Larry S. Temkin - Being Good in a World of Need

The Dinner Party. On April 3, 2016, my wife Meg and I hosted a small dinner party at our home. The guests included Holly Smith, a major moral philosopher and former Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers; Jeff McMahan, one of the worlds leading philosophers on the ethics of killing and just war theory; Alvin Goldman, widely regarded as the greatest living philosopher of knowledge; Derek Parfit, regarded by many as the best living moral philosopher; Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on international development; and Patrick Byrne, the billionaire founder of Overstock.com who has been called the most hated man on Wall Street.

Inviting Byrne had been something of a mistake. Knowing that his father was a distinguished Rutgers alum, and having met Byrne on campus on several occasions, I stupidly assumed that he lived in New Jersey. In fact, he lived in Utah. As luck would have it, however, Byrne was scheduled to fly from Utah to London the evening of the dinner party. When he learned who else would be there, he decided to have his plane stop in New Jersey for four hours before continuing on his wayjust long enough for him to attend the dinner.

The event was everything Meg and I had hoped it would be, and then some. The conversation moved easily and quickly across a wide range of fascinating social, political, and ethical topics. It was, if I may say so, the most interesting dinner party I have ever been a part of, whether as host or guest. One particularly memorable moment occurred when Byrne relayed a conversation that he had had with the leader of a tribal faction in Afghanistan some four or five decades earlier. The leadera warlord, in factwas expressing great frustration that the United States and other Western powers were tying his hands, and not allowing him to ruthlessly expunge every man, woman, and child of a rival faction. The leader boldly predicted that one day the West would regret its squeamishness on the matter.

As it turned out, that day arrived on September 11, 2001, when the world became acutely aware of the name of the faction that the warlord had wanted to eradicatethe Taliban. For, as the world soon learned, it was the Taliban which, for many years, had played a central role in supporting and protecting Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization that perpetrated the infamous events of 9/11. You can imagine the conversation that ensued regarding the morality of the warlords position. (A real-world variation of the stock ethical dilemma: if you had the chance to kill Hitler when he was a baby, knowing what he would do as an adult, should you do so? Would you?)

As we neared the end of the meal, the conversation turned to the topic of global poverty and inequality. Deaton, who is a large man with an outsized personality, pushed himself back from the table, and began presenting some of the key claims from his book The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. In brief, Deaton suggested that global inequality was to some extent the natural and predictable result of the fact that, due to a wide range of social, political, cultural, and historical factors, human progress takes place at an uneven rate throughout the world. That is, global inequality is the unavoidable flipside of uneven human progress. Accordingly, insofar as human progress is greatly desirable, rightly worthy of celebration, and inevitably uneven, at least practically, there is less cause for handwringing than most people assume regarding global inequality.

Predictably, Deatons view produced an outpouring of responses. On the other side of the table, as well as the issue, Parfit and McMahan spearheaded significant pushback. Longtime supporters of Oxfam, and more recently the Effective Altruism Movement, Parfit and McMahan insisted that even if inequality was the natural byproduct of uneven global progress, there was no reason for it to persist to the massive degree that it does. More particularly, Parfit and McMahan contended that there was much that those who were well off could, and should, do to improve the lot of the worlds worst off. In support of their view, Parfit presented a version of Peter Singers famous Pond Example, which was intended to establish that just as we have a moral obligation to save a child drowning in a pond, even if doing so will ruin our clothes and our expensive shoes, so we have a moral obligation to help those in need on the other side of the world who will die if we dont send them aid, and this is so even if the cost to us of sending aid is the equivalent of the price of a new outfit and a pair of shoes, or more.