This past weekend in the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Wolfe wrote about her interview with Princeton professor, Peter Singer. In the article, Ms. Wolfe describes Singer’s views on philanthropy. In this regard, Singer, a professor of moral philosophy, contends that ethics demands that people, especially people of means, donate a substantial portion of their income – as much as one third – to charities. He thinks substantial donations to the developing world are particularly in order.

As concerns the developing world, I found it striking that Singer is wholly silent as to the reasons why poverty is endemic, let alone how existing institutions might be altered so as to encourage a better state of material well-being over the long term. Instead, his “ethical” mandate is simply to donate money and when that runs out, donate still more money.

I have submitted a Letter to Editor laying out my thoughts in this regard. Below I reproduce the letter.

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In her Weekend Confidential piece about Peter Singer (Review, April 4-5, 2015), Alexandra Wolfe quotes the Princeton professor, as saying, “if you’re fortunate enough to be a part of the more affluent billion in the world, to live ethically, you have to do something to help those who are less fortunate, who just happened to have been born in impoverished countries and that’s part of living an ethical life.”  As Ms. Wolfe discusses, what Mr. Singer means is that successful persons — persons who have already created a lot of value for others —  have an ethical obligation to give away a substantial portion of their wealth.  Nowhere, however, is there any indication that Mr. Singer understands or even has thought about why countries are impoverished in the first place.  Instead, Mr. Singer seems self-satisfied with his feel-good ethics based on wealth redistribution regardless of the efficacy of such transfers. 

In point of fact, as the important work of the development economists, the late Peter Bauer and Hernando de Soto, shows, countries are largely poor, not because of resource scarcity, but because of insecure property rights and the absence of rule of law, which prevents the development of vibrant wealth-producing free markets.   Hence, simply pouring money into poor countries does little for long-term sustainable development.  Rather, the proven recipe for bringing billions of people out of poverty consists of establishing necessary legal institutions and fostering capitalism with as few fetters as possible.  So, it would seem that “living an ethical life” might be better judged by the extent to which successful persons teach the principles of free markets than by how many checks they write.  Put another way, you can give a poor man a fish, or you can teach him to fish.  I am sure that the eminent ethics professor’s heart is in the right place, but it would do him well to obtain a modicum of economic knowledge and economic literacy before telling the rest of us how to live ethically.

Theodore A. Gebhard