Episode #209 ... Improving our world through applied ethics. (Peter Singer, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek)
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. If you value the show as an educational resource for the rest of the world, consider supporting it on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. With that said, I hope you love the podcast today. So the other day I got a chance to interview a couple legends in the world of philosophy. I got to talk to Peter Singer and Katarzyna DeLazzari-Raddick, which by the way at the beginning of the conversation she said I could call her Kasia instead of Katarzyna.

I felt so special in the moment. You guys have no idea how much respect I have for these thinkers doing this job for so long. I felt so heard and seen in that moment.

Anyway, the two of them are pretty open to talk about anything in this conversation. So knowing that neither of them are anti-capitalists, I thought it'd be a good opportunity to continue getting philosophers' opinions on the state of the world and what they think might make that world into a better place from within the current set of tools we have. But I knew in order to do that, to get those kind of answers, I had to start the interview coming at these two as though I was one of these passionate anti-capitalists.

So I turned my hat around backwards, I threw on my "I would prefer not to Zizek" t-shirt, and I decided to go in hot. The first question I asked Peter Singer was this: Peter Singer:

You've dedicated a career to writing these books that spread awareness about the moral issues of our time, animal rights, global poverty. And you've done this while also making it easier for people to contribute to these issues via charity, should that be something they ever want to do. But a common critique you've no doubt heard all throughout your career is a sort of anti-capitalist attitude. And the critique is this, that as well-intentioned as you may be, what you really are, good sir, is someone who's just plugging holes on a sinking ship.

That liberal democratic capitalism has proven itself to be a failed system.

that these issues you're trying to raise awareness of, animal rights for instance, the exploitation of animals is not a flaw in the system that needs to be fixed. No, it's a feature of the capitalist system that is what allows for it to function at all. You need exploitation, you're never going to get rid of it altogether, and still have something we recognize as capitalism. And with every mind you change with one of your books, Peter Singer, you're not only just alleviating the symptoms of a broken system, hiding things and allowing people to keep it at the back of their mind while all this keeps going, not only that,

But what you're also doing is you're indoctrinating an entirely new generation of young adults that if they wanted to do some real good in the world, they'd just focus their efforts on revolutionizing the system entirely. But instead what they do is they ethically appease themselves with these theoretical books you write, and then spend their lives feeling content like they're actually part of any sort of solution. What would you say to that kind of critique of your work, Peter Singer? And I promise I framed it in a way that wasn't as hostile as that sounds. I'm being silly. You guys know me. I'm Steel Man in here. It's part of what makes the show fun.

And what Peter Singer said back was along the lines of, look, people have been talking about this revolution, this social utopia that's going to emerge for over 100 years now. For the record, he's been alive for many of those years, 78 of them by this point. And every time this fails, there's always some explanation, he says, for why this one wasn't the real revolution that was supposed to occur, why capitalism is going to die here very soon, just you wait.

You know, they say capitalists that benefit from this setup, their numbers are going to shrink and they're going to exploit people more. The working class are going to grow bigger and the people in it more poor and desperate. All of this, he would say, is certainly one way to view the world we're living in. But to Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Raddick, for that matter, they're just a bit more optimistic about the future. They might say comprehensive about considering the facts of what all this is, from what our history has been to what the state of the world is and what the possibilities are moving forward.

Because to view the world as though it's something that resembles what I just laid out in my question there is to Peter Singer to obscure the undeniable progress that's been made since capitalism has been the dominant economic system. And without worshipping at the altar of capitalism, we can at least acknowledge a full picture of what our present situation is.

As Singer says, fewer people are in poverty today than ever before in the history of the world. In the year 1820, 94% of the world was in extreme poverty. Today, it's less than 10%. He says fewer children are dying before their fifth birthday than ever before on planet Earth. And more broadly, the stats show life expectancy has increased from around 30 years old in the year 1870 to over 70 years old today.

And the list goes on, from literacy rates, to food availability, to access to technology, to social justice improvements. Entire books have been written by people pointing to these statistics that show all the improvements that have gone on in recent history. And what some of these people on the anti-capitalist side of things will say is that the problem with those sort of books that point out these kind of statistics is that in practice they end up reinforcing the status quo in a dangerous way. They say it's right-wing revisionist history.

Because if somebody only reads one book a year, and the only thing they read this year is something that tells them how everything's trending in the right direction, and then says nothing about all the horrors and injustices that still exist in the world, when they say it becomes very easy to ignore all the bad effects that capitalism is still having on innocent people. I mean, do we just ignore the people that fall through the cracks because of the way the current situation's set up? We can't do that.

But for someone like Peter Singer, and it should be obvious by this point, he is far from the type of person who thinks we should be ignoring the less fortunate out there. He's dedicated his life to them. And I think what Peter Singer would no doubt say is that capitalism is not perfect, alright? But if you threw out capitalism today and put some new economic system in place, there would still be problems to solve tomorrow. There is no static set of rules you can come up with that totally accounts for a dynamic human mind that's looking to exploit them.

And with as many moving parts as there are, there's no way you can set things up where there isn't someone falling through the cracks somewhere. And you can always be that kind of person that points to the problems that still exist in the world and say, "Hey look, look, that's proof right there that the whole system's horrible. We gotta replace it." But this attitude that you're not gonna do anything about the problems until the whole thing collapses one day? Well, at a certain point, that's not helping anyone.

to Peter Singer, whether you like it or not, whether you'd prefer a glorious revolution or not. If we're going to be real here, capitalism is the system we have to work with for the foreseeable future. And the more relevant question we should be asking for him is, can we use the productivity and technology of capitalism and what it does well to better distribute a decent standard of living to basically everyone? Is progress at that level something that's possible?

As Kasia DeLazari-Raddick followed up on this point in the conversation, progress, she says, certainly may be uneven in the world we live in. There may be some areas that have gotten much better, others that haven't really gotten better. Again, because of how many variables we're dealing with in these complex systems, we may fix something in one area and unintentionally create new problems in another. There's certainly much more progress that's needed, but to deny progress overall, that's something that's entirely different.

Which, by the way, Kasia de Lazare Raddick would really want to clarify what's even meant by capitalism there when people say it like that. Because as she says, when you talk about capitalism in this overly broad way, like it's a single thing, what are you even talking about at a certain point? Be more specific. For example, she says, consider the fact that Sweden and the United States are both capitalist societies.

Now, the lives of people in Sweden and the United States on average end up being very different things. From the happiness index, to the prevalence of health problems, to inequality, to social cohesion and the ability for people to even have a conversation with each other, both of these are capitalism. But a lot of people out there struggling might prefer the way Sweden's currently doing capitalism to the United States.

And the point here is not that every country out there has to guarantee the same social outcomes that Sweden does. The point is, it's almost like there's something else we could be focusing our attention on, other than just some broad term like capitalism, that's more responsible for these consequences that we don't like in the world. And to the cartoon of an anti-capitalist in the example I just gave, the person that uses their disdain towards capitalism to justify not really doing much,

Let this be yet another example of how philosophy sometimes can be used for evil instead of good. And what I mean is, never forget how possible it is for a smart person these days to fall into the trap of doing a deep dive on some philosophy, get into a level of understanding about it that almost no one in the world can call them out on, and

and then to be living in a type of pessimism that leaves them completely stuck in whatever place they're in. People will do this with hard determinism. Well, I can't change my behavior because ultimately it's all outside of my control. Or with the fallibility of knowledge. How can I even know if I really exist? Or if everything I do know is nothing but a cultural illusion? Or how about with morality? I don't really know if anything is objectively good or not. So how can I ever bring myself to do anything in this world that claims to make it a better place?

And on that same note, last episode of this podcast was on Peter Singer's entire moral journey throughout his career. And as we move more towards the end of the episode, more towards his current belief and objective morality, look, he acknowledges there are certainly plenty of disagreements or conversations to have surrounding things like the metaphysics of his view of pleasure, or

or of the ontological role of suffering in his world picture. These are fascinating questions to talk about. He's always down to talk about them. But to get caught up on them, to have them be the thing that's preventing you from taking a stance, doing some good in the world, and participating more in the decision-making of the democracy you live in,

There are moral realities for certain humans and animals on this planet that don't take a philosophical seminar to get to the bottom of whether they're bad or not. They are uncontroversial to Peter Singer. When factory farmers will grind male chickens alive because they can't lay eggs like female chickens. When it comes to poverty, children dying of starvation in their parents' arms or dying of illnesses that have affordable, widely available treatments.

For end-of-life care, someone in excruciating pain, no hope of a long-term recovery, slowly losing all their faculties each day, begging for an end to this suffering, but are unable to get it. To Peter Singer, these are consequences that are occurring in the world, where the tools exist right now for us to be doing more about them. And these are issues where we know progress is possible, because some progress has already been made on these fronts without some kind of revolution. What

What if the world is not actually so far gone that it's just all over and all you can do now is sit around saying, hey, crazy times we live in, right? Because to Peter Singer, when you have realities like this, what does it matter if we can't agree on what the metaphysics is of the suffering that's going on?

What does it matter if the solution we come up with is a market-based solution or a grassroots effort? In other words, even if you're still working out the finer details of your own personal philosophical preferences, when it comes to these kinds of issues, the question for Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Raddick is, can we be doing more? And can we be helping others to understand these issues more with our knowledge and our ability to explain them?

Can we be better participants in this democratic process that's still available to us? The bottom line is, if you think the world's in need of change, then a deeper level of engagement with these ethical issues and with our own ethical positions is something that's already proven to be effective. It may not be a panacea because of how complex some of these issues are, and it can be so tempting to think, well, we have so many problems in the world and they're so serious that if you're going to tell me you got a solution to them...

It better be something mind-blowing. Like, you better be shaking hands with the aliens, Bigfoot, and God all at once, or else I'm not listening to your solution. But to Peter Singer, a way forward like this is proven, simple, and effective. And he has dedicated a career to these applied ethical positions where he looks at the consequences in the world that we don't like, takes one manageable piece of them, neatly explains what the situation is, and then explains how to do some good about it that doesn't require you to transform your entire life.

His books, Animal Liberation Now, Ethics in the Real World, and The Life You Can Save are all examples of him trying to accomplish this. Now, of course, when I'm having a conversation with him, I know this is the thrust of Peter Singer's work. So, of course, I'm not going to be saying, hey, tell me about this animal book he wrote back in the 70s. You know, what I'm mostly going to be asking him are about things we may be able to learn from his 50 years of experience as a philosopher trying to do this. Like, if I'm someone who's sold on the vision that this is a way forward,

How do we take this project of creating a deeper level of engagement to the next level? Because there's so many angles you could attack this idea from. Why hasn't this been a bigger movement over the last 50 years? How can we spread this message even more effectively than we already have been? Like if I wanted to start small, just with me, and develop my own moral position so I could be the most helpful to others in these conversations, where would I even begin to do something like that? To know exactly where I stand morally so I can bring some confidence to all this?

And for that, I knew I had to turn to Kasia DeLazari-Raddick, living legend for utilitarian philosophers at the highest level. And I came away with some valuable insights from her on how she views this whole process that a lot of people embark on of trying to pick a team when it comes to their ethics. You know, you hear people ask stuff like, what are you? Are you a utilitarian? Are you a deontologist? An egoist?

But for her, this is the complete wrong way to be thinking about it. The goal to her is not to get everybody to come on over to team utilitarian and then everything's going to be perfect in the world. Stop thinking of these terms like utilitarian or deontologist as though they're teams for people to join, where they're all trying to compete with each other and may the best way of thinking reign supreme. The more accurate way to view them, she says, is that these are just the words we use that ultimately describe how different people think about moral decision-making.

Meaning for some people out there, and what goes on in their heads when they decide what the right thing to do is, utilitarianism might be the word that matches best. For another person, deontology, egoism for another. In other words, before these were ever words that philosophers were thrown around to be describing ethics, these were originally just ways that people thought about things.

So knowing that, not only is it kind of weird to be thinking about getting rid of any of these, you're just not going to. But more than that, you wouldn't even want to live in a world without any specific one of these ethical theories. We need them all because it turns out that different ones are more effective for people at different scales and in different circumstances. For example, she says, we need deontological thinking when we're doing things like creating laws or rules in our societies.

We need to be able to trust that people are going to follow these broad restrictions. It's a big part of what makes the world able to function at all. But on the other hand, she says, utilitarian or consequentialist style thinking, you know, deciding what the best thing to do is based on the consequences it produces. Well, if you examine it against different ethical situations you might find yourself in, it turns out to be something that's super effective, more at a personal or individual level of decision making.

It's almost like how you need different types of economic policy for your home finances versus for the entire country. Like, how silly would someone be if they're on some kind of crusade to make fiscal policy a single thing that we all need to follow? "No, Grandma, no. You're $4 million in debt? I don't care. Keep spending. Stimulate investment in your cookies, Grandma."

No, it's just different ways of thinking that apply in different situations. Now I know what some of you out there might be thinking, that this isn't actually a choice we have to make between deontology and utilitarianism, because we already have something from within utilitarianism that accounts for this. It's called rule utilitarianism, where people follow rules that if they're followed will produce the most well-being in the world. Rule utilitarianism.

And I asked her about this when I talked to her, and she said, "No, absolutely not." "Even as a utilitarian," she said, "I don't trust rural utilitarianism."

She thinks most of what rule utilitarianism is, is people trying to adjust one of these ethical theories to things they really shouldn't be adjusting it to. Again, maybe caught up a bit too much in this idea that it's one of these that needs to reign supreme. But to her, the far better way of doing things is to stop trying to have one of these do everything. To her, we need to have deontology when we need rule-based thinking, and utilitarianism when we want to maximize well-being. Again, different ways of thinking are appropriate for different situations.

I guess the larger point here is, if something you like doing is talking about trolley cars and axe murderers, you know, you like defending your ethical theory against someone else for the sake of understanding yourself and the world a little better, and say recently in one of these conversations you were defending your position, and then some smart British chap comes along and starts questioning you and really walks you into a corner and shows you that there are some big holes in this moral approach of yours that really need to be addressed. If that whole scenario happened to you,

Then I think what Kashiw would say here is that when you're in this moment, don't be embarrassed about it. Don't take that moment as though it's some kind of personal defeat, as though you're an idiot, your team has failed, you know, look at how my perfect moral theory I came up with just crumbled the second this nice British fellow gave me one of his hypotheticals. No, don't do that. Instead, try to understand that the point is not to find some ultimate best way of ethical reasoning that is correct in every situation.

you're never going to find it because it doesn't exist. The point is that every one of these moral theories will have strengths, weaknesses, better and worse applications. Again, we ultimately need all of them to understand human moral reasoning fully. And then maybe the goal should be to accept that fact, continue to show up to these kinds of conversations, and then try to be as self-aware of the limitations in your own ethical reasoning as possible.

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But who cares about that? The point should be to have these views make a difference when we're faced with actual moral dilemmas in the real world.

Because this person could say, what are these two philosophers even really saying here about a possible way forward? Are they saying that if we all just get more in touch with our ethical side, that this wisdom is going to spread like a virus? And before we know it, we're all going to be holding hands wondering how any of us were ever so unethical to each other in the past. It's like, no, okay. Peter Singer has what could be called a very healthy dose of optimistic pessimism when you talk to him.

He's all for people having more of these theoretical moral discussions if they're helpful. But the feeling when talking to him is like, come on, talking about trolley cars and axe murderers isn't what's going to lead to the kind of mass shift in consciousness we need to take this stuff to the next level. And he's been around long enough to see a lot of attempts at this whole thing succeed and fail over the years. He would acknowledge the sometimes disappointing state of things, even within his own books and efforts.

He might say, you know, it is just the reality of the world we live in that a lot of people who have heard these arguments from him about donating to effective altruist charities or cutting down on their meat consumption, they hear the arguments, they're moved in their positions on a theoretical level, but they're not moved enough to change things when it comes to their actual behavior. Or they change things for a little bit, try it out, and then eventually fall back into their old ways of doing things.

Why is that, we have to ask. And again, none of this is being said in a way that's trying to belittle any of the progress or effort that's been made. A lot of good work has been done in the past. It's ultimately the extremely promising stuff that we're trying to build on here. But nonetheless, it's worth exploring. If we want to do things more effectively into the future, what would it take to get more people to change their behavior on a more permanent basis?

Because I mean, somebody could say back to all this, a skeptical person, that people are never going to change, that people will always just do what's the most convenient for them, and that beyond defending these things in some piecemeal way in a theoretical setting, nobody's ever going to actually change their behavior. But one of the inspiring things here to consider is that people do change their behavior when the social temperature changes on a particular issue.

There are, in fact, things that used to be culturally acceptable, where then some event occurred in the world that changes public perception, where after it happens, people just don't do the thing anymore and bring a whole lot of judgment to the people who still continue to do it. How about smoking in the middle of a restaurant? Or drunk driving? Or littering? Or beating your kids? Or harassment of women in the workplace?

All of these are things that at one point were culturally acceptable. Then there was a period where a lot of people felt it was wrong but still engaged in the behavior. And then a moment came where for each of these, people just weren't going to put up with it anymore. There came a point where to do these things made you someone who paid an immediate social price for doing it.

Now, the inspiring thing about this reminds me of something that Kasia DeLazari-Raddick said in passing during the conversation. She said that people generally want to be a moral person. Nobody goes around in their life wondering, "How do I be a more horrible person today?" Which implies that a considerable amount of the time that people are doing things that lead to bad outcomes in the world, they're either doing it out of ignorance, they don't know that it's going on, or they don't understand how the way they're living is contributing to this bad outcome.

And in a democracy, we have this activity that some people like to engage in where they try to spread awareness to people about an issue or get them to rethink their moral positions. It's called activism. But unfortunately, over the last few decades, these specific ways that some activists try to spread awareness and get people to question things doesn't always end up accomplishing what their goal is. I mean,

When you ask a person on the street about their experience, you know, when you walk past that protest and you heard the people screaming at you or coming up to you with a clipboard trying to explain their position and get your signature, why was that not something that made you believe in the cause just as much as they do? Like, why didn't you drop everything in that moment, pick up a sign and start screaming at people right along with them?

And the answer you'll hear from a lot of people is that it's because this type of activism produces in me a type of skepticism. Because I know there's always an agenda behind that clipboard. This person could say that whenever there's someone with a clipboard in front of me, it doesn't matter if their cause sounds like one of the most no-brainer things that's ever been on a piece of paper. It could be about saving kittens and butterflies. And if I'm being real, I'm always thinking, "What is it that this person's obscuring about the situation here to get me to come onto their side and get my signature?"

This transparent, agenda-laden nature of traditional forms of activism is something that no doubt might make it less effective at communicating with certain people. However, there's a lot of people out there who realize this. They'll say, if the books of Peter Singer and traditional activism have delivered one type of message, are there other ways of delivering a message that could be even more effective than we've been doing for the last 50 years? How about we come up with some more creative forms of activism that try to attack this problem in a different way?

Meme warfare, for example. You ever heard of it before? This is one of these creative types of activism that in the underground has been going on for years. The thinking is this: if part of activism is about spreading awareness and getting people to engage with these issues more deeply,

And if you could package that into a meme that is funny or memorable or shareable in a way that insinuates itself into the mind of a person who's otherwise living on their phone getting all their information about the world, if you could do that, then that instantly becomes a type of activism with no barrier to entry, very little downside, that anyone clever can do really in their spare time that has the possibility of reaching millions of people.

That's exciting. And that's just one example of how people are using their brains to try to come up with creative ways to deliver a message that aren't them just doing an imitation of the protesters that they've seen before. And knowing that Peter and Kasia have so much experience in this field, seeing different ways that people have tried to make an impact, I wanted to tell them about another kind of strategy I've been thinking about. I pitched it to them on the call like it was an episode of Shark Tank, just to see what they would say. I asked them, what if Noam Chomsky was ripped?

Like what if Gnome was muscle bound, vascular, spray tanned, and then he did his philosophy?

What I mean is, there's a lot of influencers these days that'll sell people a certain kind of lifestyle first. You know, somebody on the male side of this, for example, might be ripped, spray tanned, driving Bugattis, flashing money all over the place, shooting guns, surrounded by women, and then they'll post pictures of them living this kind of lifestyle, and tons of young people, young men in this case, will come along for the ride and try to find out how they can also get that kind of lifestyle. How do I do it? But what if Noam Chomsky did that to get his message out?

What if he was absolutely jacked with ripples all over his stomach? And then he started talking about the imperialism of the United States. How many more Chomsky fans would we have in the world around us?

Now, don't get the wrong idea. I picked Noam Chomsky mostly because his name sounds really funny here. And he's 95 years old. I know he's not going to do this, nor am I promoting his work as the thing that's going to solve all the world's problems. All right. My point is that the moral content of an influencer often is something that gets smuggled in the back door, whether it's well thought out or not. People start watching and supporting an influencer for what they're good at, not for their views on the world.

And yet so often, somebody will have a giant online presence, and they'll mention offhandedly about some place they like to go, or some way they feel about a particular thing that's going on. And without even intending to, these people will have a massive influence on how millions of people think about something going on in culture. Now, here's the point when it comes to activism. Almost all of these people become an influencer first, and then have their moral approach be an afterthought.

But is there anything to this idea of someone who wants to make a difference, flipping that process on its head, to set the goal to become an influencer, because you ultimately want to deliver a well-thought-out set of moral positions to impressionable young people simply through the power of suggestion? Kasia de Lazari-Raddick heard this, and it seemed like she liked the idea. But she wanted to give a couple addendums to it first. She said, there's nothing wrong with this from a utilitarian point of view. Ultimately, you're just trying to produce better consequences in the world.

But the thing to really consider here, she says, is authenticity. She used Peter Singer as an example. See, Singer's an example of an influencer who has a lot of sway on people's moral thinking. And part of the way that he accomplishes that is because he's actually the guy he says he is.

In other words, what she's implying here is you can't just decide you're going to do this as an influencer, go to a spa, get a spray tan, and then pretend to be a shallow douchebag. You have to actually be one for this to work for you, or people are probably just going to see through it. Also, I think she's saying that you need to be upfront with people if this moral message of yours is something that's truly important to you. So maybe the way around this would be to become an influencer for something you truly are great at and believe in.

And then to be upfront about the fact that the moral side of this has always been an important reason for why you've wanted to speak to a wider audience of people. The point of all this, if you'll remember though, is to try to find ways to influence people's opinions without having to shame them or yell at them or be so salesy in your approach. And with that in mind, this seems to be like another outside-the-box option that someone trying to send a good message might want to try out.

But there's other directions we could attack this problem from other than just by using media. What if the better thing to do is to try to make this awareness of the issues a requirement at more of a structural level? I asked Peter Singer if he was a fan of the idea of teaching children philosophy and ethical awareness in schools, to which he replied that yes, he's absolutely a fan of that idea and that it's already going on to some extent. He said when he was a kid, they didn't really teach philosophy in schools. It was very rare.

Then over the years, schools started to try it, but it was mostly something like the history of philosophy. It wasn't ever the kind of practical wisdom that we'd want people to come away with after studying philosophy. But he says in recent years, if you're looking at the right country, there's actually been some pretty big leaps forward. It's starting to become more common for high schools to be offering it these days. It's starting to become more common for people to be lobbying for it in their city councils.

But he talked about how if he just wanted an example to look at, in South Korea right now, in the last few years, they've completely reformed parts of their education system to include ethics, critical thinking, and the development of social responsibility. He gets tons of emails these days from students over there that are being inspired by his work, or people asking him to come there and speak on Korean television.

I mean, for anybody who might be pessimistic about this, you know, that if you put philosophy in schools, kids are just going to learn to hate it like they hate history or chemistry. South Korea is a great example of what can happen when a country prioritizes philosophy and young people get exposed to these sorts of ideas early.

But even before high school, this is an option as well for Peter Singer. He talks about the Philosophy for Children program that's been rolled out in various ways over the years that brings a philosophy curriculum to kids even in elementary school. The point is, Peter Singer's definitely a supporter of our education systems being more of a facilitator for these values that may lead to a possible way forward.

But okay, you might say, all that is well and good for kids or for young adults who have no choice but to listen to this kind of stuff. But how do we make debating and discovering these ideas more accessible to adults? How about for adults that already value engaging with these ideas at a deeper level, but have no real place to discuss them? I mean, so many philosophers we've been covering lately have said we need something more like this. I wanted to know if there was anything Peter Singer had seen internationally over the course of his career that he thought seemed promising.

Well, after making it clear that he was in agreement it would be nice to have places like this set up, he quickly mentions the rise and fall of the Philosophy Café movement that started in Europe back in the 1990s. If you're not aware, people would meet up in a bar, community center, some informal place, and then they'd have discussions about philosophy. And things seemed to go well there for quite a while. But for as much good as that did for people during its peak, as Peter Singer said, the Philosophy Café movement has lacked a bit of steam in recent years.

Kind of a euphemism. And if he had to give an explanation as to why the interest has gone down in it, it's not because people are less interested in philosophy than they used to be, it's probably because he thinks that online meeting groups have become so much more popular in recent years than physical ones. Not the least of which he would want to point out is the effective altruist community itself.

For anybody who's unaware, Peter Singer wrote a book in 2009 called "The Life You Can Save." We did an entire episode on it. It's in the back catalog if you want to listen. But the important thing for you to know right now though is that the arguments in that book, popularized by Peter Singer, went on to spark an entire movement around charitable giving and online philosophical discussion called the Effective Altruist Movement. And as of right now, it's pretty unquestionable. Effective altruist charities have done a lot of good for people in the world.

They've saved hundreds of thousands of lives through providing bed nets to combat malaria. They provided deworming treatments to millions of children in low-income countries. They've gotten hundreds of millions of dollars directly to people in extreme poverty, saving lives. They've contributed hundreds of millions to critical research, influenced hundreds of major food companies to adopt more humane practices. If you believe that progress is possible in the world we're living in with the set of tools we currently have,

then the effective altruist movement seems to be part of that progress. And they continue to do good and have online discussion groups that allow for people to be informed and debate on any number of issues, not just ones pertaining to malaria nits. Now, here's what Peter Singer would want to point out about all this, though. Any good that the effective altruist movement has done or will continue to do in the future...

only has become what it is because there were people who originally decided they were going to do something, got together, and tried to engage with these ethical positions at a deeper level while trying to help other people do the same. So if you're skeptical of their claim that people merely engaging with these issues more is going to bring about a better world for us, well, let the effective altruist movement stand as a monument for what's possible when people do that.

And who knows where this stuff goes tomorrow? Yes, there's a lot more progress that needs to be made in the world. And a lot more people need to show up and use their skills to help the effort move forward. But this is an effort that's moving. And it's at least one way forward for people who want to do the most good they can. I'd like to thank Peter Singer and Kasia DeLazari-Raddick for helping create this episode. Told them I'd let you all know about their work. Kasia just had a book come out called The Philosophy of Pleasure. It's got an ice cream on the front of it.

Peter Singer has a sub stack that's called Bold Reasoning with Peter Singer. The two of them have a podcast they'd like you to listen to called Lives Well Lived, where they talk to people that are not only living an ethical life, but they're people who are fulfilled and happy in their respective disciplines. Tough act to pull off these days. Finally, if you want to learn more about effective altruist charities, how they work, and how you can help out with anything they got going on, go to thelifeyoucansave.org and, I guess, read until your heart's content.

Next episode, we're going to be talking about Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Yeah, this ought to be a good one. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.