SPEAKER_00 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropisms podcast with Roger Davis.

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, Rod Davis. And this week we are in conversation with Ted Lecterman. Now, Ted is a political philosopher who focuses on philanthropy and also increasingly on uh AI ethics. Uh and he is an associate professor at IE University, where he also holds the UNESCO chair in AI ethics and governance. And he's also the author of a book called The Tyranny of Generosity, Why Philanthropy Corrupts Our Politics and How We Can Fix It, which came out in 2022. And as you'll see in the conversation, he's also one of the editors of uh or one of the authors of a new entry on philanthropy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which was the kind of starting point for why I wanted to speak to Ted, although I've been meaning to have him on as a guest for for many years. So we sat down and had a great conversation all about um what the philosophy of philanthropy is and what it means to take a philosophical perspective on philanthropy. So we we talked about that question and about why uh philosophy is a useful tool when it comes to uh addressing things like the the nature and role of philanthropy. Um we talked about some of the uh sort of specific questions within that, the big themes and ideas that have come up when philosophers have tried to address philanthropy as a topic. So, you know, is giving a choice or a duty? Um if it is a duty, what is the nature of that duty? Is it a total duty? Is it um sort of perfectly defined or is it an imperfect duty? How does that relate to the relationship between philanthropy and justice as well? You know, is philanthropy a good means of delivering justice? Uh is that even the purpose of philanthropy, or does philanthropy potentially get in the way of seeking justice in some contexts? Um we also talk quite a bit about the role of philanthropy within a democracy, both the good and the bad, which feels pretty timely given uh what's currently going on in the US. Um concerns about the way in which wealth and the use of wealth um through philanthropy could be used to kind of bypass uh the machinery of democracy and and subvert it, but conversely also the way in which philanthropy could be a tool for overcoming the tyranny of the majority that can result in a in a democracy and allowing otherwise marginalized voices to be heard or kind of um uh arguments to be tested and ideas to be uh brought to bear and and that could potentially move society forward and result in uh innovation. Um we also talked kind of related to that w about the question of the taxation of philanthropy and particularly of donations and kind of what the philosophical underpinnings of that uh might be. Uh and then we talked a little bit at the end about effective altruism, which is sort of inescapable if you're gonna be talking about philanthropy and philosophy, and also about the question of corporate philanthropy and some work that Ted has been doing sort of revisiting the the uh idea of corporate philanthropy and why it may or may not be justified. So without further ado, let's get into the conversation. Um I really, really enjoyed this one. Uh I hope you will too. There's lots uh lots in there in terms of content and depth. Um, and I will be back at the end for the usual bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Ted Lecterman. Hi there, Ted. Hi, Rodri. Thanks so much for having me. Well, it's absolutely great to have you on the podcast and to talk about something that I mean listeners to the podcast will know is one of my absolute favorite topics of all time, which is the philosophy of philanthropy. And you come to this as an actual genuine bona fide academic philosopher with an interest in this topic. Um, there's loads I want to talk to you about. Um, I guess the starting point for everybody might just be to ask you what was it that brought you to philanthropy as a topic of philosophical inquiry? And why do you think that is interesting?

SPEAKER_02 4:37

Um, I think, you know, like any project or any interest, there are multiple sources of inspiration. So maybe I'll just highlight one, which is that um after my undergraduate studies, I was working for a time at the Social Science Research Council in Brooklyn for a project called Measure of America, which tries to map out inequalities in the United States uh by race, place, and gender and create a human development index based on the UN Human Development Index for the United States. In any case, one of the sort of policy research tasks that I was given by my supervisors was to try to figure out how we could measure the efficacy of philanthropic donations on some of these items of interest. Can we actually determine causally whether philanthropic donations are helpful in closing various kinds of inequalities in the United States? So I started doing a deep dive into that question of, you know, are there ways in which we can determine from a sort of empirical social science perspective the extent to which philanthropic donations really do make a meaningful difference? And I kept coming back to these normative questions as I was doing this research. Uh, first of all, what is philanthropy? Second of all, is it philanthropy's responsibility to be addressing these kinds of serious social political questions? Um, if not, whose is it or what is the appropriate role of philanthropy in a you know constitutional democracy or a liberal democratic society or any society for that matter? So I came across a few articles that were sort of raising these questions, but not really raising them in the way that I thought was correct, and certainly not answering them in the way that I thought was convincing. Um then, you know, further down the line, when I found myself in a PhD program and was searching for a dissertation topic, and all of my favorite topics at the time seemed to be super saturated. There wasn't really much room to say something new on the topic of global justice, which at the time was something I was really passionate about philosophically, um, I came back to this idea of philanthropy and started to think about, in particular, the relationship between philanthropy and democracy. What is the role of philanthropy in a democratic society? How might philanthropy uh promote certain democratic principles or values? How might it constrain or undermine or violate either the same or different democratic principles or values? Um, and the sort of motivating thought here was that, you know, both philanthropy and the state are ways of serving public purposes. Why should we prefer one or the other, or under what circumstances?

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah, that's you know, absolutely. And I want to pick up on some of those questions about philanthropy and democracy and also some of the other sort of big questions that run throughout the philosophy of philanthropy in insofar as it's a field. I guess I just wanted to ask a kind of meta question first, which is what's your sense of why a philosophical perspective in particular is of value when it comes to thinking about philanthropy? I mean, if somebody pressed you and said, well, why should we be thinking in these philosophical terms about this, what would you say in response to that?

SPEAKER_02 7:44

I I think philanthrop uh philosophy rather gets sometimes a bad rap. Right? It's sometimes thought um to address high flu uh conceptual spiritual ideas um that are extremely complex, opaque, abstruse. And I think, you know, the the way that I was trained to think about philosophy is just as a way of trying to think more clearly about a topic. And of course, you know, we can go down many rabbit holes in doing that. But for a topic like philanthropy, which uh is controversial in various ways, which is incredibly practically important, right? It makes a real difference in people's lives. People have intense views uh about this topic. It seems like the kind of thing that requires some clarification. What exactly does the term mean in the first place? We have a variety of related terms, for instance, which we kind of use interchangeably, but sometimes not, like the term uh charity, for instance, or terms like beneficence uh or benevolence. Uh, you know, what's the relationship between these different things? Then we have certain organizations that sometimes we call philanthropies. Are those just pure manifestations of this concept of philanthropy, or are they a sort of different beast altogether? So with a topic that's complex, contested, and important, I think it's really important to get clear on our concepts, to get clear on our definitions. And then, of course, you know, for me as a as a political philosopher and applied ethicist, I see uh serious normative questions involved in, you know, how we categorize and classify and theorize this concept, right? What is the role of philanthropy in a in a democratic society or or any other society? Um, do we have duties to engage in philanthropy in one way or another? Do we have duties as recipients of philanthropy to express, for instance, gratitude? Or what about the duties that apply to intermediaries like nonprofit organizations or trustees and so forth? So these are all kinds of questions where philosophical reflection can be helpful. And again, by that I just mean trying to get clear on what all these various concepts and ideas mean and some of these different norms, principles, duties, etc.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah, and I absolutely agree. You're preaching very much to the converted and somebody who spent my early career studying philosophy of maths. I mean, this seems like an incredibly practical field of philosophical inquiry, it has to be said. Um and I want to come back to what you were saying about duties just in a moment, because that's sort of, I think, a really good starting point to get into some of the substantive questions about what are the big issues when it comes to thinking about philanthropy philosophically. I guess before I do that, I just wanted to ask you about one particular example of kind of putting this into practice that you've been involved in, which is the publication of a recent new entry on philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which people who don't know is a kind of wonderful publicly available resource about all kinds of issues looked at from a philosophical perspective. Can you just tell us a bit about how that came about and what the thinking was about why this was a thing that was worth doing?

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Yeah, well, as you noted, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is um, you know, sort of uh locus classicus uh for um not just philosophers, but also for the sort of general public for an easy, you know, entree um into uh, well, at this point, several thousand topics of philosophical debate or interest, right? So if you want to know uh what's the state of debate, uh freedom of speech, for instance, uh you go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Uh, you want to know what the state of play is on the thinker Jane Addams, uh, at least her philosophical thought, uh, right? Her thought is complex, but some of it is philosophical. You go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and it's you know a resource that I use basically daily in my own work, as do many of my colleagues. And so I was kind of lusting after uh the encyclopedia for a long time. It had, you know, until a few months ago, no entry on philanthropy. Um, and I thought, you know, as uh philosophical interest uh in this area is growing, it just makes sense uh to have an entry. But I also thought um I I can't, you know, claim uh the right to be the sole author of this entry. There have been, you know, many colleagues of mine who've been working on this, well, not many, but a few who've been working on this topic uh sort of in tandem, um, in overlap uh with me over the past several years, um, some of whom I've collaborated with. And so I enlisted a few colleagues, uh Rob Reesch at Stanford and Emma Saunders Hastings at the Ohio State University, to think about, you know, how we might structure a proposal uncovering this really important, uh, really controversial topic. And uh eventually, you know, we found some time to sit down together in in Rob's office at Stanford when we were all there for a different reason, um, and just sort of whiteboarded um, you know, how we thought you know this this kind of thing could go. Um, you know, and eventually over time, you know, things things were accepted with some editorial and peer-review input and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Yeah, and it's I'll put a link in the show notes to people uh for people who want to check that out. And I would definitely say, you know, recommend they do, because it's a it's a remarkable job, I think you've done of managing to capture a huge number of what are the big questions about philanthropy and interesting sources to go to in a relatively small space. So, you know, congratulations on that. Um, just to to pick up on one of those questions and that you've already alluded to, I'd be really interested to start by thinking about the relationship between philanthropy and duty and the and essentially the sort of question of, you know, is it a choice to give, which is often how philanthropy is positioned? It's voluntary, it's a voluntary act of giving away resources for the public good or whatever definition you want to use, or actually, should we understand it as something that we have a duty of some kind to do? And if so, what's the nature of that duty? Maybe you could say a bit about how that question has taxed the minds of some pretty great philosophers over time.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

It's definitely taxing. And I I think, you know, maybe just to preview what's to come in this conversation, if your listeners are expecting tidy, uh tidy answers, there probably won't be won't be so many. But uh but yeah, there are different ways to think about this, right? Um you might think that in a, for instance, in a just society, you might think that there really is no duty of philanthropy, that philanthropy is in some cases what we call supererogatory, uh, right? It's praiseworthy to do, uh, but not blameworthy if you fail to do it. And that kind of view makes a particular kind of sense in a society that is already reasonably just, um, however you want to define that. Um, you might say in a society where everybody's rights are satisfied, uh, where lives are going basically okay, perhaps going well, um, what would be the point of having people going around distributing money around? You might think, well, you know, uh there might be something good about that if they're trying to do something for the common good. But the urgency, certainly, of distributing money on a voluntary basis in a society that is already just by our lights, it just doesn't really, doesn't really grip us. And so it would be perhaps harder to say that there is a duty to give. But of course, you know, we don't live in uh just societies, uh, arguably. Um, I think it's it's hard to find a single person, whether you know a philosopher or otherwise, who would argue that we live in a in any kind of uh society remotely coming close to some ideal of justice, though it certainly has been worse in the past, in other places, certainly. And so you might think that, you know, given the circumstances under which we live, there certainly could be uh duties to give, and those might be inherited uh from the sort of background injustice of our institutions. So uh that's a view you might have, and you might think the sort of strength of the duty varies based on either how wealthy you are or uh how many opportunities you you have. Perhaps it's particularly easy for you to give uh based on your position in the in the world. Perhaps you have uh a lot of knowledge about um you know how your resources could be put to you know socially beneficial use. Those are all things you might believe, but there are other things you could believe. You might think that philanthropy can be a duty even if you are not particularly wealthy or privileged. You might think that giving is just sort of a good thing to do. It promotes a virtuous character, um, which is something we all have an interest in cultivating. You might also think that that giving is an important aspect of communal life, that being a sort of a decent citizen or a decent member of the communities in which we live requires being willing to make sacrifices for one another or for the common good. So those could also be sources that generate a duty to give, apart from the sort of justice or injustice of the background conditions and apart from one's level of income, wealth, or knowledge or other sort of important resources.

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Yeah, absolutely. And I to pick up on that particular question about justice as the sort of the source for thinking of philanthropy in terms of duties, I guess one of the questions that that sort of comes up when you think in those terms is well f first of all, it brings up the relationship, I suppose, between philanthropy and taxation, because there's I suppose an argument that that is the the archetypal version of money redistributed through a source of a sense of duty rather than than voluntary choice. I suppose the question is, given that, as you said, we do live in an unjust world and we probably aren't close to to kind of meeting all of the potential requirements of justice through either taxation or philanthropy, is there any positive argument that can be made for a supererogatory type of philanthropy, even in an unjust world? By which I just mean, is it the case that the only justifiable thing for any philanthropist is to pay all of their taxes and then focus all of their giving on justice-seeking causes? Or can you make a case that other things might have a different kind of value? So, you know, the the arts or or other things that kind of meet other requirements of community life. Is it possible to do that?

SPEAKER_02 18:02

It's it's such a great question because it gets at a real sort of contentious debate uh between the you know ten philosophers who are working on these questions at the moment. Um, right? There, some of my colleagues um do express the the kind of uh view you've been mapping out here, which I don't know if you hold, it doesn't matter. This this idea that, you know, uh in an unjust world, it's in fact impermissible um to give um to causes that don't have a reparative function, right? Um in part because the money that you have or resources that you have at your disposal are not fully yours. They're not fully yours because they wouldn't be yours in an un in a more just society. And therefore, you are obligated not only to give, but also to give in such a way that tries to repair or replicate uh what just institutions or just circumstances would do or require. So that's a view that um the philosopher Chiara Cordelli has has expressed uh in the past few years. But uh it's certainly not the only game in town. Um you might think, for instance, that for a variety of reasons, that there's uh something important about the institutional division of labor, that it's very important that we divide up different social functions in different ways and assign certain obligations to, for instance, state institutions, certain obligations or certain functions to the market, certain functions and obligations to uh philanthropy and civil society, um, and so on. And you might think that giving or requiring individuals to take total responsibility or significant responsibility for repairing the defects of uh of unjust institutions actually ends up awarding them a significant degree of discretion and power. And so there might be sort of democratic or legitimacy concerns about requiring a kind of reparative philanthropy in all cases. You might also think that there are just simply good reasons to decentralize the production of public goods, and uh society can develop uh in a healthy direction if we disperse uh control over a variety of different things, and philanthropy is a particularly good way of doing that. Meanwhile, uh hoping for, voting for, putting pressure on uh the sort of traditional public institutions and political actors to ensure that institutions are are you know reformed in a just way. Um so I think there might be a certain amount of compatibility between uh a form of philanthropy that is focused on non-justice goods and uh and you know, engaging in other forms of activity that promote uh political reform that you know aids the cause of justice.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I mean that would, you know, just to reveal my own hand there, that's probably closer to my view, partly because working in the field of philanthropy and seeing it in practice, it probably kind of more closely replicates the the reality of what happens, which doesn't necessarily mean it's right because when you're talking normatively, you're talking about how things should be rather than how they are. But I think you know, how they are, whilst not perfect, does reflect something for me about how they might ideally be as well. Um I want to come on to the questions that you you touched on there about some of the democratic implications of allowing philanthropy to exist um and giving that sort of potential power and agency to individuals. But before I do that, I just wanted to pick up on one point there, which was at one point you mentioned about how some of these questions, certainly about um the relationship between philanthropy and justice and and the idea of duty. Actually, the starting point for them is what view you take of the nature of private property, because there is a sort of prior question about you know, the assumption that this is my money or my property, and therefore I have a right to decide how to give it away, slightly begs a question that maybe most of us take a particular view on. These days, but actually, there is a valid argument about well, is that even right? Is there any such thing as private property? And it it just made me think actually, one of the things I find fascinating about these kinds of philosophical investigations into philanthropy is you do end up on some of these questions that are absolutely sort of fundamental about human nature and the societies we live in quite quickly. Um, both that one about private property and the other one that I just wanted to ask quickly about that that you end up talking about is fundamentally what is human nature? Is it you know collaborative and altruistic and are we driven by a desire to help one another? Or are we um, you know, the sort of uh Russo version, or are we kind of as um Hobbes would have had it, you know, f fighting and competitive and the state of nature's red in tooth and claw? To what extent do we need to make our minds up about that question before we even approach some of these questions about philanthropy and practice?

SPEAKER_02 22:55

Yeah, I mean, it it's so hard. I think as you've as you've pointed out, um philanthropy very quickly starts to engage some of these long-standing and and deep philosophical questions. Um, and it can be paralyzing. Um, you know, if you think you need to have a complete theory of everything before you can do, you know, do anything. And I mean, yeah, to a certain extent, I think that that is true. We should be willing um to recognize the deeper implications uh of some of these decisions, some of these judgments, uh, the relevance of investigating um some of these questions, questions about human nature, questions about the you know, justification of private property or the scope of private property, of course, are sort of background views about about justice uh and and freedom. These are all relevant. And I think we maybe are doing a disservice to people if we say, ah, you don't need to think about any of these things. We're just gonna give you, you know, a list of five guidelines on how to be a responsible donor. That said, you know, I think one one sort of helpful role, I think, for for academics and um and philosophers engaging in this material is to try to distill some of these issues into more manageable kinds of questions and guidelines so that people are, in fact, not paralyzed when trying to engage responsibly in the practice. Now, I have to confess this hasn't been a large part of my my own work so far. My my work on philanthropy and related topics has been at a fairly academic level. But I think you know, there is certainly uh more work to be done. And I want to sort of you know salute some of the work that you do in translating, um, making making sense of uh some of these academic debates for um for an audience that includes people beyond academia who are interested in in the practice of philanthropy, whether as donors, whether as recipients, whether as intermediaries or sort of other professionals in this space. Um and I think that is an area for certainly more work. How can we how can we take uh these huge complex issues and distill them into something that's that's that's actionable but also sensitive to some of these disagreements and the sort of depth of some of these issues?

SPEAKER_01 25:14

Yeah, and I've certainly and um and I found you know if you can present things in those ways and people realize that actually once you start talking about philanthropy, it becomes about these much sort of more fundamental questions about what it is to be human. People tend to have opinions about what they think human nature is like and all sorts of other issues. So it gets very interesting very quickly. Um I wanted to circle back to to talk a bit more about um what you mentioned about the question of the role of philanthropy within a democracy or the kind of context of a democracy. Um sort of hard in a way to know how to frame a question that's sufficiently narrow, but I suppose my my starting point would be to ask, you know, it's easy to see in in some ways how philanthropy can be construed as inherently anti-democratic. I mean, it's particularly when you're talking about large donors, you're giving people with more wealth in society a means to sort of bypass the structures and systems of electoral democracy in particular. But then I guess the flip side is some of the most sort of lauded and highly cited examples of the positive impact that philanthropy has also seems to be when it has run counter to the status quo or kind of allowed people to challenge the tyranny of the majority. How do we square that circle? Yeah, it really is a mixed bag, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 26:35

I mean, I I think, I mean, at this point in my in my sort of reflection on the topic, uh I think it really just is important to sort of catalog, at least as a sort of first pass, you know, what are the sort of pros and cons of philanthropy or different kinds of philanthropy for core democratic norms, values, or principles? And from there we might be able to bootstrap or systematize uh grander theory, but just attention to these various nuances is, I think, the the first challenge. And as you've pointed out, I think many people can get behind or appreciate at least the anti-democratic aspect of uh big philanthropy, right? The fact that some people in a society or in the world enjoy uh enormous amounts of wealth, which they can use to basically dictate uh policy preferences through a variety of mechanisms, both through sort of formal influence uh on sort of public policy, but also by sort of creating parallel uh you know programs, parallel institutes where they can run different kinds of social experiments and you know create their own sort of mini-republics. And so there might be something democratically concerning about that, insofar as, you know, if we care about democracy, partly the reason why is because we think that to some extent people are equally entitled to participate in collective decision making about how their society develops over time. So large inequalities in wealth, which translate into sort of large inequalities in social and political influence, are democratically concerning. But as you also suggested in your question, there are, you know, both other reasons to be concerned about the sort of problematic relationship between philanthropy and democracy, and also other reasons to be more optimistic about that relationship. So something I try to do in my own work is to try and complicate this story a bit by showing that it's not only inequality that we have reasons to be concerned about from a democratic perspective. Part of the reason why we are concerned or ought to be concerned about the relationship between philanthropy and democracy is this question of privatization, right? If we have many non-wealthy people who band together and engage in some kind of philanthropic endeavor, if that endeavor is a way of usurping or supplanting a broader uh sort of public participation or legislation on an issue, that also seems potentially problematic from a democratic perspective, right? If we're talking, for instance, about education, uh, at least, you know, elementary, you know, primary, secondary education, which we often think is a sort of core aspect of sort of uh public life. It's something in which we all have sort of equal stake or interest in, um, and all have sort of equal entitlement to participate in the policy making of. So if some subset of the population who is not particularly wealthy, um bands together and sort of uh, you know, takes that over as an area of policy making, I think we have democratic reasons to be concerned, even if nobody in that equation is significantly wealthy. But as you've pointed out, there are also reasons to be optimistic about the relationship between philanthropy and democracy. There's this sort of long-standing idea that philanthropy can be a sort of counter, important counter-majoritarian force, right? That it can countervail other sources of power in society. So, of course, you know, the tyranny of the majority is one concern, that tyranny of the government uh can be sometimes the same, sometimes a different concern. There are various sources of tyranny, you know, even within functioning democratic societies. And having the sort of reserve capital to fight against that tyranny seems like an important protective mechanism. If you think about some of our sort of really important social movements over the past several decades, the civil rights movement, for instance, funded almost entirely by private philanthropy. Um, and for the better, right? Hard to imagine a world where the civil rights movement would have succeeded without that sort of reserve capital available from private funders. So it seems like a good thing to have, at least, you know, taking into account the sort of predictable failures of um even well-functioning democratic institutions. And then, of course, there's this also long-standing idea that the sort of practice of philanthropy or organizations created by philanthropic wealth can be crucibles of democracy, right? That we develop certain civic capacities, certain virtues of citizenship, in part through our participation in voluntary initiatives. And it's important that these initiatives be somewhat distant from the state itself, somewhat distant from the government to avoid co-optation um by um the state apparatus. So, you know, there are there are sort of other nuances of this relationship. I think other ways in which we could see philanthropy as both uh both a risk and a benefit to democracy. But I think the first step, um, and the step that I think we're all still working on is just sort of cataloging um and becoming aware uh of some of these wrinkles.

SPEAKER_01 32:02

Absolutely. And it's uh I wonder if this is one of those points at which the language that we use in the sort of conceptual framework is important because I think when we talk about philanthropy, I mean it is very difficult to come up with an agreed, you know, exact definition of philanthropy. But there's often we end up naturally kind of focusing on the giving of wealthy individuals because some of these issues are most acute there. I wonder in the context of concerns about democracy, do you think it would answer some of those concerns if actually we were talking more about giving at a sort of everyday level and more about kind of broad-based support for organizations rather than reliance on a small handful of individuals? Or would it just be a a matter of degree and that and sort of qualitatively they're actually the you know the same critiques still apply?

SPEAKER_02 32:54

Yeah, I mean, and uh here's a case where the terminology seems to make a big difference. Um, and we are sort of in a sort of impoverished position terminologically, right? Because at least in many people's minds, the term philanthropy, for one reason or another, has become associated with the giving patterns of um of high net worth individuals andor the sort of private foundations that they set up. But you know, it doesn't need to necessarily be that way. That just is the sort of term we have. We have another term that sometimes we use to describe the giving of less wealthy or ordinary people, which is the term charity. Um, but that term also has some other connotations, right? Some people think of charity as being concerned primarily with the relief of suffering, of uh being specifically associated with uh a sort of Christian heritage, uh perhaps being more local in scope. The different connotations people have with charity that are not necessarily the opposite or broader version of philanthropy. And we sort of lack a third term, which could be sort of uh maximally capacious, right? A term that doesn't carry these connotations one direction or another, um, that could be more inclusive. You mentioned that the word giving. Well, um, in some ways that's helpful, but we often use that term giving for all sorts of different things, you know, uh gift giving during birthdays and other holidays, right? Giving manifests in various forms that have, you know, little to do with sort of public donations or the voluntary commitment of private resources for public purposes. So we're we're lacking, I think, uh, an ideal term to describe the sort of general family of phenomena that we all seem to be interested in.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I mean, other terminology has been floated. I mean, people talk, these are the big debate at the moment about whether we should talk in terms of generosity, which again, there are merits too, but it's, you know, it potentially does it potentially doesn't capture everything we would want it to capture, and maybe captures some things that we aren't necessarily uh intending to talk about. So it is, yeah, it's very difficult, I think, to find that that right agreed terminology in an exact way. Um, I wanted to ask actually on this question of um philanthropy's role within a democracy when we're talking about the giving of of sort of elite donors. Um, one related question that I think is really fascinating is to what extent are we uh willing to allow those donors to have the latitude to follow their own uh kind of um beliefs about what is of most value to society as a whole in order to get the potential benefits of innovation or to allow them to sort of drive society forward. And I'm thinking here about um some of the examples we've seen in recent years where you have individuals making arguments that actually, you know, their investment in space exploration or other quite sort of um uh experimental technologies, actually, you know, that that is a form of philanthropy, or if not better than traditional philanthropy, because the payoff could be enormous. You know, should should we be willing to allow them some of that latitude, or are, you know, does there come a point at which we need to constrain that ability of those individuals to choose for themselves what to pursue?

SPEAKER_02 36:05

Uh here's um, I don't know, a working hypothesis that just occurred to me, you know, and as you were speaking, which is that, you know, there has been this argument uh across the ages that one of the benefits of elite philanthropy is this sort of expansion of our cultural language, um, that there's there's a value to having you know kooky rich people um investing in kooky ideas that would otherwise not get funded. A lot of them fail or are nuts, um, but some of them you know end up being innovative. Um, you know, they they catch the eye of others, they end up getting adopted or scaled up because they offer something different, something new, something useful. And that seems like maybe a good thing to have. Um, and also the kind of thing that's hard to justify spending tax dollars on, right? Maybe we could have some kind of rotating risk capital uh funds uh that we you know distribute democratically or by lottery. There are other models of this, right? I think it it's difficult to make that kind of argument in a world where wealth is extremely concentrated in the way that it is. That argument seems to make more sense to me if we have uh quite a lot of kooky uh rich people or maybe you know kooky people of all kinds who are able to experiment with different ideas. When wealth is as concentrated as it is in sort of contemporary societies, and it really just is the top 0.00001% or whatever, who are investing in sort of strange, strange projects, this you know can have a lot of power over the rest of society, right? It's creating entire industries, um, it's drawing competent professionals away from other areas of concern that might be more socially important, all uh because of the sort of pet projects of a few people. So um I so I guess I'm I'm more sympathetic to this justification for elite philanthropy in a world with less inequality than we have now. But I also think you know we need to consider whether there are alternative institutional devices for this function, like a sort of democratically operated rotating risk capital fund where people can apply or either just by by lottery um get access to sources of funding to invest in their own pet projects or kooky ideas about how you know society might be improved.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Yeah. I mean, yeah, as a sort of as an alternative or counterfactual, that's a really interesting idea. And I think also on the in terms of the arguments in favour of um elite philanthropy and uh in terms of its sort of innovation or discovery role, as you say, there does seem always to be a slight tacit assumption that there's a pluralism at play, which in reality maybe there isn't because the number of people we're talking about is very small and actually their preferences and values are relatively tightly defined and quite similar. Um I'm aware that I'm gonna be in danger of taking up far too much of your time, and we've we're gonna barely get through a tiny fraction of the questions that I threatened to ask you. But there's a couple of things I really, really wanted to touch on. Um the first was I thought it would be incredibly remiss to be talking about the philosophy of philanthropy and not to touch on effective altruism as both as a sort of philosophical idea and also, you know, latterly as a movement. Um, I'd just be really interested in your take, um, I guess from the philosophical point of view, on whether you think there is anything kind of genuinely distinctive and new and interesting about effective altruism, or whether it's you know, it to some extent actually a kind of amalgamation of ideas about you know consequentialist ethics and others that were already there, but it's just found a moment in time where the reception for those ideas was particularly fruitful.

SPEAKER_02 39:44

That is um that's a difficult question. I think there's there's a considerable amount of debate within the effective altruist community about precisely what what EA means and stands for. And I think, I mean, my own view is that to be a distinctive perspective, effective altruism needs to be a consequentialist view, um, and really has not developed substantively since Peter Singer's early formulations. Uh of course, it's it's you know, it developed in some of its uh concerns into um areas of population ethics, into generational justice, uh, and different areas of policy, but the core tenets of the view haven't really changed from, you know, at least the the way that Peter Singer laid them out in his famous article, Femin Affluence Morality. Now, several effective altruists have tried to claim that the position of the community is not necessarily committed to consequentialism and that effective altruism is open to a wide variety of moral perspectives. But this view, I think, drains effective altruism of anything distinctive. If the view is just that, you know, we should think carefully about our obligations to others and how to discharge them, it's hard to find any perspective that would disagree with that. Now, maybe there's a sort of aversion of common sense morality, or at least maybe a sort of a popular view, uh, which is just, you know, not terribly concerned with reflecting on our obligations to others or how to discharge them. That might be true to some extent, right? And especially when we think about just sort of common views about philanthropy. Some people just think that um philanthropy is about uh contributing money to things I'm passionate about when and if I feel like it. That's a common view. That's a difficult view, I think, to defend. Um, and so you know, if effective altruism is against that, I guess that's kind of distinctive, but um hard to find any other serious moral view um that that would not share that um that concern. So uh to make to make effective altruism a truly distinctive view, I think it needs to stick, stick to its consequentialist roots. And yeah, if it tries to broaden the tent, it just it just risks draining uh the viewer the movement of what makes it truly unique.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. And I think really captures something that I sort of thought myself, and I'm never sure I've kind of expressed properly, which is the more that effective altruists try particularly to address critiques of of the sort of tenets of cause agnosticism, particularly by saying, Oh, well, actually, you know, we'll allow some degree of donor choice about what to give to, but then when you do, just apply these principles of effectiveness, it becomes more palatable to many, but less interesting intellectually, because it's not, as you say, actually that distinctive, and it's sort of difficult to disagree with if essentially all you're saying is, when you have chosen what to give to, try and do it as well as possible. That's kind of uh you know, that's uh relatively basic.

SPEAKER_02 42:46

I would say though, I mean, I I do think you know the effective altruist movement and philosophy, when applied to philanthropy, and of course its concerns have broadened beyond philanthropy in the past few years, has made some some quite useful contributions. Oh, absolutely. Right. If we think about some of their early criticisms of at least sort of charity ratings, right? Uh GuideStar, Network for Good. These entities, I'm not even sure they they still exist or at least exist as the way they used to. But it for a long time it was common in the sort of charity rating industry or the philanthropy rating industry to rate organizations based on uh things like CEO pay, based on ratios of overhead to program expenses, these kinds of things, without paying any attention to the cause area, without paying any attention to outcome metrics. So EA, uh I think rightly criticized this approach to charity evaluation. Now, of course, there's there's a way of taking that too far in the extreme in the other direction and focusing only on outcome metrics. Um, but I think you know, some healthy criticism of these sort of uh generic input metrics as a source of evaluation for. For giving decisions was necessary and a sort of helpful corrective to debate and practice.

SPEAKER_01 44:07

I absolutely agree. And I think there are other examples one could take where you don't have to agree with effective altruism's analysis of the solution to think that they're framing the problem is hugely valuable because they've done that in a way I think that brings a lot of conceptual clarity. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about, because I know it's something that you're uh working on at the moment and have written about, was um around the question of the role of companies and corporations when it comes to their philanthropic giving. And I'm this is probably too big a topic to be opening up at this point in the conversation, but I just wanted to touch on it because you had a really interesting argument that I that I read in one of your papers about resurrecting to in some way Milton Friedman's arguments about, you know, actually the social responsibility of business is just to get on and you know make their profits. Not for the reasons that Friedman himself made that argument, but for a different reason about some of the things we've been talking about to do with democracy. Maybe you could say a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

Right. So most people, you know, at least remember Milton Friedman's criticism of corporate philanthropy or corporate social responsibility as sort of defending um, you know, shareholder property rights and perhaps uh sort of ethical egoism, right? The reason why um, in some people's interpretations, uh Milton Friedman thinks that corporations should not engage in philanthropy and related endeavors is because um corporations are the property uh of their shareholders. Um, and so any diversion of profits to social ends constitutes a theft of shareholders' money, right? It's uh a sort of illicit uh discretion of managers to champion their favorite social causes, um, which is injurious to shareholders. And some people think perhaps relatedly or additionally, Friedman was committed to some kind of ethical egoism where he thought that you know the job of the corporation is to maximize profits and that people in general, or or certainly corporations, have no obligations to society or to third parties. What I've tried to do in one of you know my pieces and in some of my other work is to draw out um what already exists in Friedman's view, which is in fact um an interesting democratic commitment. Um one of the arguments um that Friedman makes against um corporate philanthropy or or CSR more broadly has uh a democratic motivation. Um so Friedman appears to be also concerned that corporate philanthropy might constitute a sort of usurpation of the popular will, right? Corporations or or managers of corporations making decisions about social welfare represent an interest group, um, a subset of the sort of voting population. Um and what he says is that you know, when managers you know dedicate corporate profits to some kind of social end, what they are admitting or what they are trying to do is acknowledging that they have failed to convince a majority of the public to support a particular cause and they are circumventing the democratic process. Um, so that's a pretty interesting concern because most people, at least in their in their memory or in their interpretation of Friedman, don't necessarily see him as a democratic theorist or a democratic critic of the market. Um I think, I think, you know, that support is there textually and very interesting to sort of extract and extend um that criticism to think about the role of corporate philanthropy in a healthy democracy and again how corporate philanthropy might raise some some concerns about the relationship to democratic institutions and norms.

SPEAKER_01 47:53

Yeah, and I agreed, and I find it really fascinating because as you say, I was very much in the camp of having remembered Friedman's critique from just the one perspective and actually being reminded that you know he did have these other concerns and that those, as as you do, can be kind of built upon and elaborated upon. I thought was really fascinating. Um I'm aware that we're coming up to the end of the time that we had allotted. So I just wanted to say thank you ever so much, Ted, for finding some time to come on the podcast. It was really great to talk. I can honestly tell any everybody listening that there's an enormous number of questions that we didn't manage to get round to, but I think we managed to you know cover a lot of topics there. Hopefully it was you know really interesting for people listening, and I certainly really enjoyed it. Um so I just wanted to wish you all the best uh for your work in the future.

SPEAKER_02 48:33

Thank you, Rodri. It's been tremendously rewarding to engage with you and to have the opportunity to share some of my ideas with your listeners.

SPEAKER_01 48:48

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Ted for finding some time to come on the podcast. It was really great to have a chance to talk. I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can find lots of the things that we talked about, the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, paper uh Ted's paper on uh corporate philanthropy and and other things where you can get his book. If you're interested in other musings on philanthropy and civil society issues, then do check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com where you can find lots of articles, including about various sort of philosophical questions on philanthropy of the kind we were discussing in that conversation. There's also lots of updates and short guides and all the back issues of this podcast, including one uh previous old episode on the philosophy of philanthropy, so do check all of those out and I'll put links where you can find them. If you want to follow me on social media, you can find me these days on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Uh, if you've got ideas for people that I could talk to on the podcast or topics that we could cover that you'd find interesting, just drop me a line. You can find my contact details at the Why Philanthropy Matters website. Other than that, it just remains to say like, subscribe, tell all your friends about it, do give personal recommendations because I think that goes a long way. If you're so minded, leave us a nice review wherever it is that you get at your podcasts, because that also helps uh bump us up the algorithm. And I will see you next time. Bye.