Are you actually a good person?
In the first episode of More Than Good, Effective Altruism Australia’s new podcast, host Amy Aela spoke with four guests who have spent a long time thinking about how to live well:
The guests
- Moral Philosopher Peter Singer.
- AI and Animal Ethics Researcher Yip Fai Tse.
- Executive Director – Policy & Sector Development, Philanthropy Australia Krystian Seibert.
- CEO of Effective Altruism Australia, Grace Adams.
The question was simple: what does it take to be a good human being? The discussion covered a lot of ground, from drowning children to factory farms to AI, and kept coming back to the idea that doing good is not all or nothing.
You can find Episode 1 on:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
Start with the interests of others
Peter Singer began with a definition. A good human being considers the interests of others, and not only other humans. If a being can feel pain and suffer, that suffering deserves moral weight, and we should think about the consequences of our actions, including ones far into the future.
He added a counterweight. We are animals too. We evolved to care for our offspring and our kin, and trying to suppress that would be neither realistic nor desirable. The aim is to hold both: to stay close to family and the people near us, while also thinking beyond them to the wider world of sentient beings.
Obligation, or opportunity?
Should giving away part of your income be a personal choice or a moral duty? Yip Fai Tse noted that strict utilitarianism might say it is wrong not to give.
But he made a further point. Even from a utilitarian view, guilt can be a poor strategy. If telling people, or yourself, that not giving makes you a bad person actually discourages giving, then the framing is self-defeating. Often the more effective thing, and so the better thing, is to frame giving positively.
Grace Adams put it in the language she prefers: a moral opportunity rather than an obligation. People have a real opportunity to do good through their giving, and taking it can add meaning to a life. Krystian Seibert added a third frame. Giving can be a form of democratic participation, a way of collectively deciding what we want to fund and change in society. Born in Poland in 1982, in a country without a free civil society, he said the value of people participating and supporting one another is something he feels personally.
The drowning child, and the maths of distance
Grace set out the arithmetic behind EAA’s focus on global health. In Australia, governments use a “value of a statistical life” of around five million dollars, roughly what we will spend to prevent one death. Overseas, preventing a death from a disease like malaria can cost around five thousand dollars. The same dollar can do much more good in a low-income country than at home, perhaps up to a hundred times more, because of how unequal the world is.
Singer linked this to his 1972 essay, Famine, Affluence and Morality, and its thought experiment of the shallow pond. If you walked past a child drowning in a pond, you would wade in to save them, even at the cost of ruining your most expensive shoes. Almost everyone agrees they would. The harder question is why a child far away, who you cannot see, should be any different. Emotionally the distance matters a great deal. Ethically, Singer argued, it does not. The point is to let a visible child move us, and then extend the same concern to children we will never meet.
The panel did not pretend this was simple. Asked whether he would save one person he knew or reduce the suffering of a hundred strangers, Singer said he ought to choose the hundred, then admitted that in practice it would depend on who the one person was.
The others landed in much the same place: proximity and relationships are real, even when the impartial maths points the other way.
Doing good is a scale, not a switch
A key idea in the episode is that you do not have to choose between caring for your family and caring for the world. Grace pushed back on the all-or-nothing instinct, the feeling that if you are not doing everything, it is not worth doing anything. That is not right. Better to do what you can and grow your ambition over time, because doing good tends to be self-reinforcing: the first steps make the next ones easier.
Singer framed it as moving away from a strict right-or-wrong split toward a scale, where the aim is to keep moving up. Krystian noted that this is usually how people and societies change anyway, not in one big shift but through small changes at the edges that add up. It is the idea behind Giving What We Can: give a little more, join a board, contribute where you can.
Can you be good and have nice things?
So is there room for luxury? The panel’s answer was a qualified yes. Grace thought it unrealistic to expect anyone to spend down to poverty. Holidays, dinners with friends, and ordinary pleasures are fine. The question worth asking is whether a purchase genuinely adds meaning, weighed against what the money could otherwise do.
Singer drew the line at excess, citing acquaintances in New York who would think nothing of flying business class to Thailand for a single warm weekend, when the same money could save a life or two.
He also named a familiar pattern: you get the thing you wanted, feel briefly happier, and then the feeling fades and you want the next thing. Knowing the next purchase will not actually satisfy you is itself a reason to think harder about where your money goes.
Speciesism and the chickens we never picture?
Why do animal causes consistently rank below human and child causes when people give, even as billions of animals suffer in factory farms? Singer used the term speciesism deliberately, to draw a parallel with racism and sexism: a bias in favour of the interests of one’s own species against those of others. We would not run painful, lethal experiments on humans, or confine them as we confine farmed animals, yet we accept it for animals routinely.
Part of the problem is relatability. We grow up with dogs and cats and know them as individuals, so even within animal charities the shelters for stray pets attract most of the money, while helping a far larger number of farmed animals attracts much less.
We do not picture the hen or the pig as an individual, even though pigs rival or exceed dogs in intelligence. There is also a self-serving effect that research in Melbourne has captured: tell people they will be eating beef for lunch and they rate a cow’s intelligence lower than if you tell them they will be having a vegetable dish. Knowing we will eat an animal lowers our estimate of its mind.
The moral blind spots we will regret
The panel turned to moral blind spots, practices we tolerate now that we will later struggle to explain. Yip Fai shared a personal one. Until around forty years ago, many Western doctors performed surgery on infants without anaesthesia, reasoning that babies would not remember the pain. The pain still happened. The practice was overturned after a mother whose baby had heart surgery led an outcry that changed things within a couple of years. Yip Fai believes he was one of those infants. His hernia surgery took place in 1986, just as the practice was ending, and his mother’s account of him taped to the table and bruised from struggling suggests he was operated on without anaesthesia. As he noted, the same thing still happens in poorer countries where a handful of anaesthesiologists serve an entire population, and where pain relief is often unavailable.
The panel then looked forward. What are we doing now that future generations will condemn? Singer named climate change, the continued use of fossil fuels and consumption of high-emissions meat despite knowing the damage being done to future generations. Several guests raised the possible sentience of digital minds: as AI advances, we may face the prospect that some of what we build can suffer.
Singer noted that we are at least asking the question early this time, before the worst is locked in. Anthropic, for instance, has appointed someone to look into AI welfare. We had no such foresight with factory farming.
When AI starts running the farm
Yip Fai’s research looks at how AI affects animals. He gave two examples. Self-driving cars already try to avoid hitting cats, dogs and large animals, partly for the bad press and partly to protect passengers and avoid damage. But there is no sign they account for the many smaller animals struck on roads, often left injured rather than killed. There is at least scope for AI-driven cars to do better than human drivers at protecting wildlife over time.
The larger concern is AI running factory farms, which is already happening. This is not science fiction or even advanced technology, just fairly simple machine learning that can identify individual animals from video, estimate their weight without a scale, detect illness early, and optimise feeding.
It cuts costs, improves efficiency, and lets producers pack more animals into sheds while maintaining profitability. Governments in several countries, including recently the United Kingdom, are subsidising these systems. The effect is to entrench factory farming economically, at the point when many would hope to see it give way to plant-based and cellular alternatives.
This connected to a broader theme: industries that do not pay for the costs they impose on other sentient beings. Singer pointed to a “true cost” supermarket in Amsterdam, where the price at the register includes the external cost of a product, typically fifteen to twenty per cent more, with the surplus going to offset the harm. It is a viable business, which says something about the customers willing to pay it.
Getting companies to give
On corporate giving, Krystian was measured about mandates like India’s requirement that companies spend two per cent of profits on social responsibility. In Australia, he suspected, many would argue companies should simply pay more tax and let a democratically accountable government decide.
His own preference, drawn from his work on the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into philanthropy, is to start with transparency: require listed companies to report what they give and to whom. Companies follow other companies, and no large firm wants to sit at the bottom of a public table.
Singer offered a complementary approach through Profit for Good, a project inviting companies to pledge at least ten per cent of profits to effective charities and to build a community that encourages one another to give more.
The Australian ticketing company Humanitix, founded by two Sydney entrepreneurs whose charity owns the business, already directs all its net profits this way. With global corporate profits in the order of ten trillion dollars and current giving around one per cent, the potential is large, especially as government aid budgets are being cut.
So how much should you give?
The episode closed on the obvious question: what is the right amount? Singer’s reply was practical. The figure he would recommend is whatever leads to the greatest total amount being given. Ten per cent has worked well as a Giving What We Can pledge, with members having donated well over four hundred million dollars, which suggests it balances being meaningful with being achievable. If a higher figure raised more in total, he would recommend that; if a lower one drew far more people in, he would recommend that instead.
For himself, the calculation is different, because the giving is in his own hands. Singer gives well above ten per cent, in the range of twenty-five to fifty, and finds he can do so without real sacrifice. His advice was the plainest version of the episode’s argument: give what you can, and feel good about giving it.
More Than Good is a podcast from Effective Altruism Australia.
You can find Episode 1 on:
YouTube
Spotify
Apple Podcasts
