Dr. Larry Temkin is a moral philosopher at Rutgers University. His four-decade career in ethics, social, and political philosophy has regularly focused on questions of human inequality. His newest book, Being Good in a World of Need, reveals that many of our efforts to help the world’s neediest people fall woefully short of our expectations. Larry joins the podcast to explain why we may need to rethink how to do good in the world.

To build a better society, what are the best opportunities and respective roles for the non-profit, for-profit, and government sectors? Find out in our new story by Alene Dawson, entitled “Pursuing the Good.”

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Tom: Larry, I want to start by asking you where you spent your childhood. And when you were a kid, what were the things that just really fascinated you?

Larry: So, I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I had parents who were very different in many ways, but they had specific deep shared values. My mom was a kind of flaming liberal and never met a person she didn’t like. She taught English as a second language to immigrant populations at a technical college. My father was a, um, staunch conservative.

He’d served in the military. He’d fought in World War II. He landed in Okinawa and was the only member of his landing party to survive. He came back. He was a veteran. He worked in a foundry and, you know, was very conservative, but he also respected every person he came across and cared about the needy.

He cared about the hungry. So, I always grew up thinking that caring for the needy wasn’t a left issue. It wasn’t a proper issue. It was a humanitarian issue. You ought to care about those less fortunate than yourself. And so, I was raised in this tradition where we had something called tzedakah. You were supposed to contribute every week to help those people less fortunate than yourself.

And I felt it deeply. And I remember vividly in 1964, going to the New York World’s Fair, and my family and I were riding the subway through New York. And there was this African American woman sitting on a blanket with their hand outstretched and a bevy of small children around her, and the subway was pouring out, and thousands of people were screaming past this woman.

And they weren’t even looking at her. And I’m a 10-year-old kid, and it just hit me. Just the unfairness of it all. Worrying about those who are less fortunate than others, almost always through no fault or choice of their own. It’s bothered me as long as I can remember. I’ve interviewed a lot of people for this show.

Tom: I’m going to ask you a question I haven’t asked any of our guests yet, but I think it’ll make sense in our further conversation. How did you meet your wife, Larry?

Larry: So, this is a great story. I met my wife on a hunger hike.

This is Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1971. You have people who make donations. In those days, they would sponsor you for a nickel or a dime or sometimes a quarter, a mile. And then you walked, in this case, 31 miles. I was 15 years at the time. I was hiking with my brother. She was hiking with Uh, neighbor of mine and so I’m thinking, you know, how did Tom Wilkie get a girl like that?

But it turned out that she had started out walking with some of her girlfriends, and they were going too slowly. So, she found this neighbor of mine, they ran past us, we ran past them. I started making jokes. Flirting, et cetera, et cetera. And, uh, we’ve been together ever since. You know, I bet the miles ticked off for you faster on that charity hike than for anybody else.

Right. It was great. It was amazing. Yeah. I didn’t even notice it was 31 miles; you know, it’s still a problem at all. And yeah. And so, I raised that question because I know that’s an important episode in your life. For. How the rest of your life transformed, but also to that level of commitment that you had at a very early age of really sticking your neck out.

Tom: Walking 31 miles is no small feat and probably also the courage to ask lots of people to fundraise for a good cause. I’m curious now, tell me about the intellectual side. When and how did you start to gravitate towards ethics and moral philosophy as this area of study about these issues?

Larry: As an undergraduate, so 1972 1975, I was deeply concerned about the Holocaust.

And I couldn’t understand how some people put other people in the ovens. And some people put children, infants, in the ovens because they had a great grandfather or great grandmother, you know, one-eighth of a something of Jewish blood. And I could not understand this. So, I thought I’d do psychology because I figured if you could figure out why people did this, then you could figure out what you needed to do.

to change things so that people no longer did them. But I took this psychology class back in those days at Wisconsin. They were very proud, showing us on the screen how you could get a pigeon to peck out the star-spangled banner. And I took this class, I thought, oh geez, we are so far from learning how to stop people from putting other people in the ovens.

I’m not old enough for this. And then I had taken some philosophy classes, but I thought, you know, one of the things that was striking about Germany in World War II was how you had, they had this propaganda machine. You know, what was at the time arguably the most civilized country the West had ever seen, and then suddenly you have Doctors and lawyers and accountants and teachers, and factory workers and everyday people caught up in the fervor of we must rid our country and make ourselves pure because of this propaganda machine.

So, I saw philosophy with this emphasis on the analysis of arguments and truth and so on as a kind of prophylactic against propaganda. But in those days. In philosophy, ethics was this very soft, squishy area. No serious philosopher did ethics. Serious philosophers did philosophy of language, or logic, or epistemology, or metaphysics, but not ethics.

So, my advisor’s kind of pushed me away from ethics. But then, I was fortunate to go to graduate school where there were some young moral philosophers doing cutting-edge work. A guy named Tom Nagel, a guy named Tim Scanlon, who was a MacArthur Award winner, the so-called Genius Award. Nagel, Derek Harper, who was my mentor and advisor that many people regarded.

is the greatest living moral philosopher at the time of his death. These brilliant moral philosophers, sociological philosophers were doing philosophy. And I and many other members of my cohort were doing ethics. But in terms of the topic of Moral philosophy, when I started teaching, I started teaching the class that you took, and it was, uh, contemporary moral issues.

And we always did topics like punishment or nuclear deterrence. I did a whole series of topics, abortion and infanticide, but the one topic that remained constant from the first year I taught it to the last. Because it was the topic I cared so much about, it was about obligations to the needy. And I taught that in every year and at Rice, we started an Oxfam club.

But I didn’t start researching the topic till much later. Yeah, I recall as a student in a couple of your classes, the incredible enthusiasm you had for organizations like Oxfam. The energy was just coming off you and you were hoping that we would kind of Catch that wave and push forward. So, thinking back to that there in the, in the late nineties, what did Oxfam represent to you at that time?

So, Oxfam was one of these development organizations that got there on the ground in the world’s poorest countries and tried to introduce farming techniques and agricultural techniques and medical programs and so on. that would not only help people in need at the time, but transform, that was the idea, transform, develop the infrastructure, schooling, all sorts of agricultural projects to enable them to sustain themselves and get out of poverty and hunger, you know, long term.

That was the project, that was the goal. And it had always been presented to me as one of the most effective international relief and development organizations in the world. By that time already, it was certainly one of the largest. And in those days, my thought was the most important thing is to help the neediest people, to address the most pressing needs, to address the most urgent needs.

That’s what was most important. And that’s where I began to focus my efforts and my intellectual energy eventually. And it was a question of, of all the many things that you can do, all of which are worth doing, what’s the most important thing you can do? And I’ll just add, when I say that, I’ve always had what’s called a pluralistic bent to thinking about ethics.

And what I mean by that is in ethics, there’s a lot of different things that people care about and different kinds of moral theories. And you’ll get Kantian theories, which are deontological theories, which say certain kinds of actions are right or wrong, and you always ought to do the right thing.

things and not do the wrong things. There are virtue theories that say the most important question is what kind of person ought I to be? I ought to be honorable. I ought to be truthful. I ought to be loyal. I ought to be courageous. You ought to have virtues. Then there are other kinds of theories, consequentialist theories that say the most important question is how should the world go?

You want the world to go as well as possible. And I always felt. You should care about all these things. You should care about duties to yourself and to others, to your children, to your fellow human beings. You should care about being a virtuous person, being honest, being trustworthy, being compassionate, being generous.

And you should care about how the world goes. You should want the world to go as well as possible. But what I thought then, and still think, is that all the different things that are important from a moral perspective support aiding the least fortunate. They all do. We have duties to help the least fortunate and a compassionate and generous person should help the least fortunate.

And the world would be better if fewer small children died than if we Had all these great restaurants and big cars and big houses and so on. So, I thought this was one of those nice cases where all the most important moral theories agreed about what we ought to do to help the least fortunate in the world.

All right. That’s very helpful. It gives us a sense of kind of when you and I were young, you’re a young professor. I was a young student that feel like unbridled enthusiasm, even our little bits of money, if directed in the right ways. can have benefits that go tremendously beyond having our daily fancy coffee.

So, you remember my lectures on this, and I lectured on this in every class for years. You know, people say, oh, what can I do to help the poor? I’m just a poor undergraduate. And I would say, there’s a lot you can do. You can just buy your jeans. After Christmas, instead of before Christmas, save a few dollars and save a life.

Instead of buying a Starbucks every day, you could make your own coffee, save the money, send it to Oxfam, save a life. You could buy no name jeans instead of fancy name brand jeans, send them out on accident, save a life. That’s what I would do, that’s how I would teach it. I was very much a proselytizer for that way of thinking.

Tom: So, I think my next logical question is, when did you first begin to sense that maybe it’s not so simple, or maybe I’m not thinking about it the right way, or maybe just reality is different from what I thought?

Larry: Yeah, so, this is one of those rare cases where I can trace it to a day, a particular day. I can even trace it to a particular set of hours.

I had this unfailing, undoubtable, resolute conviction for almost my entire life. Until April 3rd, 2016, I had a dinner party at my house, a small dinner party, which if I may say so myself, was the greatest dinner party I’ve ever been a part of. I had several guests who were unbelievably major figures, and they included Derek Parfitt, who I mentioned already, who I think was the greatest living moral philosopher at the time.

A colleague of mine, Jeff McMahon, who was, is now the Vice Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, arguably the most prestigious chair in ethics in the world. And Angus Deaton, the 2015, I believe, Nobel Laureate in Economics. And I must back up a tiny bit. Angus is an economist at Princeton.

I’m a philosopher at Rutgers. And on a number of occasions, Angus had tried to introduce me to the idea that people like Peter Singer, so for the audience members who don’t know, Peter Singer is, as it were, the godfather among philosophers of, we have to do the most we can to help the needy in the world, to help the hungry in the world, to support organizations like ACFAM.

He’s had the biggest influence of any living person. on the idea of trying to help the needy. So, Angus, on numerous occasions, had tried to persuade me that Peter Singer and his followers were doing more harm than good. And I have to say, I just couldn’t believe him. I just thought that’s preposterous.

He can’t be doing more harm than good by telling me to give to organizations that will help feed people and help improve agriculture and all that sort of stuff. I basically, although I respect Angus a lot, and he’s smart, I just Dismissed him out of the hand. So, then I have this dinner party, and Angus, who’s this large man, intellectually and physically, pushes back from the table and starts to repeat the considerations that he’s given me previously for why people like Peter Singer might be doing more harm than good.

And Derek Parveen and, and Jeff McMahon start responding to him. And they’re responding to him exactly the way I did. And normally, if I’m in alignment with Derek and Jeff, I’m thinking, I’m in a safe place. But, you know, this time, I heard it differently. So, on that day, literally, April 3rd, 2016, that dinner party ended.

I went to bed many hours later. I couldn’t sleep

and the main reason is this Angus Deaton is a brilliant man who cares about the needy every bit as much as I do. He’s a Nobel lawyer, and he’s an economist. He deals in the empirical facts about the world, about what levers make a difference one way or the other. He’s read a ton of empirical research related to development economists.

Jeff McMahon, Derek Parfitt, and I are the quintessential armchair philosophers. We’re good at sitting in an armchair and thinking about moral issues. What’s right? What’s wrong? What’s good? What’s bad? But we don’t know any of the empirical facts on the ground. How could we be so confident that we’re right and that he’s wrong without knowing the data?

I suddenly thought for the first time in my whole life Oh my gosh, I’ve been dedicated to this my whole life. What if I’m doing more harm than good? As I say that night I couldn’t sleep. I was up the whole night. I was tossing and turning. I was thinking about all sorts of variations of a very famous example that Peter Singer wrote called the pond example.

It’s an example that was intended to get all of us to think that we must send a check to Oxfam. And then two sentences, it just goes like this. Child is drowning in pond. You’re walking by nobody else is there. You can save the child, but if you do your clothes, the shoes will get muddy, and you’ll have to replace them.

And then he says, surely you must save the drowning child. The fact that your shoes will get ruined, your clothes will get ruined, and you’ll have to replace them. It’ll cost you some money. Irrelevant, morally irrelevant. A child is drowning. You must save them. And then Peter said, look around the world.

Children are drowning all over the world, metaphorically. They’re starving, they’re lacking medicines, they’re lacking a simple vitamin A tablet or oral rehydration tablet that would stop them from dying of diarrhea and so on. For 15 cents that we thought you could save that child, you must write the check.

Even if it costs you the equivalent of the cost of a pair of shoes or fancy clothes, you must write the check, send it to reflective charity. They can do as much good with that as if the child was right there in front of you, they can pull them out of the pond for you. You don’t have to do it yourself.

Surely you ought to, and that was my thinking, but now for the first time, I wasn’t so sure, and I’m lying awake all night, and by the time I woke up, I thought about maybe 20, 25 variations that turned out, and some of them, of course, you have to save the child, but in a whole bunch of them, you don’t, and you might be saying, well, what could possibly make it wrong to save the child, but here’s one that went through my head that night.

The child’s in the pond. You want to cross the bridge. There’s a dictator or tyrant or bully standing on the bridge. And he says, you can’t cross the bridge to save the child unless you give me a gun, which I’m going to use to shoot five other people. Now, can you save the child? You want to save the child.

If you must give this guy a gun and he know he’s going to shoot five other people, is it still morally appropriate to save the child? And the answer there might be no. Or what if he says, before you can save the child, you must shoot five other people. Now, are you going to do it? No, surely not. So, the question is, is the world like Singer’s example?

And as I thought about that, when I woke up in the morning and I said, I must write a book on obligations to the needy. I must do that for myself. I must figure out. Is Deaton, right? Because if he is, I must do things differently.

After we return from the break, I asked Larry, to avoid the pitfalls of traditional aid, would it

Tom: lot of what your book is doing is describing all these different layers in which saving a drowning child directly is very different from giving money to an aid organization. Even an aid organization with an excellent track record, a good reputation, all these awards, is doing really the best that it can.

How is giving to an aid organization different from directly saving this child?

Larry: Well, there’s a lot of inefficiencies and there’s intermediaries between you and the neediest person who needs it most. There might be half a dozen, a dozen, two dozen people between you and that person when you’ve given your dime to the March of Dimes or to whoever.

There are concerns about government corruption. Some kind of goon holding a gun that says, give me weapons and you can dispense your aid. We get an arms deal; you get your international aid. We also have concerns about corruptions inside of aid organizations. You mention also in your book market distortions, whether it’s giving everyone free shoes and collapsing local businesses.

There are many cases of that. So that’s just really even introducing just some of the areas of concern that show that international aid is not pulling some Drowning person out of the water now, so here’s my question because that all makes me very uncomfortable I do like to give to aid organizations and I do want my excess income to not just be essentially Wasted on me for diminishing returns.

I want it to do good. So, I’ve heard proposed that What we should then do is give directly to the world’s neediest because there are so many people that have Smartphones it is possible, and some organizations have set up a way for us to be able to directly give the people who need it most money. Here’s my question for you.

Can giving money directly to the neediest people circumvent some of this long litany of problems that we’ve seen with traditional international aid? Okay. So that’s a great question. So, with you, I came away after writing this book, very unsettled, but I think we have a moral imperative for a wide variety of reasons to do what we can to help those in need.

And the question is. How best to do that, but one of the things I want to just make sure I get on the table first so people don’t misunderstand this is in this book, I raise a whole host of questions. of questions, problems, worries about negative consequences, often hugely negative consequences that can arise in some of the world’s poorest countries where the need is greatest.

Most of the worries arise in countries that are very, very poor, where aid interventions represent a significant portion of the overall, as it were, GDP of those countries. That can have a distorting effect. I’m also particularly worried about countries that have despots or tyrants in control, local warlords and gangs and so on and so forth.

And there are many such countries. And that’s often one of the reasons why the countries are so desperately poor. Development economists have long talked about something called a resource curse. The resource curse is the recognition that if you look in many of the most disadvantaged, poorest regions of the world, many of them are actually very rich in resources.

And there’s something which is called the principle of effectiveness or law of effectiveness, which roughly holds in international law, whoever has effective control over the nation’s resources, they can dispose of them as they wish. And it turns out that this law turns out to be very, very good for the richest companies and people in countries in the world, but very, very bad for the poorest regions of the world.

Because it foments civil unrest, it foments civil wars. You have ongoing wars in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where millions and millions of people die as rival factions fight to take control of this resource rich country, because whoever’s in control of the resources can take care of themselves, the fire, the police, the military.

Stay in control, et cetera, et cetera.

You might say you’re giving money, going back to your direct question. You’re giving money directly to, say, disadvantaged people. What you’re doing, especially when there’s lots and lots of people involved, not just your money, lots of aid organizations are involved. Lots of outside resources are pouring in.

Governments. Have a way of taking their piece of that, even if you transferred it to someone’s bank account, it can be as simple as just taxing it. One of the biggest worries that Angus Deaton has is that the flow of money into a country enables the government to basically pursue its own agenda. without significant input from the local citizens.

And what Angus insists on is that the single most important thing for long term social, political, and economic development in the country is that a government be responsive to the will of its citizens. And one of the ways that government must be responsive to the will of the citizens. is when it’s taxing, as it were, the hard-earned money that those citizens have gotten.

But if the money isn’t, as it were, the hard-earned money of those citizens, but just money that’s poured in from the outside, even if it’s ostensibly to be given to a citizen. There’s always a way that governments can take advantage of the inflow, and if there’s a big inflow in a poor country, that can lead to the resource curse.

And so that’s the worry. The worry is that even the direct aid finds its way into our government and enables them to not be responsive to the will of the people and do what is ever best for themselves. And their followers, that’s the concern stepping back. And I think you’ve well-articulated, there’s a lot of limitations to how effective our international aid can be having reflected through these issues now for years for yourself.

Tom: Have you started to notice perhaps maybe other kinds of opportunities or other kinds of places to invest our dollars have kind of risen and just become more appealing to you as you’ve, in a certain sense, seen your favorite darlings get pulled down into this quagmire? What has kind of maybe risen in your estimation in the last few years?

Larry: Yeah, I’m going to answer that. I’m going to say one thing that’s very important to me. I say I’m a pluralist, and I do think. Then in some cases, when the need is just so honestly urgent, there will be fundamental humanitarian concerns that will pull us to contribute, even with all the worries that I have.

And that might sound weird, but if my mom is. Drawing on the left and five strangers are drawing on the right. I’m going to save my mom, and I think I’m going to be right to save my mom, but that doesn’t mean I’m doing more good than harm. Five people will die instead of one. So sometimes there are considerations that push you.

I continue to give to Oxfam. I continue to give to Doctors Without Borders. I continue to give to three of the top four rated charities on Give Well, notwithstanding all these worries I have. So, the worries are real, and I write this book in part because I’m trying to force people to come up with other ways, other alternatives, finding other ways of doing things, and I’m hoping this book will help to do that, help focus attention on certain concerns.

But in the meantime, I haven’t abandoned many of the things I used to always give to. But the question was, have other things bubbled up? Am I looking for other ways to help? And the answer is yes. I am now paying much more attention to the possibility of aiding people. who are very poor, disadvantaged, but not necessarily in the world’s poorest countries.

Many of the worries that I raise about corruption, about the unresponsiveness of the government to its citizen, those don’t arise in a country like the United States, or don’t arise nearly as much. So, the answer to your question is I have shifted my thinking. I continue to give to many of the ones I’ve given before.

I am now thinking about issues of human trafficking. I’m thinking about issues of human rights. I’m thinking about issues of justice. I’m giving more to those. I’m thinking of migrants and immigrants and refugees. I’m paying more attention to that when I think about distributing than I have previously. I do think there are things that we need to try to urge our legislators to do on our behalf.

Which is to take a wider global view, to not always just think what’s best for America, what’s best for me, but to think about what’s best for our fellow human beings.

I do want to still spread that to my students. I do want to still spread that to your audience. I want people to think not just what’s best for me and us, but what’s best for the world, and for those who need it most. And then urge our legislators to represent us! On that half, towards a kinder, gentler world where more people can flourish.

Tom: I want to wrap up with two personal questions for you. I’m imagining what if you were to get into a time machine and you met yourself as a bright-eyed, idealistic high school student who’s raising money and walking 30 miles. Of what you’ve been learning the last few decades, what kind of conversation might you have with your teenage self about doing good for the world’s neediest people?

Larry: I’ll be honest, it would be a hard conversation to have, and it’s one I’m having with myself, even now. I mean, even now, I continue to worry and toss and turn, because I do want to do good, and I do want to help, and I’m not sure what the best ways are to do it. So, I’m going to be trying to wake up my teenage self a bit.

I want them to. Think hard about where that money is going and how it might end up both being used and how it might generate perverse incentives. that can in the long run do more harm than good. So, I’d want my teenage self to be aware of that, but I wouldn’t want my teenage self to become selfish and self-absorbed, not care about what’s going on in the world.

I wouldn’t want to discourage him from being involved and finding a way to try to make things better. I’d want to encourage that. I just guess I’d want him to be a little more aware than he was. Or how things can go wrong so we could try to take steps to, uh, not contribute to the worst disasters. I think one of the takeaways that I got from your book was that I need to be more realistic and more accepting of a certain amount of inefficiency and corruption in the way that my dollars are spent in the world.

Whether I’m buying new clothes or giving to reforestation efforts or to clean water, this idea that I can give. Money, and it’s going to purely turn into goodness is a fantasy that probably has been harnessed to very bad ends. That doesn’t mean we can’t do good, but this unmitigated, just pure goodness that we get our own warm glow about that cannot be the basis for doing good.

I think there’s a heaviness in philanthropy. I think that cannot be ignored anymore. No, I think that’s right. I should probably just let you have the last word on that. And I think that’s well put it. I will just say, I mean, I do in the book, as you know, distinguish between two different kinds of corruption.

What worries me, as you know from the book, is not the cases of corruption where someone’s just feathering their nest and pocketing some of my money. I can live with that. What worries me is when the person who pockets it does nefarious things with that, where it advances ends that are evil. Then it’s harder.

I want to conclude here. I, I’m grateful for you spending this time with me today, and I’m thinking about the pivotal moment in your life where you went from just being so confident and enthusiastic and eager and ebullient about a certain way of seeing the world to just, you’d heard those arguing.

Against your position repeatedly, but it took this certain moment in your life. You heard your arguments coming outate someone else’s mouth and you were just able to sit on the outside and listen to two other people. And so, I think my wish for our listeners is for them to get themselves in social situations in which they’re able to.

Here’s something that they’ve never heard in quite that way before. That’s what I took away and hopefully that I can impart with my kids as well. Makes me happy. I’m glad you take that away. I think this is hugely important. There’s almost always a kernel of truth to every position out there. There’s some reason.

Why someone else holds this view, you must search for it. I think it’s important you respect every human being, even if you’re convinced, they’re wrong. And even if you’re convinced, they’re evil and they have terrible motivations, is there some reason why someone might hold a view like this, which isn’t terribly motivated?

And give it its due weight and really look at that. And I think when you do that, it’s good for you. It’s good for the world.