And the our moral compass and altruism is our way through but how do make sure that our good intentions do not pave the road to hell i ask effective altruism evangelist professor of philosophy at Oxford University william mccaskill. William macaskill professor off the loss of a at Oxford University and the cofounder of the center of for effective altruism its really great to have you with us today welcome to our show well as case being i thank you for inviting me on so all right so the movement here associated with is called a sect of altruism i mean the very notion of this active altruism makes me wonder can altruism be ineffective or even harmful in what cases yes i think soundly isnt very often as ineffective or even harmful so there are many attempts where people try and do some out of good but actually end up. Achieving very little or just achieving far less than they could have done so for example or so that im in the United States called scared straight takes juvenile delinquents and shows them around prisons in order to scare them out of a life of crime but this is been studied many times over and actually it turns out that this program increases the rates of criminal activity among those teenagers in the years following the program so this is actually an example of an activity that is actively harmful not just in affective but most of the time things do sentiment of good is just that the very best things we can focus our time and money on to a normal amount to improve the well lets not about the inefficient ways to quench my desire to do something outrageous to quit i read an example in one of your interviewees a charity that for instance sends books to africa for kids to learn with but theres no teachers there so the books arent really making much difference so your money sort of waste it give me other causes that arent effective enough to be donating to if i spend money on for instance Alzheimers Research is it like money well spent is it effective. So i mean Something Like funding out same as the search or funding treatment for illnesses that affects some of it just countries in the world you know these are big things to do and making the world better but the question is are they the most effective things you can be doing and i think generally not and the reason being that illnesses that affects people in which comes these well theres already an enormous amount of money and resources going towards those causes so that includes you know many important issues like outsiders cancer. And so on but when you look at of course people in the world you know those living on less than a couple of Dollars Per Day well they dont have the very very most basic lifesaving. You know medical treatments so a long lasting insecticide treated bed net costs just 4. 00 can from x. To children for 2 years. And statistically speaking youll save a life there for just a few 1000. 00 thats incredibly cheap whereas if youre trying to save a life and its currency then. You know some of these other causes youll be spending more like millions of dollars to save a life when other terrorism is traditionally defined as unselfish behavior for the benefit of the others but its no secret like doing good for others it actually makes you feel good right and it gives you the sense of fulfillment selfrespect that you often look for do you agree that altruism has an element of it is into it i mean even ism in this case the desire to just feel very good about oneself the reason for as being altruistic. Well i think we should divorce the idea of altruism from unselfish behavior if i can help lots of people and then also get a benefit from it myself thats a bonus thats not a good thing thats not a reason against doing that thing and in fact i and others in the effects notice in community who often make you know quite significant decisions like to keep. When a 10 percent wedding comes on more. We often feel good about this you know its a warning way to live a life and thats something we should feel good about i think because if you feel good about acting out so astutely well thats great thats going to motivate you to do even more over the long term. What about us 3rd of all donations in the United States for instance goes to religious organizations and i found that very interesting how effective is a turds as a Charitable Organization is giving to a church in your opinion thats a fact of donation. Well i think many people give it to the church not on the grounds of you know pure effectiveness the doing it for some other reason perhaps its you know a mark of loyalty to a community theyre part of if you are to look at these organizations in terms of their effect on us i think often you can just do a lot better so these kind of large church based organizations even when theyre focused on the right cause areas late into the lives of the poorest people in the world its often very hard to know exactly what the money is being used for what change theyre making that wouldnt otherwise happened whereas we have some organizations like the against Malaria Foundation that provides bed nets that we know saves lives save lives for thousands of you know thousands of dollars and given that there are these organizations well we should target our money towards them rather than taking this much more kind of lowered shotgun approach that church based organizations typically take. Well given to charity aid is so very widespread and part of the culture in the United States but much less if i say you need europe for instance or i dont know in china why is that why do you think are americans more soft than other nations where is this coming from i think theres a couple of reasons so one is just the effect of christianity so the United States among its currencies has a much larger. Appearance to the Christian Faith certainly than european cultures and in a 2nd i think is the history and culture of social problems being a matter of you know tackling social problems being a matter of individual action rather than state action so in europe theres a larger role for the state or at least thats how its perceived and so people actually think well the right way of helping those who are poor as my taxes whether its in the u. S. Its more likely to be by a flat fee. And then kind of as you said just check space donations an enormous part of giving simply or giving back to ones own the mater the university you graduated from and that accounts for a large portion of it to. Like i told you before the interview im also like on a board of trustees for a Hospice Charity fund can i consider myself an effective odd tourist i wonder what you think of that you know so i think the question you should ask yourself is how did i come to engage in the sort of activity was it that i really just stood back and saw what all the problems the world faces were those. You know the biggest in scale yet the most neglected yet i think i can make have real traction on and then chose you know that organization on the basis of thinking yes this is where we think i can make the biggest difference or alternatively was is just you know an opportunity that kind of a close and i think it is the case. In general if youre going to aim to benefit the poorest people well the very poorest people in the world are those in the poorest countries than in you know middle income or the Chip Companies and so thats why i tend to think that the most effective organizations lie if were going to benefit people like today. So in one of your books you proposes really interesting ethical tests when you have like a Burning House in front of you with 2 rooms and one room there is a child in another one theres a picasso and of course if the choice was up to me i would save the child because i think that any human life is priceless but if we look at the standpoint of a affective autism youd say its better to save the picasso because then you can sell that because you know and save millions more lives around you is a fact is all too is a more about calculus rather than emotional intentions. So. I think affects thousands about both emotions and calculating so your emotional impulse that you get when you see say a child settling does extremely important and that you know motivates you to do good but we need to use reason in order to guide our motivations we need to use a kind of more logical part of our brains and so in this thought experiment that giles peters. Directed towards me the indian you know it was a thought experiment its a philosophical. Idea not necessarily something that plays into the real world but the thought was well if you can save someone whos white and some of you or by the small and direct means save a painting that you can then save you know thousands of other lives well my response is that the way we should think about that is just is that just as theres a child in a store experiment right there in front of you in this burning building who can save well also just thousands of children around the world and millions of children and the world you could potentially save it where its like were in this situation you know being facing a burning building just all the time and thats why our ability to use our money in the right ways is so important. And thats leads to the conclusion of this that. The where does the calculus actually stop because when i compare the bangle and i keep analyzing things through the prism of affective altruism you know i could come up to a conclusion the one i heard from many politicians in africa that actually aid in general is a in the is a really bad thing in the long term because it. Because its free its free stuff and free stuff kills industries and actually it creates dependencies so for efficiencys sake i should be contributing to any charities let say that sent stuff to africa or sudha. Yes so i think the issue of aids in the cases where it can be actively harmful i think is really important you need to think about it and its true that many government to government aid programs in the past have you know sometimes on damage helping to pluck are in fact about dictation ships and so on. But as you have yet to that i think the 1st is if we look at Global Health spending this is just enormously beneficial they have allocations no clocks to save Something Like 60000000 lives if we look at malaria tuberculosis diarrheal diseases these nodes are vastly down and Global Health spending has been a big part of that but i dont know any serious academic who disputes that and then the 2nd is looking at. Aid money thats going to nongovernmental organizations are going to government to government organizations so the literature is critical of aid spending thats normally focused on government to Government Spending rather than via nonprofits and so i think even if you are relatively skeptical of the value of aid in general that doesnt mean that these very best nonprofits that you can be funding on doing an enormous amount of good and in fact we have positive evidence for thinking that they are doing just as huge amount to improve the lives of the poorest people in the world well. Had another one lets say i give money to charity and save chinless drives in a poor country right but i have no control over what these children are going to do with their lives like my donation did not address ethnic hatred or unemployment it only saved lives and the kids who are saved they grew up in the same sort of mess that their parents did become angry at their neighbors go fighting in a war except how is the world a better place thanks to my donation in this hypothetical scenario. Yes i think theres 2 ways in which the worlds better the so the so. So one is just i think even among the poorest people in the world and even though you know by saving lives youre not addressing all the problems at once and such a thing is impossible these people still have good lives on balance the happy legs assist. And the worlds better for their contribution to it and so one thing is you just im actually benefiting them also benefiting the family who dont have to mourn the loss of a child dying young. But then secondly i think that also speaking to the long run disparity also that 20 so these issues like ethnic segmentation unemployment and. They tend to go away as a country guess which of the more developed and you know you know making just a little difference then. You know whats a big country explode checked and so youre hoping to get these countries to higher Living Standards all year long and along with these other problems dissipate much more. Right now where were back well continue talking to you professor. Oxford university. Will. Stay with us. Alan. Sputnik 5 has the world. Just like its namesake the original sputnik. The 1st draft of a to leave. Orbit the world. Many questions remain unanswered russias new vaccine be a focus for the west and the family states please when you make you feel. To receive. Interest preliminary requests. Williams those of us from what she. Writes this is happening. A window on the reaction has been exactly the same as it was waved by. Journalists in the us. The world reaction is made of green cheese. But. Its. And were talking to al trist evangelists professor of philosophy at Oxford University william at mccaskey well just recently i spoke to a loss of for im sure you know him and he actually tells me that charity work while it is ing some lives somewhat basically perpetuates the system that makes this live miserable in the 1st place right so as if were like guided by the principle of effectiveness it is in the end it seems much more effective for me to join lets say a Political Organization that would tackle inequality or other fault so the system instead of giving to charities that it will only fix the symptoms but not the illness do you know what i mean were not thats really being snotty isnt yet. So i think the key thing here is to say that you just can direct charitable money towards fixing the root dawkins rather than just the symptoms so this has a long history. Even a cow mox when writing does capital he was funded by. Educating those acting as a philanthropist marx will have been able to do the work he did whether or not thats own stuff a contribution and so similarly if youre looking at some of the big problems in the world well activists you know obviously they need people to help but they also need money for their running costs to organize to provide pamphlets and so on and so if youre more worried by the systemic issues facing the world and getting the actually poor you can fund organizations like the center for Global Development thats helping to get you know standards they deal with the worlds poorest countries. Or many other organizations that are tackling the course problems in the world so i think its important not to generalize across all of philanthropy its a very big tent. Well this active author is in the line of reasoning calls upon us to treat a charitable donation as an investment right and to put the money where the most return on investment will occur but with some causes i mean its tricky to calculate the return may mean if i donate to my local symphony right its not as effective as donating to entice antiparty angio but then again maybe having a symphony around is just as good as helping a 3rd world country kid somewhere so far away how do we measure the level of goodness. So that they go to many areas which are just very hard to get meaningful quantitative comparisons on and we have a general framework looking at. Causes where its hard. Watching our to international weve just interrupted the program to quick quickly cut live to joe biden who is now making a statement from wilmington delaware lets take a listen to what hes saying college vote and look at the National Numbers were going to win this race with a clear majority of the nation behind us weve gotten over 74000000 votes let me repeat that 74000000 votes thats more than any president ial ticket has ever gotten in the history of the United States of america and our vote total is still growing the bidding donald trump over 4000000. 00 votes thats the margin is still growing as well one of the exam especially proud of is how well weve done across america and were going to be the 1st democrat to win in arizona 24 years were going to be the 1st democrat to win georgia in 28 years and we rebuilt the blue wall in the middle a country that crumbled just 4 years ago pennsylvania michigan wisconsin the heartland of this nation. I know watching these voter alleys on t. V. Moves very slow or slow and its how slow as it goes it can be numbing but never forget that tallies arent just numbers they represent votes and voters men and women who exercise their fundamental right to have their voice heard and whats becoming clear each hour is that Record Number of americans of all races faiths religions chose change over more of the same theyve given us a mandate for action on covert the economy Climate Change systemic racism they made it clear they want the country to come together not continue to pull par the people spoke of more than 74000000. 00 americans and they spoke loudly for our ticket but while were waiting for the final results of our people know were not waiting to get the work done and start our start to the producer the process yesterday senator harris and i held meetings with groups of experts on Public Health and economic and the economic crisis this country is facing them pandemic as you also know is getting more worrisome all across the country delhi cases are skyrocketing and its now believed that we could spike to see as many as 200000 cases in a single day the death toll is approaching 240000 lives lost in this virus thats 240003 chairs the kitchen tables and dining room tables all across america will never be able to measure all that pain and loss the suffering that so many families experienced we know something about what it feels to like to lose to some it feels like to lose someone and i want them to know theyre not alone in our hearts break with you. When everyone everyone you know on day one were going to put our plan in to control this virus into action we cant save any of the lives lost and in this have been lost but we can save a lot of allies in the months ahead senator harris and i also heard yesterday by a lot of this recovery is slowing because of the failure to get the pandemic under control more than 20000000 people on unemployment millions are worried about making rent and putting food to reckon amik plan will put a focus on a path to a strong recovery look we both know tensions are high they can be high after a tough election one like weve had already remember we have to remain calm and patient but the process work out as we count all the votes you know were proving again what weve proved for 244 years in this country democracy works your vote will be counted i dont care how hard people try to stop it i will not let it happen that people will be her our journey is toward a more Perfect Union and it keeps moving on. In america we hold strong views we have strong disagreements and thats ok strongest its a strong disagreements are never to believe democracy is strong disagreements are healthy there are signs of a vigorous debate of deeply held views we have to remember the purpose of our politics is in total unrelenting unending warfare no the purpose of our politics the work of the nation is its a fan the flames of conflict but to solve problems. To guarantee justice to give everybody a fair shot and improve the lives of our people we may be opponents but were not enemies were americans no matter who you voted for im certain of one thing the vast majority of them 150 america 150000000 americans who voted they want to get the vitriol out of our politics are certainly not going to green a lot of issues but at least we can agree to be civil with one another lets put the anger and the demonization behind us stime for us to come together as a nation to heal its not going to be easy we have to try my responsibility as president we will be to represent the whole nation and i want you to know that ill work as hard for those who voted against me as those who voted for me thats the job thats the job its called the duty of care for all americans we have Serious Problems to do covert to the economy to Racial Justice and Climate Change we dont have any more time to waste on partisan warfare. You know and more than that we have such an Incredible Opportunity to build the future we want for our kids and our grandkids. Ive said many many times im never been more optimistic about the future of this nation there is no reason we cant own the 21st century we just need to remember who we are this is the United States of america. Theres never been anything anything we would be unable to do unable to accomplish what weve done together. I hope to be told to do more when i think youll meet god bush is going to protect our troops. Well as former Vice President and current democratic candidate joe biden giving a speech that seemed quite a bit like. Victory speech before the end of the elections actually its important to note that this is a close race but the elections are still going on just to give us our viewers a little bit of information joe biden actually still only has 264 electoral votes out of the 270 that he needs to win with donald trump still at 214 but theres still a close race going on in a number of states georgia is one of them nevada North Carolina and pennsylvania and in georgia theres already been confirmed a recount of the votes trump has threatened to go to the Supreme Court d at the end of the elections and theres been a number of lawsuits filed so were definitely going to have to continue following that all the way through but anyway youre watching r t internationals u. S. President ial election coverage its certainly a nail biter as you could see it from that speech as vote counting has resumed in key states to decide the u. S. President ial election. And the contest for the white house could be over in the coming hours with Democrat Joe Biden looking more and more likely to be declared the winner increasing his vote margins in key states however a recount has been announced in the state of georgia leaving americans hanging on the edge of their seats attention is focused on a handful of states and were still waiting for crucial results in nevada and pennsylvania as well where the democrats hold a tight lead. Now as it stands this is how it looks joe biden has 264. 00 electors if you include arizona which some do say is still too called still too early to call but if you assume he won biden needs only 6 more d electoral votes to achieve the 270 required for victory on the other hand currently stands at 214 with that said it remains a very tight race gaps closed in different battleground states on saturday and the former Vice President is leading in the vada and is less than one percent ahead in pennsylvania and georgia biden has taken the lead by 0 point one percent with 99 percent of the ballots counted as i mentioned the margins are so tight there that a recount is already set to happen a democrat hasnt won that state in decades while in North Carolina the race is also too close to call while democrats may feel quite confident the vote results are already coming under legal scrutiny a u. S. Supreme Court Justice has ordered pennsylvania to keep separate any mail in ballots coming in after election day and tells us the latest things look good for biden right now at this point in arizona in georgia and pennsylvania and in nevada biden has a narrow lead were hearing quite a bit of optimism coming from the democratic side this is nancy pelosi the speaker of the u. S. House of representatives i wish we werent wearing mattia we could see how exciting it is to come before you today with joe biden having the tremendous mandate that he has and that. Pretty soon the hyphen will be gone from Vice President to president elect joe biden now donald trump does not share these sentiments that biden is on the road to victory hes spoken up on social media reiterating some of the concerns he expressed regarding the fact that he thinks that there is fraud going on around the country this is some of what donald trump has said on social media joe biden should not wrongfully
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