
Philip Greenspun reviews "The Life You Can Save" by Peter Singer - rglovejoy
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/04/03/the-life-you-can-save-by-peter-singer/
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tigerthink
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2k/the_least_convenient_possible_wor...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2k/the_least_convenient_possible_world/)

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dbul
This blog seems polemical in nature. I've read Singer's _Practical Ethics_ ,
and he isn't trivializing the hunger issue inadvertently; it is on purpose.
When there is a serious situation involving a split-second decision of whether
someone lives or dies, you don't debate and argue.

The argument is also condescending to those being helped as though they are
just taking up resources and not capable of expressing their gratitude in the
form of work after receiving nourishment.

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niels_olson
I read some Singer before doing pig vivesection as part of a surgery rotation
in medical school. His general method seems to be to draw a bright
intellectual line, and proceed to demonstrate just how bright it is. Like any
bright line, one need only look around at the world for a moment to realize it
is a convenient intellectual exercise. Great for publishing papers and books,
not so useful in the trenches.

~~~
dbul
Replace "Singer" with "Gore" and I absolutely agree.

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sho
Greenspun is spot on with most of this, IMO. Singer might be a great ethicist,
but he seems to have no concept of the simple rules of economics and industry.
I respect his intentions, of course, but good intentions without good
information are useless - worse than useless, even.

A country that's short on food should have a powerful, built-in incentive to,
you know, _grow food_. If the elites aren't letting that happen, there's a
powerful incentive for the population to oppose them. If there's no economy,
it gives incentive to create one. It might be painful for the West to watch as
the wheels too-slowly start to turn, but turn they will, eventually.

But in Singer's mind, it's "unethical" to watch this process, so he wants to
interfere with foreign aid - removing all local incentives and basically
putting an entire country on welfare. And because the whole mainstream society
is in the same boat, there's no "social shame" incentives to get off welfare -
it just becomes "food from God", or, worse, from the next best thing, the
local dictator. Now the country's even worse off, really. They're addicted to
foreign aid like Heroin.

It might sound cold but incentives are the only proven way to make anyone do
anything. Those incentives don't have to be money - I hope that one day we can
get rid of money and work for the pride of recognition, or for some other
reasons - but clearly for now, we need money or trade or whatever to motivate
people. Take that away, flood a market with free food, and no-one is going to
start a farm. Why should they? The incentives are gone. Worse, they've been
perverted: better off to try and control the supply of the free food!

It's not impossible, though. If we really do want to provide a baseline food
diet for everyone in the world, and it certainly is a noble idea, then we just
have to provide a baseline food buying program for everyone in the world, too.
You can't buy from one market, strengthening their food industry, to dump on
another, destroying theirs. But if you promise to buy from both and distribute
a baseline to those in need - maybe it's possible. However, there is the small
matter of that you'd be commencing a global experiment in command economy
unprecedented in history ;)

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jibiki
Ok, let's see some numbers. What percentage of the African GDP comes from
foreign aid? What percentage of Africa is fed by free food? The ability of
both sides of this issue to avoid discussing numbers is nothing short of
alarming. You make these blanket statements like "They're addicted to foreign
aid like Heroin." Really?

There's some good discussion on:
[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/04/another-call-to-end-
ai...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/04/another-call-to-end-aid-to-
africa.html)

It's entirely possible to conclude that aid isn't helping Africa, but it's
asinine to say that it's the primary cause for Africa's economic problems,
unless you're willing to examine the numbers.

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sho
Numbers? What numbers would you like to see? I'm talking from first principles
here, like Singer. He's saying it's unethical to not help the poor, I'm saying
it is often counterproductive to do so in a naive manner. No numbers are
necessary to debate this point.

And sure, a country with no food production capacity is addicted to foreign
food aid exactly like Heroin.

Look, I'm trying to argue from first principles here, not get into a number-
slinging exercise. I'm trying to counter Singer's broad strokes with some
broad strokes of my own - kind of "concept V. concept". I can get nuanced if
you like.

For example, you ask what percentage of the African continental GDP comes from
foreign aid? Well, the answer is "not much". But take out the "rich" countries
and it multiplies rapidly. Remove the oil revenue, mostly kept by the elite,
and it goes up even further. I don't want to commit too much but I would
estimate that in the real, nominal GDP of aid-receiving african areas (just
the people, not the oil industry nearby) foreign aid is above 30%. That is a
hugely distorting figure, and it is very conservative btw.

What percentage of Africa is fed by free food? That's the wrong question. The
right question is about food dependency in a single area over time vs an area
that didn't receive food aid, and I don't have any numbers for that.

I didn't say aid is the primary cause. It's an attempted solution, although it
then goes on to cause a whole range of secondary failures. The primary cause
would be governance, but that's not what Singer talks about.

That link does have some interesting discussion, and I'm also a fan of
Overcoming Bias.

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jibiki
That makes sense; I have to admit that I haven't read Singer's book, but it
seemed like you were telling a story about foreign aid being Africa's biggest
problem. This story is very common, but it's just not true. Cutting off all
foreign aid to Africa would, literally, be letting people die. Lots of people.
That's a very sobering thought, but it's easier to accept it if you tell
yourself a story about foreign aid turning Africa into a giant welfare state.
Libertarians love to hide behind this comforting fiction.

Phil Greenspun's point is exactly the same. The bleeding heart types tell
themselves a story about saving children for $0.30 a day which totally ignores
the long term repercussions of their actions.

The story is infinitely more complicated than your first principles
deductions, as we can see by looking at real world countries that have
received massive influxes of outside money (Dubai, Israel, South Korea(?),
Cuba vs. numerous African countries and oil producers.) I think the correct
answer lies in the fact that giving aid to a government that isn't ready for
it is a recipe for disaster, or at least, not a recipe for progress.

~~~
sho
Yes I agree, and sorry for oversimplifying, but the problem is whenever you do
try and touch on a detail or two, the complexity multiplies under your
fingertips like a frickin' fractal. I mean you name it, it's a problem, and
they all feed back into each other in this huge spaghetti mess of
unsolvability. To try and talk about it at all in a format such as this is to
oversimplify by necessity. I'm try to do so in a reasonably non-misleading
way, though.

I agree with pretty much everything you say - you had (correct) criticism of
my "deductions", correct criticism of the libertarian line, correct critcism
of the Singer argument. But at least all these arguments are solutions on the
table. We can correctly poke holes in all of them, but until we have something
to offer ourselves, a "peer" argument if you will, it's all just nitpicking.
The crisis is current and ongoing and in our faces - well, in their faces,
anyway. Some kind of action is necessary, even imperfect action - it's got to
be better than nothing.

Your argument about cutting off aid killing people is of course understandable
and very human, but to me our differences on it sound a lot like a variation
on the "Trolley Problem" ethical dilemma - where whether killing less people
now to save more people later is moral or not seems to simply be a matter of
directness. To whit:

from <http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/> \- I am quite a fan of this guy:

 _First, we have the switch dilemma: A runaway trolley is hurtling down the
tracks toward five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present
course. You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a
different set of tracks, one that has only one person on it, but if you do
this that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley
and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one? Most people say "Yes."

Then we have the footbridge dilemma: Once again, the trolley is headed for
five people. You are standing next to a large man on a footbridge spanning the
tracks. The only way to save the five people is to push this man off the
footbridge and into the path of the trolley. Is that morally permissible? Most
people say "No."_

Is it possible that differing arguments between the "libertarians" and the
"Singer-esque" reduces to this phenomenon? Succinctly, the libertarians are
thinking of the switch, and Singer is thinking of the footbridge?

As for my own views, well - I think the governance situation is insoluble and
propose a UN agency backed by force of arms who will put any country who can't
feed, say, more than 0.1% of its population into "bankruptcy" adminstration,
to be reorganised and released later in a more competent shape. However, I
usually can't even say this because of post-colonialist western guilt, which
seems to be even more powerful a force than the "realeconomik" or "feed the
hungry" arguments.

