Felicific Caritas , Practical Agape

Abstract

Felicific Caritas, Practical Agape Peter Heinegg The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically. By Peter Singer. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2015 xiii +211 pp., $25.00 (hard cover) For the past two centuries, critics have mocked Jeremy Bentham's formula (borrowed from Joseph Priestley or Cesare Beccaria) that, “The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.” How can happiness (or pleasure or well‐being) be measured? Who decides the rank order of satisfactions? Weren't the Utilitarians aware that there's no necessary link between beneficent intentions and final outcomes? Well, touché. But Bentham was onto something: The most reliable gauge of any moral principle or habitual practice has, by and large, to be its concrete results—although evaluating those results will always be complicated and controversial, At any rate, Peter Singer, the world's most famous consequentialist (most widely read philosopher?), here presents a truly modest proposal: guidelines for doing good that ought to have at least some appeal to serious thinkers, secular or religious, about ethics. In a ground‐breaking article from 1972, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Singer first argued that in the face of famines and other major disasters, whether natural or manmade (which are always occurring somewhere in the world), people with money to spare are obliged to help the victims, up to the cutoff point of “marginal utility,” defined as where “by giving more, one would cause oneself and one's family to lose as much as the recipients of one's aid would gain.” (Good luck spelling out that.) Putting it negatively, anyone with surplus funds—the Waltons, say, but countless middle‐class First Worlders as well) would be responsible for all the harm that their unsent donations could have averted. You could never know exactly who might have survived or recovered, except for your close‐fistedness; but it seems logical that absent aid = present guilt. It's the old “give‐till‐it‐hurts” mantra, but with a clearer, sharper edge to it. (See Singer's persuasive “What Should a Billionaire Give—And What Should You?” in the New York Times Magazine, December 17, 2006.) This is a radical demand—and Singer admits that he and his wife haven't lived up to it—but it just so happens to be in line with ancient Christian and Catholic tradition. An unwavering atheist, Singer is happy to quote St. Ambrose (“You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his. For what has been given in common for the use of all, you have arrogated to yourself.”) and, on an even bolder note, St. Thomas Aquinas (“It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another's property in a case of extreme need; because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of the need.”) This goes back to Jesus’ “evangelical counsel,” “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor” (Mt. 19.21); but Singer objects that taking such advice could severely limit any future giving. Modern popes, such as Paul VI, John Paul II, and Francis, have continued to preach this message, though Singer rightly blames the hierarchy for not calling out wealthy churchgoers on what is, after all, an essential commandment. Jesus’ stunning hyperbole about the rich man and the eye of a needle is seldom heard from the pulpit. What Singer argues for is “effective altruism,” marked by (1) modest living and hefty giving to “the most effective charities,” (2) studying which charities are the most efficient, (3) encouraging others, in person or otherwise, to do the same, and (more problematically), (4) choosing a career with the highest potential salary (investment banker, etc.) to bankroll the needy all the more generously, and even (5) donating body parts (blood, marrow, or a kidney, say) to a stranger. Singer devotes a lot of space to naming and describing various individuals, some of them his acquaintances (read about the extraordinary Zell Kravinsky, if you haven't already) who have...