Quiz 41 Wednesday, March 10, 2021 8:41 AM Quiz Page 1 Quiz Page 2 Quiz Page 3 Quiz Page 4 What Should a Billionaire Give and What Should You_ - The New York Times

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The New York Times 1
December 17, 2006
What Should a Billionaire Give — and What Should You?
By PETER SINGER
What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really
had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent
with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity
of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of
denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a
human life.
With Christmas approaching, and Americans writing checks to their favorite charities, it’s a
good time to ask how these two beliefs — that a human life, if it can be priced at all, is worth
millions, and that the factors I have mentioned do not alter the value of a human life — square with
our actions. Perhaps this year such questions lurk beneath the surface of more family discussions
than usual, for it has been an extraordinary year for philanthropy, especially philanthropy to fight
global poverty.
For Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, the ideal of valuing all human life equally began to jar
against reality some years ago, when he read an article about diseases in the developing world and
came across the statistic that half a million children die every year from rotavirus, the most common
cause of severe diarrhea in children. He had never heard of rotavirus. “How could I never have
heard of something that kills half a million children every year?” he asked himself. He then learned
that in developing countries, millions of children die from diseases that have been eliminated, or
virtually eliminated, in the United States. That shocked him because he assumed that, if there are
vaccines and treatments that could save lives, governments would be doing everything possible to
get them to the people who need them. As Gates told a meeting of the World Health Assembly in
Geneva last year, he and his wife, Melinda, “couldn’t escape the brutal conclusion that — in our
world today — some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not.” They said to themselves,
“This can’t be true.” But they knew it was.
Gates’s speech to the World Health Assembly concluded on an optimistic note, looking forward
to the next decade when “people will finally accept that the death of a child in the developing world
is just as tragic as the death of a child in the developed world.” That belief in the equal value of
all human life is also prominent on the Web site of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where
under Our Values we read: “All lives — no matter where they are being led — have equal value.”
We are very far from acting in accordance with that belief. In the same world in which more
than a billion people live at a level of affluence never previously known, roughly a billion other
people struggle to survive on the purchasing power equivalent of less than one U.S. dollar per day.
Most of the world’s poorest people are undernourished, lack access to safe drinking water or even
the most basic health services and cannot send their children to school. According to Unicef, more
than 10 million children die every year — about 30,000 per day — from avoidable, poverty-related
causes.
Last June the investor Warren Buffett took a significant step toward reducing those deaths
when he pledged $31 billion to the Gates Foundation, and another $6 billion to other charitable
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foundations. Buffett’s pledge, set alongside the nearly $30 billion given by Bill and Melinda Gates
to their foundation, has made it clear that the first decade of the 21st century is a new “golden age
of philanthropy.” On an inflation-adjusted basis, Buffett has pledged to give more than double the
lifetime total given away by two of the philanthropic giants of the past, Andrew Carnegie and John
D. Rockefeller, put together. Bill and Melinda Gates’s gifts are not far behind.
Gates’s and Buffett’s donations will now be put to work primarily to reduce poverty, disease
and premature death in the developing world. According to the Global Forum for Health Research,
less than 10 percent of the world’s health research budget is spent on combating conditions that
account for 90 percent of the global burden of disease. In the past, diseases that affect only the poor
have been of no commercial interest to pharmaceutical manufacturers, because the poor cannot
afford to buy their products. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), heavily
supported by the Gates Foundation, seeks to change this by guaranteeing to purchase millions of
doses of vaccines, when they are developed, that can prevent diseases like malaria. GAVI has
also assisted developing countries to immunize more people with existing vaccines: 99 million
additional children have been reached to date. By doing this, GAVI claims to have already averted
nearly 1.7 million future deaths.
Philanthropy on this scale raises many ethical questions: Why are the people who are giving
doing so? Does it do any good? Should we praise them for giving so much or criticize them for
not giving still more? Is it troubling that such momentous decisions are made by a few extremely
wealthy individuals? And how do our judgments about them reflect on our own way of living?
Let’s start with the question of motives. The rich must — or so some of us with less money
like to assume — suffer sleepless nights because of their ruthlessness in squeezing out competitors,
firing workers, shutting down plants or whatever else they have to do to acquire their wealth. When
wealthy people give away money, we can always say that they are doing it to ease their consciences
or generate favorable publicity. It has been suggested — by, for example, David Kirkpatrick,
a senior editor at Fortune magazine — that Bill Gates’s turn to philanthropy was linked to the
antitrust problems Microsoft had in the U.S. and the European Union. Was Gates, consciously or
subconsciously, trying to improve his own image and that of his company?
This kind of sniping tells us more about the attackers than the attacked. Giving away large
sums, rather than spending the money on corporate advertising or developing new products, is not
a sensible strategy for increasing personal wealth. When we read that someone has given away a
lot of their money, or time, to help others, it challenges us to think about our own behavior. Should
we be following their example, in our own modest way? But if the rich just give their money
away to improve their image, or to make up for past misdeeds — misdeeds quite unlike any we
have committed, of course — then, conveniently, what they are doing has no relevance to what we
ought to do.
A famous story is told about Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher, who ar-
gued that we all act in our own interests. On seeing him give alms to a beggar, a cleric asked
Hobbes if he would have done this if Christ had not commanded us to do so. Yes, Hobbes replied,
he was in pain to see the miserable condition of the old man, and his gift, by providing the man
with some relief from that misery, also eased Hobbes’s pain. That reply reconciles Hobbes’s char-
ity with his egoistic theory of human motivation, but at the cost of emptying egoism of much of its
bite. If egoists suffer when they see a stranger in distress, they are capable of being as charitable
as any altruist.
Followers of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant would disagree. They think
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an act has moral worth only if it is done out of a sense of duty. Doing something merely because
you enjoy doing it, or enjoy seeing its consequences, they say, has no moral worth, because if you
happened not to enjoy doing it, then you wouldn’t do it, and you are not responsible for your likes
and dislikes, whereas you are responsible for your obedience to the demands of duty.
Perhaps some philanthropists are motivated by their sense of duty. Apart from the equal value
of all human life, the other “simple value” that lies at the core of the work of the Gates Foundation,
according to its Web site, is “To whom much has been given, much is expected.” That suggests
the view that those who have great wealth have a duty to use it for a larger purpose than their
own interests. But while such questions of motive may be relevant to our assessment of Gates’s
or Buffett’s character, they pale into insignificance when we consider the effect of what Gates and
Buffett are doing. The parents whose children could die from rotavirus care more about getting
the help that will save their children’s lives than about the motivations of those who make that
possible.
Interestingly, neither Gates nor Buffett seems motivated by the possibility of being rewarded
in heaven for his good deeds on earth. Gates told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more I could
be doing on a Sunday morning” than going to church. Put them together with Andrew Carnegie,
famous for his freethinking, and three of the four greatest American philanthropists have been
atheists or agnostics. (The exception is John D. Rockefeller.) In a country in which 96 percent
of the population say they believe in a supreme being, that’s a striking fact. It means that in one
sense, Gates and Buffett are probably less self-interested in their charity than someone like Mother
Teresa, who as a pious Roman Catholic believed in reward and punishment in the afterlife.
More important than questions about motives are questions about whether there is an obligation
for the rich to give, and if so, how much they should give. A few years ago, an African-American
cabdriver taking me to the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington asked me if I worked
at the bank. I told him I did not but was speaking at a conference on development and aid. He
then assumed that I was an economist, but when I said no, my training was in philosophy, he asked
me if I thought the U.S. should give foreign aid. When I answered affirmatively, he replied that
the government shouldn’t tax people in order to give their money to others. That, he thought, was
robbery. When I asked if he believed that the rich should voluntarily donate some of what they
earn to the poor, he said that if someone had worked for his money, he wasn’t going to tell him
what to do with it.
At that point we reached our destination. Had the journey continued, I might have tried to
persuade him that people can earn large amounts only when they live under favorable social cir-
cumstances, and that they don’t create those circumstances by themselves. I could have quoted
Warren...