Barcelona Metropolis

Tackling poverty

Mudrik: On the other hand, our ethical reflexes, if you like, have also expanded. Today, I get information about human suffering that is not related to my wellbeing here and I developed this empathy muscle I can relate to that. So maybe modernity also led to an expansion of our moral responsibility, of our empathy.

Singer: Yes... I think our understanding of the world as a whole has extended our empathy to some degree, obviously still to a far too limited degree. We’re still not doing nearly enough to help people in extreme poverty. We had another example of that just now during the Covid crisis, in that in the affluent countries, everybody got two vaccines if they wanted them, then they got a booster. But in some low-income countries, the percentage of people who had even one vaccination was very low, and we were not doing enough to make the vaccines available all around the world, even though it was in our own interest to stop new variants developing. But we still didn’t do it, we still thought about the short term and ourselves.

Harari: We are, historically speaking, in the best position to deal with poverty in respect to the resources we have. For much of history, poverty and the effect of poverty (such as famine and such as infectious diseases and epidemics spreading) were like uncontrollable forces of nature. Humanity simply did not have the scientific knowledge and the economic resources to overcome things like famine and plague. There were no technological means to bring food from far away and with epidemics even more so, nobody knew anything about viruses or pathogens, let alone vaccines.

Now, for really the first time in history, these are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. We have the scientific knowledge, the technology and the economic resources to make sure that no human being dies from starvation, or no human being dies from a long list of infectious diseases. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean we always have the wisdom and the compassion to use these resources. So, on the one hand, we are in the best of times. Now it’s in our power, we can solve it. On the other hand, if we don’t do it, it’s an even bigger tragedy.

Singer: We choose not to see, relatively easily. When I talk to people about poverty elsewhere in the world, people who have no particular background in this area, they are likely to say, “Oh yes, I know that there are a lot of people who are very poor and their lives are very tough, but how can we help them? The money never reaches them. It’s like pouring it down a black hole.” People say to me things like that. I think the blind spot, therefore, is the knowledge of how relatively easily and for relatively modest sums of money we can make a big difference to the lives of people in poverty. We can save their lives by distributing bed nets, so they don’t get malaria. Or we can restore their sight if they’re blind because they have cataracts. If people are living on less than $2 a day, which is the World Bank’s extreme poverty line, and you give them $1,000, you’ve given them more than their annual income. That, of course, makes a huge difference to their lives. Whereas, when we’re helping people at home, but if the poverty line, say, is $20,000 as it is in the United States, for a family anyway, and you give them $1,000, it might make them a little more comfortable for a while, but it’s not going to be life changing in the way that it will be for somebody for whom it’s their entire annual income. I’m not sure whether people don’t know that, or they look away, or they don’t believe it because then they would feel more of an obligation to get serious.

Restore confidence in institutions

Harari: I think that, again, part of the problem here goes back to the institutions and the lack of trust in institutions. Because many people would say, if with $1,000 I could save the life of a person or the eyesight of a child, then yes, I would gladly do it, but I can’t do it myself. There is always an institution in between. A lot of people develop a deep mistrust and cynicism about institutions. “No, it's just some sham. All the money goes to the executives. It’s corrupt.” In the end it’s largely a question of how you build trust in institutions. Because most ideals, in order to be realised, can’t be done individually. Globally, the only thing that really works are institutions. And for that, people need to trust institutions.

Singer: That’s exactly what the charity The Life You Can Save tries to tell people how their money can be used specifically for a certain reason or cause. What we’re trying to show is that there are independently assessed charities that have been evaluated to be highly effective and to make the best possible use of any donation they receive. If they click on a button to donate, 100% of what they donate will go to those charities. They can feel confident that what they’re donating is really being highly effective.

Singer: People will know what altruism is. They know that it’s wanting to do good for others, and that’s been around for a long time. But the emphasis on effectiveness is what is new about the effective altruism movement. It’s about people who are trying to find out the best causes to donate to, and within those causes, the best organisations to support. It has become a quite extensive debate with a lot of different voices. Some people think that trying to help people in extreme poverty is one of the most effective things you can do. Others think that it’s trying to stop the suffering of animals, particularly the billions and tens of billions of animals now existing in industrial factory farms… Other people point to the risks that our species will become extinct.

Harari: Maybe I would just add that we just need to be careful not to turn this into an argument about what is the most effective. There is room for everybody. If somebody thinks that the most effective is to take care of animal suffering and somebody else thinks, “No, we should help people in poverty”. Focus on doing what you think is most effective, don’t try to convince the other guys that they are wrong, there is enough for everybody.

Mudrik: Perhaps the idea that there are so many ways to improve the world, so many problems, and that we can’t solve them all, has a paralysing effect.

Singer: I think it would be a pity if that happens. If people get involved in some of these issues and feel that they are achieving something, it adds meaning to their lives. In this material world, particularly people who have been reasonably successful at providing for themselves and their family in material terms, lack a sense of purpose. I think finding a cause that is really worthwhile is probably the best thing that you can do, for those you are doing good to, but also for yourself.

Harari: I agree that it’s best you don’t choose one thing. Obviously, you can't do everything. Nobody can do everything. So instead of being paralysed and overwhelmed by all these different issues, just choose one issue which is close to your heart and then try to choose compassionately. Going back to some of the historical issues with altruism and with ethics, you see people that they focus, they try to do good through the most controversial means. I’ll give an example: you’re a Christian fundamentalist and you can choose whether to help the poor or whether to fight against gay marriage, and you choose to fight against gay marriage. So why not choose the kind of thing that everybody would agree on, nobody would become upset with you? Why choose the one thing that is bound to at least cause controversy, and that could cause a lot of suffering to some?

Singer: We’ve had similar debates on other issues with Christians too. In Australia, we have had over the last two or three years, a lot of debates about legislation to allow people to choose to die when they are terminally ill. Obviously that is, like gay marriage, adults consenting, and a person who wants to die, and a doctor who’s prepared to help that person to die. And we have now, in most of the Australian states, legalised that. But it took quite a battle, and the Christians were at the forefront of opposing it. Although it seems to me that it clearly reduces suffering, and it doesn’t harm people who don’t want it. Nobody is being forced to choose assisted dying. I think it’s strange that people should put a lot of energy into fighting things that competent adults are choosing and which doesn’t seem to really harm anybody.

Harari: I can understand why they oppose it. What I find kind of objectionable is the immense amount of energy invested in it. There are so many people who want to live, and you can help them live, instead of focusing on the relatively few cases of people who want to die, and you pour your resources into preventing them. Now there are so many people who really want to live, but they don’t have enough food or medicine, and you can really save them by pouring the resources there. So, wouldn’t it be kind of easier and more compassionate for everybody to just focus on that?

Mudrik: I guess history is filled with cases where people don’t go along the routes that you’re suggesting to them, and choose to fight those battles that you’re here fighting again, like the ones you were describing. And as a historian, you probably have an explanation to why that happened.

Yuval Noah Harari: The suspicion is that there is something other than compassion that dominates. There are political interests involved or there are all kinds of dark psychological forces, like hatred and bigotry. It could be that there is some compassion there as well, but diluted with a lot of hatred and anger. We know that people are almost addicted to this righteous anger, to proving that they are better than others, to having these arguments about who is right and who is wrong, instead of focusing on your belief and doing what’s right according to it.

Singer: If you’re a middle class – or above – citizen of an affluent country, you’ve got some money to spare, and you should be thinking about using some of that to help people in extreme poverty. It’s very hard to say how much. It varies, of course, not just with income, but with the dependence you have and so on. But the traditional 10% tie is not a bad standard to aim for. So that’s a start. I think you should be responsible for what you’re eating. But as I say, if you take various steps, I’m not going to be that critical. When my wife and I first became aware of the suffering of animals more than 50 years ago, we decided to stop buying factory farm products. That was our first step, and we continued to eat meat for a little while and then we decided that we didn’t really need it. In general, try not to support a system that is inflicting great suffering on animals, because factory farming just wastes the food that we have, to feed those animals. It has climate change implications and possibly pandemic implications as well. So, try to contribute to changing the world food system. And then of course, there are the general things about trying to be a decent person to those around you. I obviously don’t want to neglect them. I don’t think we just need to worry about distant strangers and animals.

Harari: It’s not about obeying this or that set of laws coming from above or coming from below, or wherever. Morality is about being aware of suffering and what we can do to alleviate it. The other thing is that morality tends towards moderation and not extremism. One of the big problems in the history of morality is that both secular and religious people confuse morality with extremism; that the more extreme you are, the better a person you are. You see it in so many different movements. But morality tends towards moderation.

Mudrik: Yuval, humanity has widened the scale. Would you say that humanity becomes more moral and more compassionate with time, or am I too optimistic here?

Harari: Most of the big changes in history are not uniform. You see the feminist revolution and the very fast changes and positive changes in attitudes towards gender and towards women. At the same time, you see the ecological crisis and they are happening at the same time. They don’t cancel each other out; they don’t add up. Over the long term, I think we cannot say that there is any marked improvement in human morality, because even the very real achievements of the last century, are just the last century, and who knows what’s waiting for us in 10 or 20 or 50 years? This could be just a very small blip in history.

Humanity is becoming more and more powerful and unified over thousands of years: not in the sense that everybody agrees or there are no wars, but everything becomes just a single system. From a situation with thousands of independent, isolated tribes, we now have one global system. But we can’t say that we see any clear improvement in human morality or any clear improvement in happiness either. We are not significantly happier. There is no clear trend towards better lives over thousands of years.

Maybe the pendulum just swings far between extremes. Look at the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century; they reached a depth of cruelty that may not have been reached anywhere previously in human history. Again, in the last few decades, the pendulum swung in a positive direction, but now in the last few years it’s again swinging in a very dangerous direction. Maybe in 20 or 50 years we could have totalitarian regimes worse than anything we’ve seen in the 20^th century.

Singer: I certainly hope you’re wrong about that.

Harari: I also hope I’m wrong. It’s just a possibility, it’s not a prophecy. But we should be realistic that it is a possibility. It depends on us, on the decisions we take, on who we vote for and what kind of institutions we support. I mean, it goes back to the beginning of this talk. We are still in the position that we can do something to prevent the worst-case scenarios.