Author: Peter Singer

PRINCETON: The recent release of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, the only person convicted of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, sparked outrage. Around the same time, the Philadelphia Eagles, an American football team, offered a second chance to former star Michael Vick, who was convicted of running a dog-fighting operation in which unsuccessful fighters were tortured and killed. And William Calley, who commanded the platoon that massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai in 1968, has now broken his media silence and apologized for his actions.

When should we forgive or show mercy to wrongdoers? Many societies treat crimes involving cruelty to animals far too lightly, but Vick’s penalty – 23 months in prison -was substantial. In addition to imprisonment, he missed two years of his playing career, and millions of dollars in earnings. If Vick were never to play football again, he would suffer punishment well beyond that imposed by the court.

Vick has expressed remorse. Perhaps more importantly, he has turned words into deeds, volunteering at an animal shelter and working with the Humane Society of the United States to oppose dog fighting. It is hard to see what good would come from not allowing him to complete his rehabilitation and return to doing what he does best.

Megrahi was convicted of murdering 270 people, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He had served only seven years when Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Minister, released him on compassionate grounds, based on a medical report that Megrahi has terminal cancer, and only three months to live. The question of remorse has not arisen, because Megrahi has never admitted guilt, and did not drop an appeal against his conviction until just before his release.

Doubts have been raised about whether Megrahi is really near death. Only the prison doctor, it seems, was prepared to say that he did not have more than three months to live, while four specialists refused to say how long he might have. There has also been speculation that Megrahi’s release was related to negotiations over oil contracts between Britain and Libya. Finally, some question whether Megrahi really was the perpetrator of the crime, and this may have played a role in MacAskill’s decision (although, if so, that would have been better left to the courts to resolve).

But let us leave such questions aside for the moment. Assuming that Megrahi was guilty, and that he was released because he has only a short time to live, does a prisoner’s terminal illness justify compassionate release?

The answer might depend on the nature of the crime, the length of the sentence, and the proportion of it that remains to be served. For a pickpocket who has served half of a two-year sentence, it would be excessively harsh to insist on the sentence being served in full if that meant that he would die in prison, rather than with his family. But to release a man who served only seven years of a life sentence for mass murder is a very different matter. As the victims’ relatives point out, in planning his crime, Megrahi showed no compassion. Why, they ask, should we show compassion to him?

MacAskill, in a statement to the Scottish Parliament defending his decision, refrained from quoting from the best-known speech on mercy in the English language – that of Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice – but Portia’s words would have fitted the core of his statement. Portia acknowledges that Shylock is under no obligation to show mercy to Antonio, who is in breach of his agreement to him.

“The quality of mercy is not strained – that is, constrained, or obligatory – she tells Shylock, but rather something that falls freely, like rain. MacAskill acknowledged that Megrahi himself showed no compassion, but rightly points out that this alone is not a reason to deny him compassion in his final days. He then appeals to the values of humanity, compassion, and mercy as “the beliefs we seek to live by and frames his decision as being true to Scottish values.

We can reasonably disagree with MacAskill’s decision, but we should acknowledge that – unless there is more going on than appears on the surface – he was motivated by some of the finest values we are capable of exercising. And, if we believe that Megrahi was not sufficiently punished for his crime, what are we to make of the treatment of former Lieutenant William Calley?

In 1971, Calley was convicted of the murder of “no less than 22 Vietnamese civilians of undetermined age and sex. He was also convicted of assault with intent to murder a Vietnamese child. Yet three days – yes, days – after his conviction, President Richard Nixon ordered that he be released from prison and allowed to serve his sentence in a comfortable two-bedroom house. There he lived with a female companion and a staff to assist him. After three years, he was released even from this form of detention.

Calley always claimed that he was following orders. Captain Ernest Medina, his commanding officer, ordered him to burn the village down and pollute its wells, but there is no clear evidence that the order included killing non-combatants – and of course if such an order were issued, it should not have been obeyed. (Medina was acquitted of murder.)

After decades of refusing to speak publicly, Calley, who is now 66, recently said that “not a day goes by when he does not feel remorse “for what happened that day in My Lai. One wonders if the relatives of those murdered at My Lai are more ready to forgive Calley than the relatives of those killed at Lockerbie are to forgive Megrahi.

Peter Singeris Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).

PRINCETON: The arrest in New York last month of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn businessman whom police allege tried to broker a deal to buy a kidney for $160,000, coincided with the passage of a law in Singapore that some say will open the way for organ trading there. Last year, Singapore retail magnate Tang Wee Sung was sentenced to one day in jail for agreeing to buy a kidney illegally. He subsequently received a kidney from the body of an executed murderer- which, though legal, is arguably more ethically dubious than buying a kidney, since it creates an incentive for convicting and executing those accused of capital crimes.

Now Singapore has legalized payments to organ donors. Officially, these payments are only for reimbursement of costs; payment of an amount that is an “undue inducement remains prohibited. But what constitutes an “undue inducement is left vague.

Both these developments raise again the question as to whether selling organs should be a crime at all. In the United States alone, 100,000 people seek an organ transplant each year, but only 23,000 are successful. Some 6,000 people die before receiving an organ.

In New York, patients wait nine years on average to receive a kidney. At the same time, many poor people are willing to sell a kidney for far less than $160,000. Although buying and selling human organs is illegal almost everywhere, the World Health Organization estimates that worldwide about 10 percent of all kidneys transplanted are bought on the black market.

The most common objection to organ trading is that it exploits the poor. That view received support from a 2002 study of 350 Indians who illegally sold a kidney. Most told the researchers that they were motivated by a desire to pay off their debts, but six years later, three-quarters of them were still in debt, and regretted having sold their kidney.

Some free-market advocates reject the view that government should decide for individuals what body parts they can sell – hair, for instance, and in the US, sperm and eggs – and what they cannot sell. When the television program Taboo covered the sale of body parts, it showed a slum dweller in Manila who sold his kidney so that he could buy a motorized tricycle taxi to provide income for his family. After the operation, the donor was shown driving around in his shiny new taxi, beaming happily.

Should he have been prevented from making that choice? The program also showed unhappy sellers, but there are unhappy sellers in, say, the housing market as well.

To those who argue that legalizing organ sales would help the poor, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, founder of Organ Watch, pointedly replies: “Perhaps we should look for better ways of helping the destitute than dismantling them. No doubt we should, but we don’t: our assistance to the poor is woefully inadequate, and leaves more than a billion people living in extreme poverty.

In an ideal world, there would be no destitute people, and there would be enough altruistic donors so that no one would die while waiting to receive a kidney. Zell Kravinsky, an American who has given a kidney to a stranger, points out that donating a kidney can save a life, while the risk of dying as a result of the donation is only 1 in 4,000. Not donating a kidney, he says, thus means valuing your own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger – a ratio he describes as “obscene. But most of us still have two kidneys, and the need for more kidneys persists, along with the poverty of those we do not help.

We must make policies for the real world, not an ideal one. Could a legal market in kidneys be regulated to ensure that sellers were fully informed about what they were doing, including the risks to their health? Would the demand for kidneys then be met? Would this produce an acceptable outcome for the seller?

To seek an answer, we can turn to a country that we do not usually think of as a leader in either market deregulation or social experimentation: Iran. Since 1988, Iran has had a government-funded, regulated system for purchasing kidneys. A charitable association of patients arranges the transaction, for a set price, and no one except the seller profits from it.

According to a study published in 2006 by Iranian kidney specialists, the scheme has eliminated the waiting list for kidneys in that country, without giving rise to ethical problems. A 2006 BBC television program showed many potential donors turned away because they did not meet strict age criteria, and others who were required to visit a psychologist.

A more systematic study of the Iranian system is still needed. Meanwhile, developments in Singapore will be watched with interest, as will the outcome of the allegations against Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum.

Peter Singeris Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. This commentary is published by Daily News Egypt in collaboration with Project Syndicate, (www.project-syndicate.org).

MELBOURNE: In April, Germany’s parliament placed limits on the use of genetic diagnosis. Is the new German law a model for other countries to follow as we grapple with the ethical issues posed by our growing knowledge of human genetics?

Some provisions of the German law draw on the widely shared ethical principles of respect for individual autonomy and privacy. No one can be tested without his or her consent. Neither employers, nor insurance companies, may require genetic testing. Individuals are granted both the right to know – to be informed of the results of any genetic test about themselves – and the right to choose to live in ignorance of what a genetic test may predict about their future. To discriminate against or stigmatize anyone on account of their genetic characteristics is prohibited.

Desirable as these provisions seem, they could impose a heavy cost on German companies. If insurance companies outside Germany are permitted to require genetic tests while German companies are prohibited from doing so, then people who know they have life-shortening genetic diagnoses will get their life insurance from German insurance companies. These companies will then find themselves making more payments for premature deaths relative to their competitors. To cover the increased costs, they will have to raise premiums, making themselves uncompetitive.

In an attempt to mitigate this problem, the law specifies that anyone taking out an insurance policy valued at more than ?300,000 may be required to disclose the results of prior genetic tests. But if people lie about whether they have previously been tested, that provision will be moot.

As genetic testing becomes increasingly able to predict not only health, but also some cognitive and personality traits, the prohibition on employer testing may also put German employers at a disadvantage in the international marketplace. They will invest resources in training employees whom their competitors will exclude from the initial pool of recruits.

This may be a humane thing to do, for it gives every individual a chance, irrespective of the genetic odds against their paying their way for the company. But, in the long term, if we are serious about prohibiting such tests, we need an international agreement – on both insurance and employment – to ensure a level playing field for all countries. That will not be easy to achieve in a globally competitive economy in which some nations have demonstrably less respect for individual human rights than others.

The German law’s most controversial feature is a prohibition on prenatal genetic testing for diseases that will manifest themselves only in adulthood. Consider, for example, a woman who knows that her partner has the gene for Huntington’s disease. Any child of his has a 50% chance of inheriting the condition. If the child does inherit it, he or she will, at around 40, begin to suffer uncontrollable movements, personality changes, and a slow deterioration of cognitive capacities. People with Huntington’s disease usually die about 15 years after the onset of the symptoms. There is no cure.

No parents could want this future for their children. Prenatal testing of fetuses (or of in vitro embryos before transfer to the uterus) is now well established throughout the developed world. If the test is positive, the pregnancy can be terminated, or, in the case of pre-implantation diagnosis, the embryo will be discarded.

The new German law makes such tests a crime. The same is true of tests for the genes that strongly predispose women to breast cancer. As genetics advances, more such late-onset conditions will become detectable prenatally.

What could be the thinking behind such a law? One might take the view that 40 years of life before the onset of Huntington’s disease or breast cancer is better than no life at all. But if we take that into account, should we not also take into consideration the life of the child who the parents would have had, if they had been able to use prenatal diagnosis and be sure of having a child who does not carry the gene for the disease? Surely that child has better life prospects. When we have a choice between lives with such different prospects – and can make the choice before the embryo or fetus has any awareness at all – shouldn’t we be able to choose the child with the better prospects?

It is not surprising that questions about genetic tests should receive special attention in Germany, given the national imperative of avoiding any repetition of the crimes of the Nazi era. But, in their laudable desire to distance themselves as much as possible from those atrocities, Germany’s legislators have enacted a law that makes it a crime to use modern science to avoid undoubted human tragedies. That is an absurd outcome. The pendulum has swung too far.

Peter Singeris professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).

MELBOURNE: Something new is happening at Harvard Business School. As graduation nears for the first class to complete their Master of Business Administration since the onset of the global financial crisis, students are circulating an oath that commits them to pursue their work “in an ethical manner ; “to strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide ; and to manage their enterprises “in good faith, guarding against decisions and behavior that advance my own narrow ambitions but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.

The wording of the new MBA oath draws on one adopted in 2006 by the Thunderbird School of Global Management, based in Arizona. Nevertheless, the fact that it has been taken up by the world’s most famous business school is significant.

As of this writing, about 20 percent of the Harvard graduating class have taken the oath. That will, of course, prompt cynics to ask: “What about the other 80 percent? But those who have taken the oath are part of a larger turn toward ethics that has followed the recent flood of revelations of dishonesty and greed in the financial sector. Interest in business ethics courses has surged, and student activities at leading business schools are more focused than ever before on making business serve long-term social values.

Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing. A member of my family recently had an eye problem, and was referred by her general practitioner to an eye surgeon. The surgeon examined the eye, said that it didn’t need surgery, and sent her back to the general practitioner.

That is no more than one would expect from a doctor who is true to the ethics of the profession, my medical friends tell me. By contrast, it’s hard to imagine going to a car dealer and being advised that you don’t really need a new car.

For physicians, the idea of swearing an oath to act ethically goes back to Hippocrates. Every profession will have its rogues, of course, no matter what oaths are sworn, but many health care professionals have a real commitment to serving the best interests of their clients.

Do business managers have a commitment to anything more than the success of their company and to making money? It would be hard to say that they do. Indeed, many business leaders deny that there is any conflict between self-interest and the interests of all. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand, they believe, ensures that the pursuit of our own interests in the free market will further the interests of all.

In that tradition, the economist Milton Friedman wrote, in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom: “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. For the true believers in this creed, the suggestion that the manager of a business should strive for anything except maximizing value for shareholders is heresy.

But, while the global financial crisis did reveal fraud on a massive scale, the underlying cause of the crisis was not fraud but the failure of the market to knit together the self-interest of those who sold and resold sub-prime mortgages with the interests of the investors in financial institutions that bought them. The fact that an even larger catastrophe would have resulted had governments not been willing to draw on taxpayer funds to bail out the banks was an additional blow to those who have told us to trust the unregulated market.

The MBA oath is an attempt to replace the Friedmanite view of the social responsibility of business with something quite different: a management profession that commits itself to promoting the long-term, sustainable welfare of all. The sense of a professional ethic is conveyed by clauses in the oath that require managers to “develop both myself and other managers under my supervision so that the profession continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society. Another clause stresses accountability to one’s peers, a hallmark of professional self-regulation. As for the ultimate objectives of the managerial profession, they are, as we have seen, nothing less than “to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.

Can such a code really take hold in the competitive world of business? Perhaps the best hope for its success can be glimpsed in a comment made to a New York Times reporter by Max Anderson, one of the pledge’s student organizers: “There is the feeling that we want our lives to mean something more and to run organizations for the greater good, he said. If enough business people would conceive their interests in those terms, we might see the emergence of an ethically-based profession of business managers.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).

MELBOURNE: The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote: “Two things fill the heart with ever renewed and increasing awe and reverence, the more often and more steadily we meditate upon them: the starry firmament above and the moral law within.

This year, the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of a telescope, has been declared the International Year of Astronomy, so this seems a good time to ponder Kant’s first source of “awe and reverence. Indeed, the goal of the commemoration – to help the world’s citizens “rediscover their place in the universe – now has the incidental benefit of distracting us from nasty things nearer to home, like swine flu and the global financial crisis.

What does astronomy tell us about “the starry firmament above ?

By expanding our grasp of the vastness of the universe, science has, if anything, increased the awe and reverence we feel when we look up on a starry night (assuming, that is, that we have got far enough away from air pollution and excessive street lighting to see the stars properly). But, at the same time, our greater knowledge surely forces us to acknowledge that our place in the universe is not particularly significant.

In his essay “Dreams and Facts, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that our entire Milky Way galaxy is a tiny fragment of the universe, and within this fragment our solar system is “an infinitesimal speck, and within this speck “our planet is a microscopic dot.

Today, we don’t need to rely on such verbal descriptions of our planet’s insignificance against the background of our galaxy. The astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that the Voyager space probe capture an image of earth as it reached the outer reaches of our solar system. It did so, in 1990, and Earth shows up in a grainy image as a pale blue dot. If you go to YouTube and search for “Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot, you can see it, and hear Sagan himself telling us that we must cherish our world because everything humans have ever valued exists only on that pale blue dot.

That is a moving experience, but what should we learn from it?

Russell sometimes wrote as if the fact that we are a mere speck in a vast universe showed that we don’t really matter all that much: “On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.

But no such nihilistic view of our existence follows from the size of our planetary home, and Russell himself was no nihilist. He thought that it was important to confront the fact of our insignificant place in the universe, because he did not want us to live under the illusory comfort of a belief that somehow the world had been created for our sake, and that we are under the benevolent care of an all-powerful creator. “Dreams and Facts concludes with these stirring words: “No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.

After World War II, when the world was divided into nuclear-armed camps threatening each other with mutual destruction, Russell did not take the view that our insignificance, when considered against the vastness of the universe, meant that the end of life on Earth did not matter. On the contrary, he made nuclear disarmament the chief focus of his political activity for the remainder of his life.

Sagan took a similar view. While seeing the Earth as a whole diminishes the importance of things like national boundaries that divide us, he said, it also “underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. Al Gore used the “pale blue dot image at the end of his film, An Inconvenient Truth, suggesting that if we wreck this planet, we have nowhere else to go.

That’s probably true, even though scientists are now discovering other planets outside our solar system. Perhaps one day we will find that we are not the only intelligent beings in the universe, and perhaps we will be able to discuss issues of interspecies ethics with such beings.

This brings us back to Kant’s other object of reverence and awe, the moral law within. What would beings with a completely different evolutionary origin from us – perhaps not even carbon-based life forms – think of our moral law?

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. This commentary is published by Daily News Egypt in collaboration with Project Syndicate, (www.project-syndicate.org).

PRINCETON: Last month, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning “defamation of religion as a human rights violation. According to the text of the resolution, “Defamation of religion is a serious affront to human dignity that leads to “a restriction on the freedom of [religions’] adherents.

The resolution was originally proposed by the 56-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and was put to the Human Rights Council by Pakistan. It supports that it was aimed at such things as the derogatory cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed published in a Danish newspaper three years ago.

Germany opposed the resolution. Speaking on behalf of the European Union, a German spokesperson rejected the concept of “defamation of religion as not valid in a human rights context, because human rights belonged to individuals, not to institutions or religions.

Many non-government organizations, both secular and religious, also opposed the resolution. Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said that that body saw the resolution as weakening “the rights of individuals to express their views.

This seems like a sound argument. While attempts to stir up hatred against adherents of a religion, or to incite violence against them, may legitimately be suppressed, criticism of religion as such should not be.

The resolution is non-binding, but if nations were to enact laws putting it into effect, there can be no doubt that it would interfere with freedom of expression. For a start, what counts as “defamation of religion is contested.

For example, the OIC said in its statement that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism. Are those associations wrong? If the OIC wishes to change many people’s perception that Islam violates human rights, suppressing freedom of speech is hardly the best way to go about it. The way to change such a perception would be to marshal evidence against it, and to make the case that human rights – including the rights of women – are as well protected in Islamic countries as they are in non-Islamic countries.

To demonstrate that it is wrong to associate Islam with terrorism, the OIC might begin to compile statistics on the religious affiliations of those who engage in terrorism. By contrast, suppressing the freedom of speech of Islam’s critics merely gives rise to the suspicion that evidence and sound argument cannot show their arguments to be mistaken.

Coincidentally, in the same week that Germany and the World Jewish Congress rejected the idea that defamation of religion is an affront to human dignity, and upheld the right to freedom of expression, Germany’s highest court issued its ruling on a case brought by a Jewish organization, and two Jewish individuals. The court ruled against the right of the United States-based animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to exhibit posters that juxtapose photographs of victims of the Holocaust with photographs of animals in factory farms and at slaughterhouses.

The posters bear the heading: “To Animals, All People are Nazis – a line from the Polish-born Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. According to the court, Germany’s laws on freedom of speech did not protect PETA’s campaign, because to make “the fate of the victims of the Holocaust appear banal and trivial was an offense against human dignity.

PETA was, of course, not arguing that Holocaust victims’ fate was banal or trivial. On the contrary, it was using the Holocaust – which we would all agree was utterly horrific – to suggest, as Isaac Bashevis Singer did, that there are parallels between the way the Nazis treated Jews and the way we treat animals. The conclusion PETA wants us to reach is that both the Holocaust and the mass confinement and slaughter of animals are horrific. A free society should be open to discussing such a claim.

Irrespective of the merits of PETA’s campaign, however, those who stood up for free speech at the UN Human Rights Council should be able to see that the fact that some forms of speech cause offense is not sufficient reason to censor them. If PETA is not allowed to state its case against our abuse of animals in the way that they judge best, because doing so might offend some people, then criticism of religion could also be prohibited on the same grounds.

If, on the other hand, a religion’s adherents have no right to protection against criticism of their religion, then, even in Germany, Holocaust victims and their descendants (I am one) should not be protected against advertising campaigns that, though not intended to incite hatred or violence, may cause them offense.

Peter Singeris professor of bioethics at Princeton University. For further details on The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, please go to www.thelifeyoucansave.com. This commentary is published by Daily News Egypt in collaboration with Project Syndicate, (www.project-syndicate.org).

PRINCETON: As I tour the US promoting my new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, I am often asked if this isn’t the wrong time to call on affluent people to increase their effort to end poverty in other countries. I reply emphatically that it is not. There is no doubt that the world economy is in trouble. But if governments or individuals use this as an excuse to reduce assistance to the world’s poorest people, they would only multiply the seriousness of the problem for the world as a whole.

The financial crisis has been more damaging for the poor than it has been for the rich. Without in any way minimizing the economic and psychological blow that people experience when they lose their jobs, the unemployed in affluent countries still have a safety net, in the form of social security payments, and usually free health care and free education for their children. They also have sanitation and safe drinking water.

The poor in developing countries have none of these benefits, which proves fatal for an estimated 18 million of them each year. That’s a higher annual death toll than during World War II, and it’s easier to prevent.

Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly ten million, according to UNICEF, are children under five. They die from diseases like measles, diarrhea, and malaria that are easy and inexpensive to treat or prevent.

We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off. Have you, in the past week, bought a bottle of water, a beer, or a coffee when tap water was available at no cost? If you did, that’s a luxury that the world’s poorest billion people can’t afford, because they have to live for an entire day on what you spent on just one of those drinks.

One reason that we can afford to increase the amount of aid we give is that the amount we are giving now is insignificant in comparison to what we spend on other things. The United States government, for example, spends about $22 billion on foreign aid, while Americans privately donate perhaps another $10 billion.

Compared to the $787 billion stimulus package signed by President Barack Obama last month, that $32 billion is trivial. It’s also less than $0.25 for every $100 that Americans earn. Of course, some nations do better: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg all exceed the United Nations target of allocating the equivalent of 0.7% of gross national income in foreign aid. But even $0.70 for every $100 is still not a lot with which to confront one of the great moral problems of our age.

If extreme poverty is allowed to increase, it will give rise to new problems, including new diseases that will spread from countries that cannot provide adequate health care to those that can. Poverty will lead to more migrants seeking to move, whether legally or not, to rich nations. When there is eventually an economic recovery, the global economy will be smaller than it would be if all the world’s people could take part in it.

Nor is the global financial crisis a justification for the world’s leaders failing to keep their word. Nearly nine years ago, at the Millennium Development Summit in New York, the leaders of 180 countries, including all the major affluent nations, promised that by 2015 they would together achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

These goals include halving the proportion of the world’s people living in poverty and ensuring that children everywhere receive a full primary education. Since that meeting in 2000, the commitments made by most nations have fallen short of what is required, and 2015 is now only six years away.

If we cut back on aid, we will fail to keep our promise, and poorer countries will learn, once again, that rich countries’ actions fall short of their inspiring rhetoric about reducing world poverty. That is not a good basis for future cooperation between rich and poor countries on issues such as climate change.

Finally, if anything good comes out of this global financial crisis, it will be a reassessment of our basic values and priorities. We need to recognize that what really matters isn’t buying more and more consumer goods, but family, friends, and knowing that we are doing something worthwhile with our lives.

Helping to reduce the appalling consequences of world poverty should be part of that reassessment.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University. For further details on The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, please go to www.thelifeyoucansave.com. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).

MELBOURNE: Is the global financial crisis an opportunity to forge a new form of capitalism based on sound values?

So French President Nicholas Sarkozy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair appear to think. At a symposium in Paris last month entitled “New World, New Capitalism, Sarkozy described capitalism based on financial speculation as “an immoral system that has “perverted the logic of capitalism. He argued that capitalism needs to find new moral values and to accept a stronger role for governments. Blair called for a new financial order based on “values other than the maximum short-term profit.

It is surprising how readily politicians of all parties – even strong ideological defenders of the unregulated market – accepted the idea that the state should bail out banks and insurance companies when they got into trouble. With the exception of a small number of ideologically committed defenders of free enterprise, few were willing to take the risks inherent in letting major banks collapse.

Who knows what the consequences would have been? Many feared mass unemployment, a tidal wave of bankruptcies, millions of families evicted from their homes, the social safety net strained to the breaking point, and perhaps even riots and a resurgence of the political extremism that brought Hitler to power in Germany during the depression of the 1930’s.

The choice to save the banks from the financial consequences of their own errors indicates a shift in values away from belief in the wisdom of the market. Evidently, the market got some things – like the value of certain financial securities – horrendously wrong. But will the downturn also produce a deeper shift in the values of consumers?

It is no accident that the “New World, New Capitalism symposium was held in France, where some critics have seen the global financial crisis as necessary and desirable precisely because it is producing this change in values. In the newspaper Le Figaro, a section on how to scale back one’s expenses predicted a “revolution in values and claimed that people will put family ahead of work. (Americans think the French, with their shorter working hours and longer summer vacations, already put family ahead of work.)

The French have always been less likely to go into debt – when they pay with plastic, they tend to use debit cards, drawing on funds they already have, rather than credit cards. Now they see the current crisis as a vindication of the value of not spending money that you don’t have.

That means, in many cases, less luxury spending – something that is hard to reconcile with the image of France as the country of fashion, perfume, and champagne. But excess is out of style, and there are reports of cutbacks in luxury goods everywhere. Richemont, the Swiss luxury goods company that owns the Cartier and Montblanc brands, has said that it is facing “the toughest market conditions since its formation 20 years ago. But does this mark an enduring change in values, or just a temporary reduction, forced upon consumers by investment losses and greater economic uncertainty?

In his inauguration speech, American President Barack Obama said, “The time has come to set aside childish things and instead to choose the noble idea that “all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. It would be an excellent thing if the global financial crisis restored a proper sense of what is important.

Could the crisis remind us that we buy luxury items more because of the status they bring than because of their intrinsic value? Could it help us to appreciate that many things are more central to our happiness than our ability to spend money on fashion, expensive watches, and fine dining? Could it even, as Obama suggests, make us more aware of the needs of those who are living in real poverty and are far worse off than we will ever be, financial crisis or no financial crisis?

The danger is that the potential for a real change in values will be co-opted, as has happened so often before, by those who see it as just another opportunity to make money. The designer Nathalie Rykiel is reportedly planning to show the new Sonia Rykiel collection in March not in the usual vast rented area, but in the smaller space of her own boutique. “It s a desire for intimacy, to go back to values, she told the International Herald Tribune. “We need to return to a smaller scale, one that touches people. We will be saying, ‘Come to my house. Look at and feel the clothes.’

Ah yes, in a world in which ten million children die every year from avoidable, poverty-related causes, and greenhouse-gas emissions threaten to create hundreds of millions of climate refugees, we should be visiting Paris boutiques and feeling the clothes. If people were really concerned about defensible moral values, they wouldn’t be buying designer clothes at all. But what are the chances of Nathalie Rykiel -or the affluent elites of France, or Italy, or the United States – adopting those values?

Peter Singer’s new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, will be published in several countries during the coming months. For details, see www.thelifeyoucansave.com. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).

MELBOURNE: Louise Brown, the first person to be conceived outside a human body, turned 30 last year. The birth of a “test-tube baby, as the headlines described in vitro fertilization was highly controversial at the time.

Leon Kass, who subsequently served as chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, argued that the risk of producing an abnormal infant was too great for an attempt at IVF ever to be justified. Some religious leaders also condemned the use of modern scientific technology to replace sexual intercourse, even when it could not lead to conception.

Since then, some three million people have been conceived by IVF, enabling otherwise infertile couples to have the child they longed for. The risk of having an abnormal child through IVF has turned out to be no greater than when parents of a similar age conceive though sexual intercourse. However, because many IVF practitioners transfer two or three embryos at a time to improve the odds of a pregnancy occurring, twins and higher multiple births are more common, and carry some additional risk.

The Roman Catholic Church has not moved away from its opposition to IVF. In a recently released instruction, Dignitas Personae, the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith objects to IVF on several grounds, including the fact that many embryos are created in the process, and few survive. This outcome is not, however, very different from natural conception, for the majority of embryos conceived by sexual intercourse also fail to implant in the uterine wall, with the woman often not even knowing that she was ever “pregnant.

In addition, the Vatican objects to the fact that conception is the result of a “technical action rather “a specific act of the conjugal union. But while any couple would prefer to conceive a child without the intervention of doctors, that option is not available for infertile couples. In those circumstances, it is harsh to say to a couple that they cannot have their own genetic child at all.

It also appears contrary to the broad thrust of the Church’s teaching about marriage and the family as the appropriate context for rearing children. Dignitas Personae says that new human life should be “generated through an act which expresses the reciprocal love between a man and a woman. But if by that the Church is referring to sexual intercourse, then it surely has an unduly narrow view of what kinds of acts can express reciprocal love between a man and a woman. Taking the several inconvenient and sometimes unpleasant steps required to have a child together by means of IVF can be, and often is, the result of a much more deliberate and reciprocally loving act than sexual intercourse.

A better objection to IVF is that in a world with millions of orphaned or unwanted children, adoption is a more ethical way of having a child. If that is the argument, however, why should we single out couples who use IVF?

Why not, for example, criticize Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the Arkansas couple who recently had their 18th child? Yet Michelle Duggar was named “Young Mother of the Year in Arkansas in 2004, when she had already given birth to 14 children. I haven’t noticed the Vatican telling them that they should be adopting instead of conceiving so many children.

Religious opposition notwithstanding, the use of IVF by infertile couples of normal reproductive age has been widely accepted around the world, and rightly so. But in countries where the Church’s influence remains strong, IVF’s opponents are fighting back. In Poland, for example, proposed new legislation would drastically restrict its availability.

Elsewhere, the ethical debate is not about IVF itself, but the limits of its use.

Last November, Rajo Devi, a 70-year-old Indian woman, became the world’s oldest mother, thanks to IVF. She and her 72 year-old husband have, she says, longed for a child through 55 years of marriage. Her husband’s sperm appears to have been used, but news reports are unclear about the source of the egg.

Some will find it grotesque to become a mother at an age when most women are grandmothers, but the more significant question is what kind of care such children will have if their parents die or become incapable of rearing them. Like many people in rural India, Devi lives in an extended family with other relatives, so she is confident that there would be others to bring up her child if necessary.

But, as this example suggests, the impact of parental age on a child’s welfare will vary from one culture to another. Becoming a mother at 70 is more acceptable for someone living in a joint family than it would be for Western couples living in their own home without close relatives or friends nearby.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His next book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, will be published in early 2009. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with.

PRINCETON: The economic gloom that shrouded the world in 2008 has led many to ask whether the apparent prosperity that preceded it was real.

We know that in countries as diverse as China, India, Russia, and the United States, the number of billionaires soared. More generally, the top 1 percent of the population prospered. But the gap between the rich and poor widened, and at least in the US, the incomes of the poor and the middle class stagnated.

No wonder that many are now skeptical about taxpayer-funded schemes to bail out banks, insurance companies, and even automakers. Is this just another case of politicians making sure that, even in hard times, the wealthy elite that supports them will once again do better than everyone else?

But, in assessing the benefits achieved by economic growth, it is a mistake to focus on whether the income gap between rich and poor widened or narrowed. If a person’s annual income increased from $300 to $500 that may be enough to lift him out of extreme poverty, and will make a huge difference to his welfare and that of his family. If, at the same time, the income of a person earning a million dollars increased by $100,000, the income gap will have widened. But since $100,000 doesn’t make that much difference to the welfare of a person earning a million dollars, the gap in welfare will have narrowed.

I believe that we shouldn’t really be focusing on inequality anyway. We should give priority to reducing unnecessary suffering. So the right question to ask is this: did the economic growth of recent years make the poor better off?

If we take a worldwide perspective, it clearly did. In 1981, about four in every ten people on the planet was living in the degrading condition that the World Bank terms extreme poverty. Now, it is less than one in four. Even in absolute terms, despite population growth, the number of extremely poor people fell during that period, from 1.9 billion to 1.4 billion. There have been especially dramatic reductions in poverty in countries like China and India.

Does it matter so much that a few Chinese and Indians have become billionaires, if in the process hundreds of millions escaped extreme poverty?

But the prospects for a continuing reduction in world poverty in 2009 are not good. If the recession cuts deep in the developed nations, many workers will lose their jobs. Families that can no longer keep up with their mortgage payments will lose their homes. All of this causes real suffering.

People become accustomed to a level of comfort, and hope to move up to something even better. When those expectations are disappointed, it is hard to accept having less than one had in the past. There may be a sense of shame, and a loss of self-esteem, at being poor, even in hard times.

Nevertheless, the poor in industrialized nations will remain, in most cases, poor only by comparison with those who are better off. In the US, 97 percent of those classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV and a car. When Americans lose their jobs, even if they have no assets, they still have some access to health care and food stamps.

The situation of the 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty is different. They are poor by an absolute standard based on the most basic human needs. If the recession reduces demand for imports from developing nations, many people living in those countries will lose their jobs.

They will have no social security to fall back on. They will struggle to feed their families. When a poor family’s income drops, one of the few expenses on which it can cut back is the cost of sending the children to school. The most basic health care services will usually be beyond their means. This will be where the recession hits hardest.

Some will see globalization as the cause of this hardship, for if the poor were not linked to the rich through trade, they would not be affected by the recession. True, but they would also have missed out on the growth that helped so many of them to escape poverty. It’s difficult to see self-sufficiency providing an adequate standard of living for the world’s growing population. In this dire situation, what will the rich countries do? They have, on several occasions, pledged to increase their aid to the poor, and some European countries have started to meet their higher targets. But they will be tempted to use the current hard times as a reason for backtracking.

US President-elect Barack Obama said, prior to his election, that he would double America’s foreign aid, and make it more effective in helping the poor. But, as the recession hit, and the cost of the bailout became apparent, he indicated that he might have to postpone implementing this commitment.

It is understandable why, in the midst of an election campaign, a candidate would say that, for, even in the best of times, increasing foreign aid wins few votes in America.

Doubling US foreign aid would, however, still leave it below $50 billion a year – a modest sum compared to the $685 billion that the US spent on defense in 2008. I doubt that any $50 billion in the Pentagon’s budget could do more to make the world safer than doubling aid to the world’s poorest people. It is not a step that should await the return of prosperity.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University. His next book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty will be published in March. this commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).