When the book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty was first published in 2009, it completely changed (and re-ignited) the conversation around poverty, ethics, and philanthropy. Clearly it affected Musings host Charlie Bresler, who, after reading the book, ultimately approached its author about starting a non-profit based around philanthropy.
According to its author, Peter Singer, those with money are behaving unethically — even immorally — if they don’t take steps to end the poverty and suffering of others.
Singer’s parents were Austrian Jews who immigrated to Australian to escape the Nazis. Tragically, three of his four grandparents died at the hands of the Nazi regime, and in this episode, Peter and Charlie discuss how this history may or may not have impacted his world view.
It’s a fascinating conversation around why we give or don’t. As you might imagine, the reasons are complex, rooted in human psychology, tinged with fear and cognitive dissonance, and seasoned with a lack of cultural pressure, thanks to an idea called the “diffusion of responsibility.”
We hope you’ll enjoy this episode and share it widely.
More about Peter Singer:
Raised in Australia, Peter Singer was awarded a scholarship to attend Oxford, where he received a Bachelor of Philosophy and later a Master’s. He was a Radcliffe lecturer at Oxford, a visiting professor at NYU, and spent most of his career as a professor in Melbourne. In 1999 he moved to Princeton to teach, and in 2011 to London to lecture at the New College of the Humanities.
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In 2008, Australian entrepreneurs Annabelle Chauncy and David Everett founded School for Life. The mission statement tells it all, really: “To educate poverty out of existence.” The co-founders met in Kenya where they were working as volunteers, and they saw in real time how education changes lives for the better, for individuals and their communities.
While doing post-doc research and study at the University of Georgia, Dr. Harrison took a volunteer position at the non-profit Heifer International. She describes having a “Eureka moment” during this time, when she fully realized the linkage between animals and humans and how the health of all are “woven together.”
Starvation isn’t only a deficit of calories, it’s also a deficit of nutrients. Children especially suffer when the food they do get doesn’t meet all their nutritional needs. Felix Brooks-church has some big ideas to end the “hidden hunger” of micronutrient deficiency, and in 2013, he and David Dodson co-founded the non-profit organization Sanku to help close the gap.
