The Pursuit of Happiness, Peter Singer interviewed by Ronald Bailey

Ronald Bailey from the December 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

Singer: Right, right. That's a different question. I think the limits ought to be essentially those that can be achieved without the kind of authoritarianism that would be incompatible with fairly liberal democratic traditions and without enormous costs and enormous loss. You have to consider whether you're going to trade off some element of the total overall prosperity of a society for the sake of having it be more egalitarian. I think those are questions of judgment. I think it's reasonable to trade off some measure of that, but obviously not enough to create a widespread hardship.

Reason: What do you think would be a reasonable tradeoff?

Singer: I would look at it in terms of meeting people's basic needs and providing for a certain level of comfort. I think the kind of thing you're talking about is if you could ensure that there are virtually no people whose basic needs for food, shelter, warmth-those sorts of things-are not being met. I think that might be something that was worth doing, but I emphasize only if you could do it without introducing authoritarian measures, and that's a separate question.

Reason: It is very popular among some segments of the intellectual left to say that various aspects of society are "socially constructed" in the sense that humans are radically free to make social institutions and social roles be whatever we want them to be. Yet you argue that some common human tendencies-including hierarchy, male dominance, and sex roles-transcend cultural variation. Are the social constructivists deluded by ideology?

Singer: I think they are factually in error. At least, that's my best guess. This is obviously an area where there are no demonstrable proofs, but I would say that the evidence that's been coming in-the evidence of evolutionary theory, the evidence of cross-cultural comparisons, the evidence of looking at our closer primate relatives-suggests that these things are not simply culturally constructed.

Reason: You write, "Modern Darwinian thought embraces both competition and reciprocal altruism, which is really a more technical term for cooperation." You also write, "Modern market economies are premised on the idea that we are all dominated by acquisitive and competitive desires." But aren't markets really the primary arenas for reciprocal altruism? I give you something in exchange for something you give me back. There's a lot of reciprocal altruism in markets. Billions of transactions take place every day in the market, and 99.9 percent of the time both parties go away happy.

Singer: Yes, you can see markets as involving reciprocal altruism. Certainly they involve all sorts of relationships, and that's part of it. In the statement you read I was thinking not so much of ongoing trading relationships [as] the mentality of advertising-that is, essentially seeing consumers as acquisitive and trying to attract their acquisitive desires to this product rather than that product.

When I'm thinking of reciprocal altruism, I'm thinking of things where there is not just a single exchange but an ongoing relationship. A lot of those billions of transactions do take place in ongoing relationships, where you go to the same little outlet that sells your fruit and vegetables or whatever. But a lot of them, particularly in larger societies, get more anonymous, and there really is no such relationship. It's a sort of one-off thing, and it's not a relationship that's built up over time or that has the same conditions.

Reason: As I understand Darwinism, there's nothing beyond reciprocal altruism. As you write, "We often reserve the greatest rewards for those who do not seek them, precisely because we wish to encourage readiness to sacrifice one's own interest for the sake of others." Don't people who sacrifice in this way understand that they are engaging in a kind of tit for tat: "If I do this risky thing, there's a good chance I will get a good reputation, which will lead to more money, more attractive mating possibilities, more children, etc."? By reserving rewards for such sacrifices, haven't we constructed a society where people understand tit for tat in this larger sense? And doesn't that fit well within the notion of Darwinian reciprocal altruism?

Singer: I think that's a slightly cynical interpretation of why people do these things. You say, "Well, they all know that"-so it suggests that in some way this has more or less consciously got into their motivation. There are many cases of altruistic acts that are more spontaneous than that, or more anonymous than that. A lot of people give to the blood bank, but they don't go out wearing the little badges that say, "I gave to the blood bank today." Some people do, but a lot of them don't. So it's not clear who's going to know about altruistic behavior or how they're going to get rewarded for it. Where I'm talking about altruism, I'm excluding those people who are doing it with the sense of getting a reward for it. This is what I call genuine altruism, as distinct from reciprocal altruism. There can be such people who act because they do in fact get rewarded, but that's a somewhat separate question from what their conscious motivations are for doing it.

Reason: You admit in the book that a very small proportion of the people in society will actually be motivated to genuine altruism. What kind of institutions do you see for increasing that number, given Darwinian constraints?

Singer: You can only do it in a piecemeal, experimental way and see what's going to work. You can create the opportunities for it, and you can see whether people will voluntarily come to it. I think those experiments are interesting. Obviously, the blood bank is an institution with a long history. Bone marrow registers are more recent, require a significantly greater sacrifice, and attract a smaller number of people. But they still attract numbers that are real, and that may be sufficient for it to achieve its purposes.

Reason: Both Japan and Britain have to import from the United States about half their blood plasma because they don't get enough from donations. The reason the United States is the world's largest exporter of human plasma is that we have commercial blood collection centers. So in a certain sense, if it's a good thing to do, to have these supplies, why not commercialize it?

Singer: There's at least an argument to say that the opportunity to give altruistically is something that fosters a sense of community, a sense of community ties. It is not entirely a coincidence that the United States has more commercial ways of doing these things. Maybe they do produce more plasma, but on most accounts the United States is also a society which has weaker social ties. Individuals tend to be isolated more easily and so on; perhaps this has some broader social costs as well.

Reason: What does Darwinian thinking tell the left about why so many of the social programs they have favored have had difficulties or have failed?