Changing Values for a Sustainable World
Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University

John Mutter: Thank you, Al, for conducting the panel discussions. Remember we have one more speaker this evening, who I'll introduce when the others leave the stage. Thank you very much.

My greatest fear in managing this conference was that we would get way behind time, and there would be no time left to do everything that we hoped to do. And in fact we're a little bit ahead of time. So it gives me plenty of time to give the final speaker all the room he needs to say the important things that I know he will.

He is Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a position he's held since 1999. He was, and I discovered, educated at my own undergraduate alma mater, University of Melbourne in Australia, and trying to figure out our relative ages I think we were actually contemporaries, at least for a little while. But then he went to Oxford which was a better place than I went, and has taught at the University of Oxford, La Trobe University and Monash University. He is the founding President of the International Association of Bioethics, and with Helga Kuhse founding co-editor of the Journal of Bioethics. Singer first became internationally renowned after the publication of his book “Animal Liberation” in 1975. His other books include “Practical Ethics, How Are We to Live?,” “Rethinking Life and Death, One World” and “The President of Good and Evil,” and his next work, “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter,” will be published in May. It's my very, very great pleasure to introduce to you for our keynote speech to end the day Peter Singer.

Peter Singer: Thank you very much, John, and thank you for your enormous work in organizing this great event. I think it's been a fascinating day with a lot of speakers, and it's with some trepidation that I follow some of the speakers, as you'll see, because I'm touching on some of the issues that they've been talking about, and there are a lot of people here who are far more expert on many of the details than I am.

What I'm wanting to do, though, is to talk about the value aspects, put some of these questions in an ethical framework. And I've chosen to focus really on two issues which I think have been fundamental themes of what we're talking about. One is climate change, and the other is the obligations of the affluent nations in regard to world poverty. So you see what I mean when I say that there are people far more expert on these topics than I am. But we don't always see them as ethical issues, so these are the two issues. And we don't always see them as raising ethical questions. That's one of the things that led me to work on them after I came to Princeton and we had a succession of brilliant professors and policy experts and people from Washington coming through to give talks on these issues, but very much focused in terms of policy, in terms of what the government's likely to do, in terms of economics, sometimes lacking I think the ethical framework. So that's what I hope to be able to do.

Okay. So let's start with climate change then. Why is this an ethical issue? Well, I think actually people sometimes fail to see that it's really one of the most basic kinds of ethical questions, it's one of those standard questions of justice that you have when you have the apple pie and you have the ten hungry people, each of whom is hungry enough to eat an eighth of the apple pie, but of course there isn't enough apple pie to give an eighth to ten people, by definition. So what do you do, how do you divide it up? That's the sort of question that we often put. And clearly global warming is like that. You think of the atmosphere and the atmosphere's capacity to absorb our waste gases without disastrous consequences that nobody wants as the apple pie. And then the shares of the apple pie are the amounts that the nations all wish to put into it, the amounts of their carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that they wish to put in the atmosphere. And of course then you add that up and, especially with countries like China and India wanting to develop, you simply don't have enough of that capacity. So you have to then ask that question what is a just allocation of this resource, how should you divide it up?

So what I'm going to do is to look at three plausible principles and see where they would lead if in fact we followed any one of them. Now, there are more than three possible principles, of course, that we could think about, and you can think of others, but I think these are three very plausible ones, and I'm not aware of more plausible ones that would give you a dramatically different result.

First, though, let's just have a word from our President. And the reason I put this up is because you can see that President Bush is also thinking in moral terms about climate change here, right? He has the idea that we should be even-handed in deciding how to allocate this. So even-handedness, I take that to be a synonym for fairness or justice. So we have agreement from the President that this is a question that needs a just outcome. The question is whether we want to agree with the substance of his view that for the United States to sign on Kyoto when China and India were not exempted is not totally the right word, they were not required to be part of the first stage of Kyoto. The expectation was and is that they would become part of a later stage of the agreement when they would have quotas or controls. But at least the first stage they were not. So the question is whether indeed that would not have been fair for the US to sign up when those nations and other developing nations were not.

So what are the principles of justice? Okay. One kind of principle of justice is what the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick said is a historical principle of justice, distinguished them from principles of justice that are patent, like the other ones I'm going to talk about. And so on one view to find out what is just you have to go back into the history of something. They would say, for example, if you want to know how the apple pie should be divided up you need to know who baked the apple pie, who provided the apples, and so on. Well, when we're talking about pollution the standard historical principle of justice is who caused the problem, who is really the source of the problem, because the general view then is that the polluter ought to pay, or broke it you ought to fix it. You've all seen I think slides like this, which indicate the historical contribution of nations to the existing problem. For this you have to realize, of course, that greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere a long time. I've seen an estimate that perhaps 80% of the carbon dioxide that came out of the tailpipe of Henry Ford's first Model T is still up there. So this actually only goes back as far as 1950, and doesn't quite forward to the present day, but it indicates that in terms of the accumulated carbon dioxide there the United States is overwhelmingly responsible for that, it's responsible for more than three times as much as China, and more than ten times, about twelve times, as much as India. So if we're talking a historical polluter pays principle it does seem reasonable that the United States should be required to do something before China and India are required to do something. And of course some other countries have done even significantly less, the least developed countries. So that principle isn't going to justify the United States not doing its part, rather the reverse.

Let's look at a second principle, a patent one. This is probably the one that you all thought of when I mentioned the apple pie. You say well, you've got ten hungry people, you divide it into ten equal slices, isn't that the obvious thing to do? So for the reason that I've just given you this is actually somewhat generous to the United States and the other industrialized countries because it just wipes the slate clean, says never mind what you've done so far, let's just start afresh and divide it all up into equal shares. Well, where will dividing it up into equal shares get you? They would of course have to be per capita shares. I don't think anyone would suggest that it's fair for small countries, for Iceland, to have as much for its emissions as China or India. So this table shows you the per capita divisions, again not totally up to date. But it also shows, and I think we've had somewhat different figures earlier but they're very much in the same direction, it also shows you that the United States is grossly exceeding its per capita share, that Kyoto in fact which required it to go 6 or 7% below 1990 levels is incredibly generous on this scale, which suggests that really the United States to be fair ought to cut its emissions to just 20%, an 80% cut, not suggesting that that's economically feasible, but that would be a fair outcome on this view, whereas China at the time this was done didn't really need to cut at all. It may now have reached the level where it's pretty much on a par with its per capita share, or maybe slightly over it, it certainly will get over it soon, and India is well below, maybe can treble its greenhouse emissions before it's actually required to cut on equal per capita shares. So this is also going to require very drastic reductions from the US.

And the third one I've taken from another late Harvard philosopher John Rawls. We've had a couple of bad years unfortunately for Harvard moral philosophers, we've lost a couple of good ones. So this principle says that you ought to give priority to the worst off, it's sort of the underdog principle, if you like, you favor the underdog, so those who are poorest ought to have the fewest obligations, and those who are wealthiest can best afford to do something or to do more. Again obviously that's not going to help the United States in its case for saying we don't need to do something immediately. The blue nations here are the ones that have quotas, and the United States as you can see is the highest one of these. Some of the other ones that are higher are tiny nations, basically they're the Persian Gulf oil states which are producing a lot of oil and flaring a lot off, so on a per capita basis they have very high emissions, but they're not really very significant in global terms, nor is Singapore. Some of the other European nations get reasonably high as well. But you can see again that the richer nations are here, the ones that have the highest levels, and that should be doing the most. So I think on any of these views, any of these plausible principles, really the United States is simply doing the wrong thing. And let's hear from our President again on why we're doing the wrong thing. It's because our way of life is a blesséd one, and that of course includes driving large SUVs, that's part of a blesséd way of life, and other wasteful fuel practices that we have. This was not actually verbatim George Bush, as you can see it was Ari Fleischer, but he was speaking on behalf of the President, and the President certainly did not demur after he made that statement.

So you can understand I think why this is not only clearly an ethical problem, but one in which the United States is simply doing the wrong thing. And for an administration that talks about morality and values and setting a high moral tone and so on, this does strike me as strange, that there seems to be no real argument, moral argument, in defense of what's going on here that I can see.

Okay. So what would be a fair allocation then? Having put forward various possibilities, let me give you what I think is probably the best one. It is the equal per capita shares, the simple one that you divide up the apple pie. You don't want to, however, provide an incentive to nations to increase their population so that they can put out more greenhouse gases, so you could take population targets that are already set by, say, the United Nations, the expectations for what populations nations will have by 2050, take the middle projection of the population program, and maybe peg the quotas to that, and then you can allow global emissions trading, admittedly as Eric Schaeffer was saying, there are problems in measuring this and again I bow to the experts here, but I think it ought to be a priority to try and iron out those problems, and then we can have trading. Now of course from what I've shown the US and other industrialized nations will have to spend something in order to buy quota from other nations. But that's okay, that's a good thing for other reasons as well, as we get to when we look at the obligations of the rich to the poor, and it will provide an incentive for the nations that are currently below quota to come into Kyoto or Kyoto Mach II [?] or whatever it might be, to say yes we want to actually have quotas because if you give us quotas based on our equal per capita share we're going to have a lot to sell. India, for example, will have an enormous amount to sell, and Ethiopia will have quite a lot to sell because it's even further below its quota, and so on. So it would be a way of providing an incentive for those countries to come into the agreement and then being in it to keep their emissions reasonably low compatible with development and efficiency so that they continue to have something to sell.

How do we get there? Well I don't know exactly the politics of that. Obviously we need to make people more aware I think that what the US is doing is wrong, and maybe we need other countries to take a firmer stance and to think about, for example, even the possibility of sanctions, trade sanctions, against countries that do not join Kyoto. Because after all they are having an unfair advantage, producing an externality that they're just passing on to the rest of the world willy-nilly and thereby reducing their production costs.

Okay, there is when you talk about value of course also the question not just what should my government do, where we can easily take a critical stance, but what should I do, because values affect all of us. And I think we do have personal obligations here, too. So, for example, one thing that we can do is we can switch to more fuel efficient vehicles if we're driving. I'm pleased to see more of the Prius around and other hybrids are around the streets, they're certainly helping. And as you see from this study we can save a ton of carbon per year per person or per driver anyway if we switch to a more fuel efficient car.

But what people are perhaps less aware of, and what this recent study by Eshel and Martin has indicated, is that we can also change our diet. So yes, it's true I'm the author of “Animal Liberation” and I do have perhaps other barriers to push here, but this is a study not about the treatment of animals but about diet and energy, and you can actually save more, the average American can save more carbon by switching from a typical American diet to a vegan diet than from switching to a typical American car to the Prius. And the reason for that is that the way we rear animals now, again in typical American production, is extremely energy intensive. Animals, remember, used to go out in the fields and gather food for themselves to eat, expending their own energy and gathering grass or insects or seeds or whatever it might be that we could not digest and turning them into food for us. No longer. And of course I'll whip through this very quickly, but this is what we're doing with animals, we're bringing them indoors, we have to grow the food and bring it to them, and then we have to ventilate their sheds and so on. Beef production is probably the most inefficient of all because when you get beef in a feed lot like this they're consuming about ten times at least the food value of what we get out of them, and that has high fossil fuel inputs, pig production, and so on. So that's one thing that we can change.

Let me move to the second half of this topic now, and look at this question of global poverty and what are our obligations to the poor, just use the Time of last year as looking at this issue and suggesting various easy solutions. And I'm now going to look at some of the facts about this. So what is poverty? It's the definition of the poor that we've already had, those without enough income to meet basic needs. The purchasing power equivalent standard is set at that, and that is remember purchasing power equivalents. Don't think oh yeah, well I know, but when I went to India I found that the US dollar went a long way. That's not what we're talking about, we're not talking about actual dollars, we're talking about purchasing power equivalent, so it might be for example as little as 30 US cents that people are living on, and that may be all that they have. So we have about 1.1 billion below this line, and their average income in 2001 was 77 US cents, again purchasing power equivalent.

So this is one result of that, and again I hesitate to say this after Carol Bellamy has been on the platform who knows about these things so much better than I do, but according to UNICEF this is responsible for ten million deaths, preventable deaths, of children per year, or 27,000 per day. We're all shocked by sudden tragedies like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11, but they killed 2,000 perhaps or 3,000 people. We're talking about a daily toll here of something like ten times that, that's only children, I don't want to suggest that older people's deaths don't matter, of course they do, and it is preventable.

Okay, so here's an example that I've used over the years to look at what in fact we're doing by standing by. It's the case of the drowning child, a case where you walk past a shallow pond and you see that a child has fallen in and is drowning. I have not shown you a picture of a child drowning, that would not have been ethical to produce such a picture and it would not have been pleasant to show you, but I am just showing you a picture who could be in danger of drowning in the next few minutes for all we know here anyway, if there's no one around. So you see this child, you think where are the parents or guardians or something. You look around, there's nobody there, and you think well what should I do? You happen to know that this pond is quite shallow, you've seen older children playing in it, and so you're in no danger of drowning yourself if you wade in and pull out the child. But there is some cost to it, you're wearing your favorite pair of shoes and they're going to get ruined probably in the muddy water. Your trousers will get wet and maybe you'll be late for an appointment or something like that. Well what should you do? I won't ask for a show of hands but when I do with my students I do find that overwhelmingly they think you ought to wade into the pond and pull out the child, despite the fact that there is some cost to you. Now given that, if that is something that we think is a settled moral judgment, the question is aren't we in a somewhat similar situation with regard to people elsewhere in the world? This is what we think about the child, so we think it would be wrong to allow the child to drown.

Now this is the real question: are there morally relevant differences between our situation with regard to the drowning child in that imaginary case, and the real world situation in which we could be assisting some of these 27,000 children who die every day from poverty-related causes? I want to suggest that we are in the same situation, that the fact that they're more distant from us, the fact that they're not here in front of our eyes, of course does mean that the emotional pull is not the same. But nevertheless I don't think really we think of it as morally relevant that they're 10,000 miles away, that we can't actually see them. If we know that they're there, and if we know that we could help them, then I think the situation is similar. It's also true of course that they're not identifiable. If we send money to UNICEF or to OXFAM of America or to one of those groups we can't identify which children will have been saved, but I think we can be confident if we pick the program well that we will be contributing to saving lives in the long run by helping people to escape from the poverty that causes these deaths. So that's why I conclude that it is wrong for us to allow children to die from these poverty-related causes.

Here's another way of putting it, this is a more general principle. I'd suggest that if we can prevent something bad happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance we ought to do it. That's why you all think we ought to save the child. The excuse that I didn't want to ruin my nice shoes is laughable because nobody would really think that a pair of shoes is comparable in moral importance to a child's life. Well we know that absolute poverty is a bad thing, we've seen that in many presentations, and we can prevent at least some of it without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance. We can send modest amounts of money at least that we are spending on luxuries or frivolities in our own lifestyle, we can send them to organizations that are reducing poverty. I'm not suggesting that we have to give to the point where we're sacrificing something of comparable or really of any moral significance. But we have such luxurious lifestyles that there's a lot that we can do that sacrifices nothing of moral significance at all. So, I want to argue, that's what we ought to be doing.

Okay here's an example that I take from someone who I happen to know personally who inherited some money when his father died and thought that he ought not really to be keeping it all for himself. So he decided to see what he could do. And this is a relatively modest sum, in fact it was 10,000 Australian dollars, an Australian friend of mine, so that's about 7,300 or something I think at current exchange rates in US dollars. And he hooked up with the Australian OXFAM affiliate and found out about projects that they have in Tigray in Ethiopia, which as you know is a pretty arid sort of area, and he decided that he wanted to put this money into providing safe and clean drinking water. Now here's where the village that he was concerned with was getting its water from at the time, from a river. The river was actually being used, as you see here, by animals for watering, and of course the animals were defecating in the river as well. Humans were also using it for similar purposes upstream, so it was not a sanitary water supply. It was also one that was a long walk from where the village was, I think…

…in order to make it safe. So my friend here, David Morovitz, pictured here, paid for a well to be drilled, and this well has no power required, it's just a hand well, you just pump this handle that he's holding and water flows out, and it's lidded and capped so animals can't fall into it and pollute it, and so on, it's simple technology that's been shown to work well. So here's the village, or some of the members of the village, that were benefited from it. It provides this village with safe drinking water and should continue to do so for many years. It therefore reduces the burden of disease that they have in the village, reduces the amount of fuel that they need to gather and burn, protects the environment, frees up the women for other kinds of work because they don't have to spend so much time gathering water. It's a fairly small amount of money, as I'm saying, say seven and a half thousand US dollars. It doesn't going very far if you're thinking of renovating your house or something or that sort. Maybe if you postpone upgrading your car for a newer model or something or that sort it's that sum of money. So that's just an indication of the kinds of differences that exist I think in the discrepancies of purchasing power, the relatively small amount that we have to give up in order to provide not just for one family but for an entire village something that we just take for granted. And I think that this is the kind of thing that we can and indeed should be doing.

So here's some general facts that I've taken from Jeffrey Sachs. I hope he doesn't mind me quoting them from “The End of Poverty.” This is, if you look at it now as a global picture. So here's the shortfall in annual income of the extremely poor, 124 billion to bring them up to that basic level that would cover basic needs. Here's the income of the twenty-two wealthy nations of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, twenty trillion. So here's the percentage of income required to make up the shortfall. Now of course I think as Jeffrey Sachs says in the book this is not saying that this amount would actually do the job, it's a very rough sort of figure, there are no doubt transference costs that need to be met and distortions if you simply gave them the money so you have to think of other things that you're going to do, and it might be, I don't know what Jeffrey would say, that you have to double or treble this amount in order to achieve this, but even if you did it's a very small amount, it's not a significant amount that we would need to give. And here for comparison is how much the US alone is spending on alcohol. Now I'm not suggesting that the global poverty problem should be solved by the US, so it would only be the US share of the problem, which I would say would be less than what we spend on alcohol alone.

Okay. This is what we're actually doing, this is at the government level, it doesn't take private philanthropy into account, but private philanthropy actually doesn't dramatically change these figures, although people often say well the US is very generous privately, more generous than many other nations, nevertheless private philanthropy is significantly less than government aid. So the figures have gone up. You have to give credit to President Bush for that, he has increased the figures during his years in office, President Clinton did not do that, in fact the figures had steadily sunk from basically the Reagan years. This is, by the way, the key figure here, the percentage of official development aid as a percentage of gross national income, 0.17, it's still a very low figure, 17 cents in every $100. And the other thing is that this is not all going for poverty relief. If you look at the countries that are getting most of this, down at the bottom there, this year now it's predominantly going to Iraq, for obvious reasons. Okay, the Congo is a very poor country that certainly needs aid. Egypt is a country where it's going to for strategic reasons. Leave out Russia, that's not development aid. We have Jordan also for strategic reasons. Afghanistan again the result of the American attack on Afghanistan, and Pakistan and other allies, Colombia, is the war on drugs, Israel again is not development aid, so you get down to Ethiopia, a tenth [?] before you get down to countries that are really seriously in need. And you look at that in this thing up here, this is the least developed countries, the poorest countries, getting less than a quarter of our aid, and the other lower income countries getting not too much more. So just for comparative purposes, try and keep that chart in your mind, and here's one of the countries that does rather better. It's the usual suspects of course, it's the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands who tend to do well on these figures, and Luxembourg fairly well, too. So here's instead of 0.17 we have 0.85, and that's in excess of the UN target of 0.7, though I personally think that target is clearly too low, and although more countries are trying to get to it now, European nations, I think it's not enough, but still 0.85 is more creditable, and you look at the countries where it goes to they mostly are among the poorest countries in the world, and you look at this chart, too, you have the least developed countries going down at least a third, and when you add in the less developed countries as well you're getting well over half and close to two-thirds. So we're not doing well by global standards.

Now why is that? Well people would say it's because the US public don't want us to give more. When you do polls the US public have in the past said we give too much in foreign aid, and now they're actually a bit more evenly split on that, it's got more around to slightly less than half who say we give too much. But still there's a very substantial amount who say we already give too much foreign aid, so politicians are worried about that. But why does the US public think that? Well there are some surveys that were taken a few years back asking Americans what they think of foreign aid and asking them how much of the federal budget - now this is a different figure from the figure I just gave you which was how much of our gross national income - how much of the federal budget, of the money the government spends, goes on foreign aid. So this is what they said in the surveys. Four different surveys, most done by this Program on International Policies Attitudes, but one actually done by the Washington Post because they didn't believe the results that the Program on International Policy Attitudes got. But in fact they got higher figures, and then those figures basically stuck. So this is the median answer, the median result of a poll of Americans. The middle of the range suggests now that most Americans think that 20% of the federal budget goes on foreign aid. After they'd said that they were then asked how much of the federal budget do you think should go on foreign aid, and this is what they said, again in the more recent ones. The median figure was well I think it would be okay if about 10% of the budget went on foreign aid. So they think we're giving too much and they want us to cut what we're giving to 10% of the federal budget to go on foreign aid. That is how much we actually give. [The prior sentence is confusing, but I suspect he was indicating something on the screen which makes sense.] So the figures suggest that Americans are badly confused about this, and the amount that they would like us to give is ten times the amount that we're currently giving, although many of them think that we're giving too much. That clearly is a failure of leadership. It's a failure of political leadership, you know, perhaps NGOs as well, but I know a lot of them try, but it's a failure of political leadership to educate Americans about what we're actually doing. And I do find it disgraceful that never comes up as an issue. If you watch the presidential debates, Kerry vs. Bush or Bush and Gore I don't think this issue ever came up as far as I could see, whereas in some countries, you know, it is an election issue, in some European nations how much the government should be giving for foreign aid is something that gets raised in elections. I'm not saying it's the key decisive issue, but it certainly does get discussed. I think it ought to be something that we try to say a lot more about in this country.

I just want to mention one other thing really before I conclude, and that is this issue of fair trade. There's lots of questions about trade that I don't have time to go into, but we can also I think help by trying to promote fair trade products, mainly it's coffee in this country. Again, though, we have much less recognition of this issue here than we do in Britain. Here's a poll in Europe that showed that recognition of the fair trade logo and understanding of what it means, that is, that it means that the producers are getting a better share of the money that you pay for the products, has now reached 50% in the United Kingdom. There isn't really comparable surveys here, but from asking around people and looking at some information I'd be very surprised if it was 10% in this country, I think it's probably significantly less than 10%. And the result of this 50% recognition of course is a very significant increase in fair trade sales, so that in the UK they increased 50% just in one year from 2003 to 2004. And it's now not just coffee and tea and chocolate but it's fruits and juices, confectionery and so on. So it's another area I think in which we have to try and do more to educate Americans and to get them to feel that they can make a personal contribution to helping small scale producers in developing countries.

Okay, I'm going to close with a statement of values that goes back hundreds of years, and that comes from a philosopher or theologian that I don't always see eye to eye with, is in fact a philosopher who has been regarded as a philosophical bulwark, almost the official philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church. And yet what I find extraordinary that we have come so far away from Aquinas' views about the rights to property and what we owe to the poor, and unfortunately even the Roman Catholic Church and other churches do not really push this kind of ethic. Aquinas is looking at property rights, and he holds that we only have the right to property in order to supply our basic needs. And if we have more than can supply our basic needs, in other words if we have what he calls super abundance, and if others can not supply their basic needs, we don't have a right to that property. Now of course we have incredible super abundance, by the standards of Aquinas we have super abundance that he had never even thought of. We have tropical fruits imported to our doorstep at all seasons, we have climate control for our apartments where we live, we can holiday around the world, all of this is clearly super abundance. And Aquinas' view was that we have no right to it if others are lacking what they need. And he actually went so far as to say that if someone is starving and takes from someone who has super abundance, just takes some of that abundance, not what that person needs, that is not really theft, that is not morally wrong because the person has to right to it. It's a very radical doctrine. And perhaps you might say well, it's impractical, it would destroy incentives, we shouldn't do that, and in a way I agree. We do have a market economy, market economies are highly productive, we don't want to destroy incentives. But I do think without going this far we need to at least put ourselves back into this frame of mind where the basic needs of others should be a pressing call on us, a pressing call both on our governments and on us personally to change our values and to do what we can to help them get what they need to satisfy their basic needs.

Thank you very much.