According to the World Bank’s latest figures, around 700 million people live in utter destitution, on less than $1.90 per day, poorer than the average pet cat in the rich world. It is easy to agree that this is a terrible thing. It has so far been much harder – even for philosophers – to agree on what should be done about it. Peter Singer, for example, argues that rich people should donate more to effective charities. Thomas Pogge argues that rich world citizens should stop their governments from supporting less than ideally just global institutions. Yet this intellectual debate is an unnecessary distraction. We already have all the moral agreement we need to act. Ending extreme poverty is not an intellectual problem but a practical one, and not even a particularly difficult one. We just need to find the people who are poor and give them enough money so that they aren’t poor anymore.
Monday, 2 May 2022
Monday, 18 April 2022
Why Governments Failed the Challenge of Covid and Capitalism Succeeded
- Corporations are better at globalisation than national governments
- Political incentives are less well aligned with the public interest than those for corporations
Sunday, 3 April 2022
A Dead Man's Switch Method for Insuring Against Dementia
What can be done to mitigate this risk? I propose a dead man's switch method for ensuring that your body cannot continue living without you in it.
Saturday, 12 March 2022
There Is No Such Thing As Countries
As any map will show you, the world is divided by political borders into spaces called countries. People and things can live in, come from, or go to these places.
But countries are not any more than that.
Firstly and most obviously, countries are merely a social construction. They are collectively produced fictions (like money, or religions) rather than mind-independent objects (like stones). Being fictional does not mean that countries do not matter, but it does mean that they only exist so long as enough people agree to act as if they do.
Secondly and more significantly, countries are places not agents. Places on a map cannot have interests or goals or take actions to achieve them. To think otherwise is to confuse the properties of one kind of thing with another. This category error infects not only general talk, but also much otherwise careful journalism and even academic analysis. For example, the influential Realist school of international relations is founded on the axiom that countries do (or ought to) act only in their national interest. This trades on two category errors: that countries (rather than governments) can act and that they have interests. The result is confusing and unfalsifiable nonsense about buffer zones, access to resources and so forth that is about as helpful for understanding, predicting, and managing conflicts as an astrological map.
Sunday, 20 February 2022
Invading Ukraine Can Only Be Bad For Russia
Tuesday, 11 January 2022
Replace Waiters With QR Codes