that idea, and I think this argument, you know, this first critique that it doesn't reflect the reality of philanthropy is probably the weakest one, um, in that if I was an effective altruist, I would just say, well, it's not supposed to reflect that, because it's meant to be normative rather than descriptive. And we're not saying how philanthropy is now, we're saying how it should be. Um, I think there is an argument that maybe um, you know, philosophers and ethicists should stick to to slightly more theoretical and descriptive uh work rather than trying to impose sort of normative uh theories on people, uh, only because the history of that is not necessarily great. But uh, and I think in that, you know, in that transition from the the philanthropy debating salon to the real world, there's a danger of quite a lot of you know uh pragmatic reality and realpolitik getting missed. But anyway, I I don't think this is a particularly strong exaction. I think it's worth saying another critique is that some versions of effective altruism actually aren't morally normative. So they're normative in terms of how you should give, but they don't they stop short of actually saying that you should give. So this there's a distinction here. Like Peter Singer, I think, does take a morally normative point of view. So you know, he has his argument about the drowning child, and he's sort of his starting point is sort of saying that you you should give. There's a compunction on you to give, and then goes into talking about why you know an effective altruist approach is the best way of doing that. But if you look at other versions of it, for instance, the version that somebody like Will McCaskill puts forward, he's sort of saying not that you should give, even if you're wealthy, but merely that if uh you give you should do as effectively as possible. Um and that actually, you know, his argument is more you know, it's a great opportunity if you're wealthy because you can you have the power to do lots of good. So it's not that there's a duty on you, going back to that question before about whether giving's a duty or not, but it's just that you have an opportunity. So um Elizabeth Ashford, who wrote a really good paper um called Severe Poverty as an unjust emergency, which sort of lays out quite a lot of the critiques of effective altruism. So she says, you know, McCaskill, by contrast, avoids appealing to the claim that it's wrong for affluent agents to fail to donate. Instead, he appeals to the fact that their affluence gives them the capacity to save or transform the lives of several people if they donate to the most cost-effective NGOs. This may indeed be an important part of the explanation of the movement's success. Telling people that failing to donate would be deeply morally wrong can trigger defensiveness and resentment. By contrast, appealing to the amazing opportunity that our affluent agents have to do good in the world can be stirring and motivational. So again, this is sort of a critique in in the sense of people saying it's fine, and maybe it's sort of pragmatically fine as a way of selling philanthropy, but actually are you kind of dodging, you know, you're ducking an issue by not making not taking a stance on whether or not there's a kind of moral compunction on people to give. I think it's interesting as well, this can give rise to another problem which has been called the all or nothing problem. problem. And so you see this problem in the work of people like Derek Parfitt and it's subsequently been critiqued by people like um Horton and McMahon. And actually there's a version of it. So there's a paper by um Tyrone Palmer, which I'll put links in the show notes to, um, and he kind of outlines this and gives you an idea of what it means. So he says the main claim I'll argue for here is that in many cases it would be wrong of you to give a sum of money to charities that do less good than others you could have given to instead. Even if it would not have been wrong of you not to give the money to any charity at all. So the point is that like on this all or nothing argument, if you aren't going to take a point of view on whether or not there's a moral compunction to give, you're okay you're probably okay to say, well, if there isn't then it's a choice. You can choose whether or not to give. If you choose not to give that's fine. If you choose to give that's fine. But if you're then taking a normative position on how you should give, it might well be the case that you're saying well if you give to ineffective charities rather than effective ones, that's terrible. And actually it's worse than not giving at all. So some effective altruists find themselves I think in the position of arguing that it's fine for wealthy people to give nothing at all, but it's not fine for them to give but not according to effective altruist principles. And that seems to me a sort of odd case of letting the best be the enemy of the good. Another critique of effective altruism that I think's important and is sort of more broadly a critique of utilitarianism is that it often sort of relies on the idea that we can take this entirely objective or impersonal perspective. And this some you know a philosopher like Henry Sidgick who was a prominent utilitarian very much argued that this was the perspective from which we should view ethical issues. And the critique here really is that this is not just an impossible standard and that we can't do it, but also that it's kind of theoretically wrong because it ignores the centrality of of the individual perspective in assessing ethical questions. And the Bernard Williams the philosopher had a kind of um quite a famous and influential critique of utilitarianism on these grounds and there's a a good summary of it actually in a paper by Brandon Boch which I'll just read from here and he says the trouble is that when considering what to do an agent's own projects and commitments are part of the consideration but only as one lot amongst others and that's in terms of utilitarianism. This entails some likelihood that the decision will require you to abandon your own project for the sake of someone else's project. Of course there are times when this is in fact quite reasonable and probably right where our own projects are of little importance to us or where the alternative projects are so overwhelmingly important. But when we come to those projects that are tied more deeply to an agent and who she takes herself to be, that is when we come to consider our commitments, this sort of utilitarian reasoning is problematic at best. How can a man as a utilitarian agent come to regard as one satisfaction among others and a and a dispensable one, a project or attitude round which he is built his life just because someone else's projects have so structured the c the causal scene that that's how the utilitarian sum comes out. So sort of saying actually you know the idea that that what we should do is just kind of this brute utilitarian calculus of like the greatest good for the greatest number and that people should be willing to ignore their own role in that in terms of which of the issues are most proximate to them or kind of which of them motivate them most is is wrong. And I think this is very relevant as a riposte to effective altruism for those working in philanthropy because it's actually a kind of philosophical and theoretical grounding for for that kind of gut feeling argument that this doesn't really work. But it doesn't just work in practical sense because that's not how people are motivated. It's kind of that isn't how ethics works is the argument here and that actually you have to take into account the individual perspective. Another argument I think that that is made that's very important against effective altruism is by its nature it kind of ignores lots of those issues around justice and philanthropy that we talked about earlier. Or in fact actually makes them even worse because effective altruism essentially kind of emphasizes the maximization of effectiveness within existing structures and if you rely on measures that solely look at outcomes so what they would call consequentialism you're you're sort of saying right well the world might be um kind of unequal and there might be problems with our current modes of capitalism but we're not we're not looking at that. We're looking at how do you kind of maximize your effectiveness as a donor within that. Whereas if people are saying no the problem is those fundamental structures are unjust and then what we need is reform of them there is not necessarily the capability within a um a world a viewpoint like effective altruism to measure that kind of change and so if you apply an effective altruism lens to everything do you forever kind of leave untouched those structures and sort of ignore the need for fundamental reform. The philosopher Amy Srinavasan wrote an article back in 2015 in the London Review Books really sort of influential critique I think of Will McCaskell's book um at that point and this article Stop the Robot Apocalypse which is which is great and if you can get access to it I highly recommend reading it. So she she made this point she sort of says you know effective altruism doesn't try to understand how power works except to better align itself with it. In this sense it leaves everything just as it is this is no doubt comforting to those who enjoy the status quo and may in part account for the movement's success. And I think one of the things to say about this is people within the effective altruism movement have tried to kind of address this by shifting away from things like kind of entirely consequentialist approach that only focuses on outcomes to thinking about maybe what they call process consequentialism, which takes into account you know how the outcomes are delivered and sort of values those as well. But I think the the issue I have with that is the more that you do that, the further you get away from what it was that made effective altruism distinctive in the first place. Because if you get away from the idea that it's like you fundamentally about an entirely objective assessment of how to do the most good with the money available to you regardless of causaria and you start saying oh no you know actually it's about how you do it and you take into account the process and also maybe you know we can allow people to have some degree of discretion over that. And it's really it's more just about making sure that when you do give you effectively that's all fine and it's you know that's practically more palatable in a lot of ways but how I don't see how it's that different from lots of other other people and viewpoints out there that are you know kind of putting forward the needs to to give effectively. And and this is a point Srinavasa makes in that article she says you know either effective altruism like utilitarianism demands that we do the most good possible or it asks merely that we try to make things better. The first thought is genuinely radical, requiring us to overhaul our daily lives in ways unimaginable to most. The second thought that we try to make things better is shared by every plausible moral system and every decent person. If effective altruism is simply in the business of getting us to be more effective when we try to help others then it's hard to object to but in that case it's also hard to see what it's offering in the way of fresh moral insight still less how it could be the last social movement we'll ever need. So I think you know that's quite a kind of key critique to me. And then the final one I think in terms of criticisms that are made of effective altruism is not so much a critique of effectual altruism itself but it is a critique of one of the the ways in which the field has developed which is interesting which is the focus initially in lots of the writing on effective altruism the focus was very much on things like kind of international development and and kind of interventions in the developing world because that's where you know when you do the um the kind of maths on the most impact you can have with your money in terms of quality adjusted life years it sort of inevitably ends up that that is where the greatest impact is. But as this has become more popular within particularly the sort of tech world what we've seen is much more of a focus on things like existential threats and the ideas of long-termism. And the critique here is that this is subject to something that they call Pascal's mugging. And the idea is that you know if what you're doing is measuring what you should focus on based on you know the the total amount of good done if you take an event or a a thing that could happen that is of a very very small probability but you assume that it happens to an absolutely vast number of people which is possible if as the long termists suggest we should value future lives on a par with existing human lives then all of a sudden the maths totally changes. So if for instance you argue that actually you know the risk of uh future um kind of AI breakout or superhuman AI taking over the world or of a kind of interstellar event and collision killing off the human race is very low but that if it does happen it and causes the extinction of the human race, it's not o you know not only does that endanger the lives of people alive right now, but all potential future human lives and you extrapolate what that number is all of a sudden you know the maths regardless of how low the probability of the event is, the maths will almost always work out in favor of well that is the most important thing that you could do because if even if it's of a very very low probability addressing it is worthwhile on the very slim chance that it happens and endangers all of those lives. And you know this again this sort of there is an inherent kind of plausibility to this and it's not to say that we shouldn't be thinking in long-termist ways or taking into account extremely unlikely events. But I think the concern here is that it just it's easy if you buy into this argument for it to distract attention from things that will have less of an impact on fewer lives but are actually happening right now. And there was you know a number of people have made this this point but there was an article quite recently by um Phil Torres I think who used to be sort of part of the EA community and maybe still is EA but not so much keen on long term is attacking some of the the impact that this longtermist thinking has had. So he said you know why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfillment of humanity's supposed potential above all else could non-trivially increase the probability that actual people, those alive today and in the near future suffer extreme harms, even death. You know, consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insucient attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn't going to compromise our long term potential over the coming trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75% for the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a small blip, the equivalent of a 90-year-old man having stubbed his toe when he was two. And so I think on that basis and maybe you know some defenders of EA would argue this is a kind of you know a caricature of their views, but you do see people kind of within you know the philosophical foral and debating these putting forward views that are not not very far removed from those that are that are being kind of characterized there. And and again it's one of those things you know if this was staying within the rarefied halls of academia and academic philosophy that would be one thing because people say all sorts of things in terms of philosophical arguments and part of it is about kind of testing ideas to their limits and thinking through you know some of the counterintuitive kind of implications of them. But because effective altruism has become so influential with actual donors and with policy makers I think there is a concern and we need to be alive to the concern that some of it leads to these kinds of conclusions that could take focus away from the immediate needs of people and communities in the here and now and sort of allows a justification of putting money into extremely unlikely long-term you know events. And and I think this kind of goes to a the basic point I wanted to leave us with about uh effective altruism and the philosophy of philanthropy more broadly. So I think effective altruism is really interesting because in terms of that question of philosophy and philanthropy it's definitely a philosophical take on philanthropy that has cut through to the mainstream and you know all credit to it. I think there are all sorts of kind of questions that would be interesting to look at about why particularly this version of you know existing ideas around utilitarianism stuff has gathered so much traction right now and it's probably a combination of you know timing and and other things and some of the individuals involved but what what I think we should have some concern about is that you know the if if effective altruism effectively becomes the only game in town when it comes to uh thinking about philanthropy in a philosophical way, will that you know does that come at the expense of focus on all of these other questions that I've been outlining over this far, far too long podcast and what's been said about them. You know, actually is the problem that there's not enough philosophy of philanthropy more broadly so it's easy for effective altruism to fill this space. And I would say that's probably the case and that's not necessarily an argument against effective altruism per se, although as I say I think there are unjustified critiques of it. I think EA is interesting at the very least as a sort of you know challenge or benchmark to other forms of giving but I do think there is much more need to bring in other philosophical perspectives when talking about philanthropy and kind of use them to broaden our understanding in that way. And I think here endeth the lesson because that really has been a very very long podcast. I suspect at the point at which I've edited this down I will have turned it into two podcasts because it's far too much for one. But anyway I will put links in the show notes to both uh parts of the the podcast for where you can find uh some more readings on this kind of thing and some of the things that I've mentioned and I'll probably put together a sort of brief bibliography for anybody who wants to follow up on the sort of stuff. If you're interested in more broadly uh in things uh writing about kind of phantom civil society issues uh check out my uh philiteracy page at medium where I write blogs follow me on Twitter at Rodri underscore h underscore davis or at philiteracy um or follow the Twitter feed for for the podcast as well which is at phil underscore isms uh underscore pod or just maybe google it you know uh you can find more information on the website which is philanthropisms.com for the podcast if uh you want to uh drop us a line about any topics we could cover on future episodes or people I could interview again you can find the email uh on the podcast website and please do get in touch do uh leave us a review or you know some comments on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts because I think it all helps please tell uh other people about it who you think might be interested and other than that I will see you next time bye