The life you can save

CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

Professor Peter Singer has been called the “world’s most influential living philosopher.” He’s often credited with starting the modern animal rights movement, and with the influence that his writing has had on the development of effective altruism. He is also known for his often controversial critique of the sanctity of life ethics in bioethics.

Professor Peter Singer is the Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Since 2005, he has combined this position with that of Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He is also the co-founder of The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit devoted to spreading his ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty.

In 2009 Peter Singer wrote his book “The Life You Can Save” to show that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but ethically indefensible. In the tenth anniversary edition released in late 2019, Peter brings his landmark work up to date. In addition to restating his compelling arguments about how we should respond to extreme poverty, he examines the progress we are making and recounts how the first edition transformed the lives of both readers and the people they helped.

Our reporter Steve Grimwade caught up with Peter Singer via Skype from New York.

STEVE GRIMWADE
For the most part we'll focus on the reissue of your book, "The Life You Can Save". But first, I wanted to begin in a slightly obscure place. What did your parents do and how did they model what work could be for you?

PETER SINGER
Well, my father was an importer of coffee and tea and a rather small business that he ran, and I would not say that he modelled a good way to work because he always seemed stressed, he always seemed worried that his customers might not pay him and then he would be losing a lot of money. And I don't think he really enjoyed his work. I think he enjoyed the holidays and periods when he could relax, he enjoyed being with the family, but the work was just a means to an end.

My mother was a physician, so she worked part time, at least once my sister and I were around. She didn't work full time, but she did enjoy her work. She would talk to us occasionally about patients that she'd seen and the kinds of issues she talked about. She had a particular interest in psychological medicine, although she was not qualified as a psychiatrist or psychotherapist, but she obviously was giving psychological counsel to some of the people that she saw and that was interesting. So in a way, perhaps she was more of an example of how to live and do meaningful work than my father was.

STEVE GRIMWADE
What was it then that led you to study philosophy both at Melbourne and Oxford?



PETER SINGER
Well it was really quite accidental, I have to say. I applied to do law at Melbourne and was accepted for law and part of the process was that you went to talk to an adviser or counsellor and the counsellor I saw, who was a rather young Sandy Clark, he eventually became Dean of the Faculty of Law, he looked at my academic record and my results of matriculation and saw that I'd done well in literature and history and said that I might find law a bit dry and had I thought about combining law with an arts degree. And I hadn't really thought about that, but it did sound quite interesting, so I decided to do that.

And then the other accident occurred was that my sister, who is older than me, had a boyfriend who'd studied some philosophy and I talked to him a bit about philosophy. I knew nothing about philosophy; it wasn't taught in high schools then. I did know about history and I enjoyed history, so history was one of the arts subjects I was going to enrol in, but for something different, I decided to give philosophy a try and here I am today.

STEVE GRIMWADE

You did a…

PETER SINGER
I never finished the law degree, by the way. I completed the arts degree and then got a scholarship to go and do a masters, suspended the law degree, but I think probably you can't suspend for 50 years or whatever it's been now, so that's it for law.

STEVE GRIMWADE

I think we're better off for that. I'm interested in the temper of philosophy at the time. You said that you were at the right place, at the right time, when philosophy was becoming more practical. How was philosophy changing at that time?



PETER SINGER
Well you have to see this against a background of how it had been during the '50s and right up into certainly the mid-'60s where philosophy, English language philosophy, was dominated by what was known as the ordinary language philosophy or linguistic analysis. Philosophers were basically concerned to analyse the meanings of words, so that if you were doing ethics, for instance, you were likely to be discussing what we mean when we say you ought to do this or it's wrong to do that or something is good. But philosophy was not seen as a normative enterprise, that is it was not seen as being action guiding. So one of the leading philosophers at the time, AJ Ayer, actually wrote that some people are disappointed with philosophy because they come to it looking for guidance, but that's a mistake, giving guidance is the role of the preacher, he said and philosophers are not preachers, they do this analysis of the meanings of moral terms, which is neutral in terms of what you ought to do.

So it was against that background that the student movement of the later '60s, the protests against the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, led to students demanding more relevance from their courses in general, whatever those courses might be. And in terms of philosophy, the obvious place to respond to those demands for relevance at the time was to look at the big moral issues of the day, to look at, for example, was the war in Vietnam a 'just' war, well what is a 'just' war? Philosophers and theologians have talked about the idea of a just war back as far as Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. Or you could look at the Civil Rights Movement, demanding equality for people irrespective of their race. What's the basis of equality, what are the justifications for departing from equality in some respects? That was another clearly relevant philosophical issue.

So those things were just starting to show their head at the time when I came to Oxford as a graduate student and I wanted to write my thesis on the question of civil disobedience, is civil disobedience justifiable in a democracy? Obviously the civil disobedience had been important not only in Martin Luther King's Civil Rights Movement, but also during the protests against the Vietnam War. So this was something that it wasn't clear, at least initially, that the university was going to approve, because it was really rather different from how moral philosophy had been understood. But they did approve it and I got some helpful supervision from Professor RM Hare who was a professor of moral philosophy there and I think that's an indication that philosophy was already starting to change in that way.

STEVE GRIMWADE

I think philosophy was far from neutral for you. I mean you've also written that discussion is not enough, what is the point of relating philosophy to the public and personal affairs if we don't take the conclusions seriously. How has philosophy tested and changed your own values?

PETER SINGER
Well the first important change in my values that philosophy led to was it got me to think about the moral status of animals, which was not a topic that I'd really ever thought about until I came to Oxford and here I was, 24 years old, a graduate student, I'd never thought about whether it was okay to eat meat. That wasn't a topic anyone talked about. You really virtually never met a vegetarian. If you did, that person was probably a Hindu or maybe they thought that meat was bad for their health. But I'd certainly never met anybody who said, no we shouldn't eat animals because animals have a moral status that makes it wrong for us to treat them the way we do treat them and kill them for meat. So you know, coming up in a chance conversation with a fellow graduate student led me to think about that issue and start reading about it and pretty soon when I got into this, I thought, hmm, this is not good, it doesn't look like it's possible to justify the way we're treating animals at the moment.

So I talked to my wife about that. I was married before we came to Oxford and we decided to stop eating them. So there was one very big change that philosophy had already made in our lives. And that led us to think about other issues, including what should we, as reasonably, comfortably off people in an affluent society, be doing to help people in great need, perhaps starving or without the basics of life in developing countries. So around that time we also started tithing, giving 10 per cent of our income to - at that stage it went to Oxfam, which was the major organisation that we were familiar with working to help people in extreme poverty.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Only a year after you'd finished your Bachelor of Philosophy at Oxford, you wrote an essay called Famine, Affluence and Morality. Can you tell us about this essay and what drove you to write it?

PETER SINGER
There were, in a way, two quite different stimuli for writing that essay. One was an invitation from one of the professors of the college where I was then teaching, Professor Ronald Dworkin, who is a very famous professor of jurisprudence and was a member of the board of a new journal that was being started, a new philosophy journal called Philosophy & Public Affairs. And again, going back to what I said before, that was an innovation that philosophy might have something to say about public affairs. So he was on the board and he'd been asked to solicit papers and he spoke to me and said, is there anything you might be interested in contributing? So that was the one stimulus.

And the other was the fact that around this time there was this crisis in what is now Bangladesh, but was then East Pakistan. There was an autonomy movement in East Pakistan, it wanted to become autonomous from the other part of Pakistan, which was across the other side of India, the part that is still called Pakistan. And this autonomy movement was brutally crushed by the Pakistani army, so brutally that nine million people fled across the border into India and became refugees in India. And this was an immense crisis. India was a much poorer nation than it is now, it was struggling to cope with nine million people in need of food and sanitation and shelter. It appealed for help to wealthier nations and some help was given. Oxfam certainly started soliciting for donations, the government gave a bit, but very little compared to other priorities.

So I thought this is an issue that I should write about. As I said, we were already tithing and I thought, well really we do have an obligation to do something substantial, not just to throw a few pennies in a tin when it's rattled under our nose, but to really think about how much we ought to be giving to help people in such great need.

STEVE GRIMWADE
I believe that this essay really is the foreground to the book, The Life You Can Save, as does the thought experiment of the girl in the pond. I'm sorry to ask you to do this, but do you mind relating it to listeners?



PETER SINGER
You're strolling across a park in which there's a pond. It's a shallow pond, you know that, in summer you've seen kids playing in it, but there's nobody else in it now, except then as you walk you notice there's something splashing in the pond. You look more closely and it's a child, but it's a much smaller child than the ones who played in the pond and this child is too small to stand up and seems to be in great danger of drowning. You look around, you'd expect obviously that there'd be parents or a babysitter, someone looking after the child, but you just can't see anyone. You don't know how the child got into the pond, but it's going to be up to you to save the child; nobody else is around. But then you have this less noble thought that unfortunately you've just put on your very best shoes and good clothes and if you jump into the pond, they're likely to get ruined and you'll be up for some significant expense in replacing them.

Now at this point I ask you to pause and think. Suppose that you didn’t save the child, suppose that you were thinking of the expense you'd be up to and you decided to forget that you'd ever seen the child and just walk on, leaving the child almost certainly to drown. Would that be okay? Would that be something that was all right to do? Fortunately most people, when you ask this question, I've often asked it to audiences to raise their hands, they say no, that would not be okay, that would be a terrible thing to do, to put a pair of shoes above a life of a child, you can't do that.

So then having got to that result, I ask people to think about their own situation right now with regard to people who are dying in low-income countries, because in some cases they don't get enough to eat, more commonly nowadays maybe they get diseases that kill them like malaria, which is preventable or measles or perhaps they don't have safe drinking water, so their children get diarrhoea and die from that. There are a number of preventable, cheaply preventable causes that children die from according to UNICEF, something like 5.3 million children are dying each year. Most of those deaths - these are children under five - most of these deaths are from preventable causes. So if you've got money to spare, to spend on nice clothes or expensive shoes, but you could give it to an organisation that would save the life of one of these children, are you really all that different from the person who doesn't save the child in the pond because they don't want to ruin their shoes?

I can easily feel that there's a psychological difference, because you don't see the child in front of you, but think about it, is there really a moral difference between those two and if so, what is it exactly?



STEVE GRIMWADE
So what is it about human nature that potentially separates our thinking and our intuition, like I mean the fact that we can philosophically understand that there is no moral difference, however we try to establish some other difference in our minds or in our hearts or in some part of ourselves.



PETER SINGER
I think of it this way. We are evolved animals, evolved social mammals. That means that for millions of years our ancestors, human ancestors and other primate ancestors before we separated out, lived in small social groups, had to care for our children, if we didn't care for our children, they wouldn't survive and we wouldn't pass on our genes. Had to also participate in the social group, support others in the group in need, build relationships, reciprocal relationships which might help us in times of need with others. And so all of that gave rise to some basic instincts to help people. So you see the child in the pond, you have this instinct to help this small, helpless, non-threatening human being. But that is pretty much at the instinctive level and it leads to feelings of empathy or compassion perhaps and to a strong urge to help the helpless.

If, however, the people we need to help are far away, if we can't see them and if in fact we can't even identify exactly who we're helping, then those emotional impulses just don't come into play. Our rational faculties, which of course is what I'm appealing to now and your listeners in this discussion are thinking about the ideas that I'm putting forward, so they are responding at the level of reasoning and that's when I ask them to say what's the difference between these two cases, the child in the pond, the child dying of malaria in another country. I'm asking people to think and reason about it and I think if we do that, we can see that the cases are at least close, no identical, but in important respects, close.

But that doesn't mean that the moral impulse just follows on that rational judgment that they're close and I think that's why it's still hard, even when you go through this process, it's still hard for people to feel it in the same way in terms of motivation. That makes it perhaps somewhat less likely, not at all impossible, but somewhat less likely that people will be moved to act.

STEVE GRIMWADE
I suspect your life's work is the answer to this question, but you've written that evolution has no moral direction. What are the ways we can increase our moral evolution? Is it possible to increase empathy in society in various ways?

PETER SINGER

I've argued that we can expand the circle of moral concern and that that's an important thing to do, so this is really - this idea of expanding it beyond the social group that we're part of, which as I say, used to be quite a small social group, maybe 50, 100, 150 people in the kind of tribal groups that early humans lived in, we've expanded that considerably, we've expanded it to include, I guess, our fellow citizens, to some extent anyway, even if we don't really think about them to quite the same way that we think about immediate family or friends. But I think we need to expand it further than that. I think, for example, we need to expand it to all human beings. Most people would agree with that, again at least at a theoretical level.

I also think, as I said before, that we need to push beyond the barrier of our species and recognise that non-human animals are capable of feeling pain, at least many of them are and that their pain matters and that the fact that they're not human beings is not a reason for ignoring their pain or, for that matter, ignoring the possibilities that they can enjoy their lives. And I also think that we ought to extend this circle, not just from the present, from people who are alive now, but into the future, which has of course become a much more critical issue with climate change, with our awareness of what we're doing to the planet and what we're doing to the planet not only right now. I know if you're in Australia, particularly I guess if you're in New South Wales, you feel that what we're doing to the planet right now is really terrible. But what we're doing to the planet for the next 50, 100, 200 years, these changes we're making, in the absence of any miracle technology to soak up the carbon out of the atmosphere, these changes will have a very long-lasting effect and a negative effect. So we also need to expand the circle in the direction of the future.

STEVE GRIMWADE
How can your original thesis on civil disobedience impact our support for groups like Extinction Rebellion?

PETER SINGER
That's an interesting question. I have actually come back to that, I just taught a course at Princeton on practical ethics and I've been talking about climate change in this course for a few years. But this year for the first time I introduced the idea of civil disobedience in the context of climate change. And one of the things I said to the students, of course I'm very old compared to the students, I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War, as I said and to have written about it, which for them is history. But I said, you know, there were huge protests in relation to the Vietnam War, I was involved in them in Melbourne, 20,000, 40,000, 50,000 or more people out in the streets, blocking the traffic, protesting the war. And I've been surprised that although climate change is in many ways a bigger issue, will affect more people in the long run than that war affected, although the war of course had a big effect on millions of people in Vietnam, but there has been very limited civil disobedience on that and that again may be something to do with the nature of the change, with the fact that we don't see the victims in the same way that we got those horrific pictures of, for example, the naked child who had been burned with napalm, running through the streets in a city in Vietnam. So the lack of that kind of dramatic cause and effect relationship, I think, maybe has made less civil disobedience than there otherwise would have been.

But I think it's quite justifiable. I think it's pretty clear that what our leaders are doing is wrong, that it's shortsighted, that it fails to take into account the interest both of people in the poorer parts of the world who are less able to defend themselves against climate change and also those future generations. And I think given that civil - and I stress civil disobedience, I'm talking about non-violent, civil breaches of the law and also breaches where the protesters accept the penalty of the law, as Martin Luther King and Ghandi did and use the occasion of any trial to make their point of view clear and to show their sincerity and their commitment - I believe that that kind of civil disobedience is justifiable in the context of climate change.

STEVE GRIMWADE
I'm going to return back to The Life You Can Save and going back to psychology, I'm interested to hear from you how psychology is offering insights on how we can best nudge people's propensity to give.

PETER SINGER
Psychology is starting to test what it is that leads people to give. That's one interesting area of study. And it's also doing research into the effect of giving on people's wellbeing. So these are two interesting areas. Now in terms of the first, a lot of the research has suggested that emotional appeals will do better than rational appeals. That goes back to what I was talking about earlier and particularly people give more if there's an identifiable individual, even if they don't see this individual, if they're just told, for example, your donation will help and then you give someone's name and you say, she's nine years old and she lives in Malawi, people are more likely to donate than if you just say, there are many children in Malawi who go to bed hungry, you can help them. So that's one interesting fact and to me a somewhat depressing fact, of course, because I'd like to be able to use more reasoning appeals.

So there is ongoing work. I've been involved in some research into trying to use rational appeals and really see whether there's a particular segment of the population that they work better in. That's one set of questions. But then the other point that I do often mention in my writing and public speaking about this issue is that there is strong evidence that people who are generous, who help others, who think about the wellbeing of others, actually enjoy their lives more than those who are more narrowly self-interested. The people who are more altruistic, more outgoing, find their lives more fulfilling, they're more satisfied, they have a meaning and a purpose that sometimes other people lack and it's pretty clear that this is not simply a correlation, but that there is really - the cause of giving to others actually takes you out of yourself, gives you this meaning and purpose and maybe makes you less anxious about bad things happening to you because you know that there are a lot of people who are going to be worse off than you.



STEVE GRIMWADE
I guess one of the effects you've had in this area is the work of effective altruism and the rigour that we bring to research. Where is the best research into assessing interventions happening?

PETER SINGER
It's happening in non-profit organisations like GiveWell and ImpactMatters. They're organisations that do this kind of research. They are going out into the field and looking at the impact on the ground of particular aid projects and where possible, they're comparing that with places where these aid projects are - these interventions are not taking place, so they get a real comparison and they can see what difference the aid intervention is making. It's quite expensive research to do. Obviously you need skilled people out there talking to people in the villages and making measurements, assessing what's going on, but the research gets gathered in a few places online.

So there is an organisation that sprung out of the first edition of my book, The Life You Can Save. It's called, The Life You Can Save and there is an Australian branch of that, you can find online at thelifeyoucansave.org.au and they put together a lot of this research and you can find a list of recommended charities based on that research. Incidentally, if you give through The Life You Can Save, for Australians, these are tax deductible donations. In the United States there's an organisation called GiveWell that does some of this research and it's a valuable source of information too.

STEVE GRIMWADE
What's most impressive about the book, or not most impressive, but another aspect is the fact that you actually outline the most effective interventions that your money can achieve or can assist with. Perhaps you can mention a few of those here.

PETER SINGER
Yes, there are quite a few organisations, many different things you can do. The simple sort of thing is you can donate to the Against Malaria Foundation which will use that money to distribute bed nets in places where malaria is prevalent. Malaria is a pretty bad disease. I actually had malaria myself many years ago when I went to New Guinea. I felt dreadful for a while and it came back a couple of times too, but I had good medical treatment and I survived, obviously. But children particularly often don't survive malaria, especially if they're not really well nourished and they don't get the drugs that they need. So malaria is a killer and you can save children's lives, as well as preventing many more cases of illness by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation.

Another rather different sort of organisation is something called Village Enterprise. Village Enterprise goes into villages, they're working in East Africa mainly, they go into villages and they offer both an asset and some training. Now the asset might be cash or it might be something like chickens and the training is about using the asset to start a small business. So there's a period of training; in addition, once the training is over, there's mentoring, there's somebody that people can go to if they have problems. And when Village Enterprise goes into a village, they also organise, help people to organise themselves into a group so that they can support each other. They may support each other with loans to get through tough times, or they may support each other just with moral and social support. So that's also been tested pretty carefully and it has been shown that in a whole range of different countries, not just in East Africa, but in other countries where it's been tried, it does leave people better off, it helps them to get out of poverty.



STEVE GRIMWADE
And also I think we should note at this point that you had some wonderful success in retaining or getting the rights to your book back and that people can actually download an electronic copy of The Life You Can Save for free from that website, which is an amazing thing to be able to do.

PETER SINGER

It is, it's wonderful and as far as particularly Australian and New Zealand rights are concerned, I want to thank Text Publishing who are the publishers of the original edition 10 years ago and they simply donated the rights back to me so that I could pass them on to the organisation, The Life You Can Save. So thankful to them, the book is available for free as an e-book and as an audio book and I hope lots of people will download it and by the way, if you do want to listen to the audio book, you will find that we got some celebrities, who also donated their time to read chapters. The actress Kristen Bell from Frozen and from the TV series, The Good Place reads one. Paul Simon, the great singer/songwriter, somebody I got to know personally since being in the US, reads another chapter. Other people from The Good Place, Mike Schur and Marc Evan Jackson are reading. Stephen Fry, who people may know as an actor, comedian, may hear him on the BBC, he reads in his beautiful English accent. I read a chapter in my Australian accent. We have an Indian actress, Shabana Azmi, reading. And we have an East African woman, Winnie Auma, reading. So it's kind of a global range of accents of people reading English, which is very suitable for a global project.

STEVE GRIMWADE
You have a very eclectic group of friends.

PETER SINGER
Yes, they're not all my personal friends. They're sometimes friends of friends or contacts, but yes, some of them are personal friends, it's great.

STEVE GRIMWADE

Is campaigning for philanthropy more effective or important than campaigning for greater government aid?



PETER SINGER
I think you can do both. I certainly am dismayed by the level that Australian government aid has fallen to. I think last time I checked, it was about 0.22 or 0.21 per cent, which means that for every $100 the nation earns, $0.21 are going to foreign aid. That's miserable. It's miserable even by comparison with other countries who I don't think any Australians would think of as wealthier than Australia, the United Kingdom, for example. Many Australians visit the United Kingdom, do they think, oh wow, this country's three times as wealthy as Australia? Nobody thinks that, but the United Kingdom is giving three times as much aid in proportion to its national income as Australia is and I think we ought to be ashamed of that. So yes, we ought to be active citizens, we ought to support parties that will restore foreign aid to something at least like it was, used to be higher than it is now and I think it should be like the United Kingdom's, at least 0.7 per cent, which is what the United Nations recommended many years ago, which a few nations have met. So yeah, let's do that, but let's not feel, oh when we've done that, we've done everything we can and there's nothing more we can do, because we can give ourselves as well and I think it's important to do that and show that we want that aid to go, as well as supporting those political parties that will restore foreign aid.



STEVE GRIMWADE
People may think of philosophers as idealistic, but you're incredibly pragmatic as well. So in the book you don’t ask us to give everything away, rather you've established quite realistic targets. How did you come about that approach and those figures?

PETER SINGER
I suppose when I was younger and in the article you mentioned a while back, Famine, Affluence and Morality, I did have much more demanding levels. But I realised that there were very few people who were going to respond to a highly demanding requirement, so I thought for a while about just calling, asking people to tithe, to give 10 per cent of their income. But really that's quite a lot for people who don't have very much and rather too little for people who have more. I thought we should have a progressive scale, like the income tax scale; the more you earn, the higher the percentage of your income you can afford to pay in income tax and the higher percentage you can afford to donate. So I started looking at figures which I thought would not impose a real hardship on anyway, because they start much lower than 10 per cent, they start at one per cent, but then as people earn more, they rise and they do then go above 10 per cent, they go up to 33 per cent, a third of people's income for those people who are very wealthy, who are really earning in the millions. So it's no hardship for them to give a third of that.

Then when I got all those figures, I looked at the number of people, the US publishes figures for how many people there are in each of these income ranges for tax purposes, so you could calculate how much would be raised if people gave the suggested amounts. And I was really surprised when I added that up, just how much this is, that the amount that affluent people of the world could give, without serious hardship, is many times, at last five times the amount of foreign aid that all the governments of the world give. So this would be a huge resource that if we applied it effectively, would dramatically reduce extreme poverty, would dramatically reduce the number of children dying before their fifth birthday, would enable, for example, every elderly person in the world who develops cataracts to have those cataracts removed, which of course all Australians can do under our health service. But there are millions of people in the world who are blind because they have cataracts and they can't afford the treatment to get them removed. So there's such a lot that we could do if people would only give at that, as I say, I think reasonably modest levels that I'm suggesting.



STEVE GRIMWADE
Timing is everything. Should we take time to develop a better understanding of what our own strengths are and how we can grow them to maximise our utility for all? Or should we be fighting on the frontlines of crises straight away?

PETER SINGER
No, I think it's worth reflecting. After all, you're going to spend a long time in your career, so if people are at the stage where they're choosing a career, it's been calculated that we spend about 80,000 hours, typically, over our lifetimes working in our career. So if you're going to spend 80,000 hours, it's certainly worth spending one per cent of that, 800 hours, you would think, thinking about your career, but nobody does that. That's a lot of hours really, but you would think it would be worth it. So anyway, stopping to think for a lot more than people do, not just going on in some sort of preordained path because some school counsellor sort of did a test and said, oh you'd be good at this or that, but really think about how you can have a fulfilling life and do good at the same time. There is a website, which not coincidentally is named 80,000 Hours, 80000hours.org, where you can find a lot of information on a variety of possible careers that can be both fulfilling for you and making a positive difference in the world.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Is there any advice that you'd give to your students on what it means to be a philosopher?

PETER SINGER
So the advice that I would give is philosophy is an interesting thing to study and it's also something that can benefit you, even if you don't become a philosopher, because there are few opportunities for philosophers in the world today and the competition for jobs, when they open up, is really intense, much more intense than it was when I was looking for a job in the early 1970s. So don't go into philosophy initially thinking, I'm going to make a career and be a philosopher. Think, I'm going to learn to think in various ways and that'll be useful in whatever occupation I'm in, but it'll also be useful in thinking about my life and making life decisions about the path that I want to go in, because these are - philosophers study big questions. Socrates said the important question is how I ought to live and he said the unexamined life is not worth living. So examine your life, think about the path you're going in and philosophy can help you with those questions.

STEVE GRIMWADE
Finally, the next time I get a windfall, what would you like me to think?



PETER SINGER
I would like you to think that there are people who need the windfall that you've got a lot more than you do. It's nice to have it, I'm sure there are some things that you can think of that you'd enjoy and distribute to other people in your family and the people you care about. But save a significant part of it for people who just don't have the things that pretty much every Australian does. I know we have people in poverty, we have homeless people, but Australians do have things that we take for granted, like safe drinking water, we have health care, we have free education for our children and we have some social security so that you're not really in danger of starving or anything like that. Whereas in other countries in the world, that's not so, so think about helping some of those people with your windfall, as well as enjoying a bit of it yourself.



STEVE GRIMWADE
Professor Singer, thank you so much for joining us today.

PETER SINGER
Thank you very much. It's been really good talking with you.

CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Peter Singer, Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on December 18, 2019. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2020, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this episode, review us on Apple Podcasts and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.