thank you very much and thank you all for coming out on this chilly night which i understand is not quite seasonal so i'm going to tell you a story today about an extremely moral person an animal rights activist in his forty's and his name is aaron pecan but i should tell you right at the outset that this is in fact a pseudonym and the fact that i'm using a pseudonym is itself a whole other story because here's a man who lives exactly as he believes he ought to not only does he have incredibly high moral standards for himself but he sticks to them and my book is about extremely virtuous people so why does he need a pseudonym he asked me to use one because he was worried that telling the story of his moral life would make him look so weird that it would interfere with his ability to do his work he says there are people out there connected with the meat business who want to undermine his credibility and he doesn't want to give them any material and i don't know anything about the meat business so i don't know if he's being a little paranoid and he himself is not sure but the point is that he believes that living a very moral life can make a person look crazy and he is not wrong about that i began this book by talking to people who donated one of their kidneys to a stranger and i was astonished to discover that many of them had encountered a lot of skepticism and even hostility for doing so i didn't expect that i was talking to them wanting to know what sort of person would do such an extraordinary thing they found that family members were very angry they say why are you donating to a stranger what if i need a kidney what if my children we our children need a kidney friends thought they were just bizarre and the doctors involved in transplant centers thought they must be nuts and in order i don't know if anyone here has tried to donate a kidney but if you try you have to go through your psychological tests designed to make sure that not that you're not being coerced by someone but also that you're not insane and while i was working on this book i talked to a lot of people about this project an extremely moral do gooders i was interviewing and something like half the people said oh they're all mentally ill right and i said no but i became quite intrigued by this reaction and i so it turned out that i spent a lot of the book investigating it and trying to analyze where it came from now the key word here is extremely the kind of person i'm talking about is not someone who's really nice but otherwise normal it's not someone who volunteers in a homeless shelter and then goes home to an ordinary family life in the evenings i'm talking about people who think about even the smallest decision in their life in moral terms who almost never asks themselves what do i want but only what should i do and why does not such do gooders make us uncomfortable when reason may be guilt nobody likes to be reminded even implicitly of their own selfishness and another's irritation nobody likes to be told even implicitly how they should live their life but that's not the whole story there's a quote i love from george orwell in an essay he wrote on gandhi and orwell greatly admired gandhi but he had an ample he felt ambivalently about him he wrote the essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love on other human vigils it is too readily assumed that the ordinary man only rejects sainthood because it's too difficult but many people genuinely do not wish to be sa and it is probable that many who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings ambivalence towards do gooders also arises out of a deep uncertainty about how a person ought to live is it good to live as moral a life as possible a saintly life is it good to bind yourself to a severe morality that constrict spontaneity and freedom if you're really a committed do gooder you're not just giving away spare bits of money and time to strangers you're devoting your life to them and that will inevitably prevent you from giving everything you want to your own family this not petty selfishness is the deepest conflict for most do gooders but is it right to care for strangers at the expense of your own people it seems to me that these questions can't be answered in the abstract only and actual lives convey fully the beauty and the cost of a certain kind of moral existence so back to our animal rights activist erin can when aaron pickett was a young man he searched for a cause to devote his life to and the answer he came up with was chickens it was basically a numbers game the vast majority of animals killed for food or chickens because they were so small the meat meat to life ratio was terrible and what factory farms did to chickens before they died a pole to him the birds in chronic pain most of the six weeks or so they were alive so fat their legs couldn't hold their bodies up sitting in their own feces covered sores aaron realize that if you could figure out a way to make chickens lives better then the quantity of suffering he could eliminate would be many times greater than in any other way you could think of it wasn't that he thought chickens were more important than people or more innocent or more moving he cared about them because they were more helpless and more brutally trodden on than even the most oppressed people their suffering was greater and their situation more unjust he didn't spend time pondering how happy a chicken in better circumstances could really be he wasn't interested in happiness he was interested in pain although he made animal suffering his life's work it didn't affect him much emotionally when he heard about some new terrible abuse or even when he saw some horrifying footage half the time his immediate reaction was to think fantastic this will be great for the cause there was one video of a beef slaughtering plant in the mid west in which the abuse of cows was so pornographic lee sadistic that it made him cry but that was rare aaron works at a large animal rights organization and has been an extraordinarily effective chicken advocate helping to bring about a dramatic change in both laws and attitudes he's a vegan because he believes it's the right thing to do but he's not a purist about it he's a pragmatist who believes that relieving suffering is more important than a hearing to principle for this reason he believes that he should probably eat meat when he is meeting with cattle man he sometimes also works on cows in order to prove that he's not some marginal zealot but a regular joe whom they can deal with the trouble is that if anyone from the movement saw him eating meat his authority would be irreversibly destroyed he thinks of the example of a famous animal rights activist he had heard about who was an awful person with a coke habit given to sexual harassment and waving guns about but the thing that really scandalized his followers was that he was rumored to have been eating  true the people who raised hell about the m and m's were a bit crazy but they were aaron's base he needed them to do his work aaron decided in high school that it was wrong to eat meat meat ought to be a vegetarian but it took him six months to become one every day he would get off the bus and go to hardee's need a bacon cheeseburger and feel terrible about it some time later he visited a place called farm sanctuary an organization that rescued animals from agribusiness and he discovered the animals were harmed in the production of eggs and dairy too so he decided that the only defensible position was to be a vacant he thought boy i am going to miss ice cream but i have no choice in college he decided to dedicate his life to social justice his initial plan was to work as a doctor in the third world and then he read an essay that changed his life the philosopher peter singer's article famine affluence and morality singer compared the way most of us live to seeing a child drowning in a shallow pond and refusing to save him because we might ruin our clothes even if we don't see a particular child in danger he argued if we spent two hundred dollars on clothes that could have bought life saving medicine we're still responsible for a death after he read singer's article everything aaron bought even the smallest cheapest thing felt to him like food or medicine snatched from someone starving no one would buy a soda if there were a starving child standing next to the vending machine he thought well for him now there was always a starving child standing next to the vending machine he became very very frugal he went dumpster diving for food every time he spent money no matter how little he would write the amount down in his notebook aaron now knew he had to donate as much money as possible to international aid that much was clear to him but what else should he do he decided that animals were more oppressed than people and among animals the one lower the ones lower down the food chain the non mammals the ones that weren't smart or cute were the most oppressed of all nearly everyone cared about dogs and cats and many people cared about rabbits and cows but very few people cared about chickens at first after making this decision to focus on animals he made a point of spending some time each year in the library reading anti animal rights literature in order to test his principles to make sure there wasn't some compelling argument out there that would lead him to change his course he wanted to be rational about it after all he was choosing animal rights work for logical rather than emotional reasons but after a while he became convinced that he really was on the right track and he stopped doing this research it wasn't as if the rights of farm animals conflicted with the rights of humans eating less meat was good for human health it was good for the environment and the undocumented immigrants who worked at slaughter houses were some of the most ill treated and miserable workers in the country after he decided that animal rights were going to be his thing he began to see suffering animals everywhere once in college he was rushing to get to a final exam and of course he really needed to get into graduate school and the exam was a major part of his grade but it was raining and worms were coming out of the grass and wriggling on to the paths he knew that if he didn't pick them up someone would step on them and crush them to death so he stopped and picked up the worms and put them on the grass and he was late then at the end of the exam he was racing to finish the last question he had the answer in his calculator and he was just about to write it in his book when the examiner called out pencils down of course the other students were still scribbling away and he had the answer on his calculator but he put his pencil down that was a turning point for him before that day he had believed in absolute principles never lie never cheat never this number that but when he thought of himself  exam putting his pencil down well everybody else was still writing and getting a worse grade that he deserved which might have prevented him from going to graduate school and doing his work all because of some idiotic pompous sense of principle he cringed being ethical was not about being pure he realized it was about caring about suffering from then on he figured out the moral thing to do not by consulting inviolable principles but by thinking about consequences yes it was generally better to be honest but if and frank is in your attic and the nazis are at the door you lie during graduate school in slivers of spare time he sought emotional relief from the schools and a moral isolation by working at charities he arranged his classes so he could volunteer  food not bombs on fridays that was awful work he got up before dawn on a frigid boston morning to show up in a tiny alley with excrement everywhere to lift box after box out of a van until his knuckles bled and then he toiled down in a hot basement kitchen making meals the fun part was serving the meals and seeing the faces of the people getting the food but he usually left before that he figured there would always be people willing to do the fun stuff but only he was willing to do the bad part so he would do that and go on to something when he was in his mid twenty's erin met jen she was working at the new england and the section society when aaron walked in and offered his services as an expert on mad cow disease at the time they thought they were quite similar they were both wholly dedicated to overcoming injustice and to gen surprise erin was funny even when he was giving talks about veganism he could make people laugh he had a chart with pictures of the seven different kinds of human poo with descriptions of which who is healthiest and of course the best pounds and pounds of lentil stew or hummus and leave crusted of pans and bowls all over the kitchen when she complained he told her that time spent washing dishes was time spent could be time spent working for animal rights which were more important she couldn't think of a good counterargument to that in fact she thought he was right from a moral point of view so all she could do and felt she felt herself going crazy pressed to the brink by the filth in the kitchen was but i need it i want it i'm asking you years later she would wish she had thought to yell at him you know what it is all about balance and we live in an imperfect world and you're right doing these dishes will take away from the animals do the fucking dishes before i have a nervous breakdown but back then she was young and she wasn't sure what was right or normal or what she deserved what killed her two was that she'd always thought of herself as an extremely ethical person and now she felt like the selfish one the bush one dishes when animals were being tortured and people were starving dishes jen came from a terrible family her mother had been raised in an orphanage and got pregnant when she was very young her father down to garage and made quite a bit of money but then he became a violent alcoholic and lost it all as a child jen was molested by both her father and her two brothers when she told her mother about the abuse and that she was thinking about suicide her mother told her she understood and if jen wanted to kill herself she should go ahead all through school she worked for money to help her mother with the rent and during college she sometimes recycled cans for money she started racking up credit card debt but she believed in the women's movement so when she graduated instead of trying to get a high paying job she went to work for a battered women's shelter for practically nothing still with her history jen felt like if she wanted to make herself feel better by buying a pair of shoes occasionally that was ok she was careful with money but aaron was so much more so that he made her feel guilty he kept the heat down low in the middle of winter he would leave his spending down to four thousand twenty four thousand dollars a year then to twelve thousand dollars a year then to nine jen worked hard but aaron was always working and work always came first he felt that there was so much suffering in the world he felt it almost physically how could he stop sometimes how could he relax and watch t v with his girlfriend when people were starving sometimes she thought he was right to do that but sometimes she thought she is his girlfriend deserved special treatment that people owed more to the those they were close to than to strangers sometimes they would discuss this issue philosophically suppose there were two people drowning over there jen would ask i was drowning over here what should you do these discussions always ended badly his activism she realized was the other woman in their relationship and one with which she could never compete the only time he was fully there for her was when she was in a crisis so awful that he felt justified diverting his attention when her father died she was scared to go to the funeral because her two brothers who molested her would be there but aaron took care of her the day of the funeral he helped her get dressed because she was so numb she could barely move he put a slut put aside his dislike of religion to say cottage with her because she didn't want to pray alone at a certain point jen discovered to her astonishment that aaron had money not huge amount but a trust fund that he was his to do what he liked with she asked him to pay her credit card it didn't make any sense financially for them the two of them to be paying all this money and interest but more than that it was driving her out of her mind to be in debt after all these years she was terrified of poverty traumatized by her period her period of homelessness she and her mother were homeless for a few months but he wouldn't pay it he told her there other people who needed that money more he told her she was well fed and had a place to live in there were people in the world who were starving he'd already allocated the money to charity it was blood money in aaron's eyes his mother's father had started a company that manufactured making that made for coats its taint could only be expunged by spending it to alleviate the worst kinds of suffering they got married in one thousand nine hundred nine jen spent the morning of the wedding throwing up the marriage lasted two years one of the hardest parts of the breakup for jen was that she now had to admit to herself that she was not the ethical person she thought she was she was not just leaving aaron she was choosing selfishness she was choosing her own survival over the happiness of other creatures she could not justify it she thought it was the wrong thing to do but she couldn't help herself she was not him for a while it was awful and then bit by bit all the resentment and misery she'd been repressing during the years she and aaron had been together built up to a point where it exploded and she rebelled she and aaron had been rigorously vegan for years and now jen ate cheese she went to paris and gorge herself on cheese she went shopping for clothes that were new she drank alcohol for the first time in her life she stopped recycling aaron meanwhile stared hard in the other direction after he and jen split up he didn't have a place to live for nearly a year he put the word out that he was willing to come and speak about deacon ism or nutrition or animal rights or social justice to anyone who would have him for free as long as he put they paid his fare and put him up for the night even if it was sleeping on someone's floor at first he was ecstatic now after all the years of guilt living with jen he was free at last to devote himself completely to his activism he earned nothing and he spent nothing he was constantly the move but after about eight months of this he decided that enough was enough he wanted a home again he interviewed for a job at an animal rights organization the same day he found a tiny dingy apartment above a furniture store and rented it on the spot at the animal rights organization he found his people at last he was working with people as self denying and morally driven as he was but sometimes he wondered about all the other people out there who didn't worry about suffering how could they justify that to themselves how could they ignore the misery and unfairness in the world he wondered how could they not help i started this book project with the same question why don't people give more than they to and this is a real real puzzle because giving is pleasurable we all know that giving something even something small a little bit of money a seat on the bus or something large a lot of money or one of your kidneys can make you happier than keeping it so it's a real puzzle even if we only care about our own pleasure why we don't give more and the usual answer is we're human we're weak willed we're lazy were selfish we're too attached to our material comforts to give them up there are also some reason specific to giving money to foreign aid charities such as poverty or injustice feels few tile aid is in some fields insoluble so giving feels few tile aid money is often wasted and sometimes harms the countries it's supposed to help and so on and all of this is true but it's not the whole story one reason for living an ethical life is to do something usually to help other people another reason is to be something to become a certain sort of person yourself and in the past couple of hundred years but especially in the twentieth century both these reasons have come under increasingly hostile scrutiny first it came to seem that helping people was much more difficult and liable to backfire disastrously than have been previously thought and then the motives for helping people came to see much more complicated and suspect and they had before the result is that living an ethical life has come to seem less appealing or at least less straightforwardly so than it once did for instance in the eighteenth century adam smith in the wealth of nations argued that a man pursuing his own selfish ends in combination with many other people doing the same thing could end up working as effectively for the public good as if he'd been doing so on purpose he intends only his own gain smith wrote and he is in this led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention now smith only used the word the term invisible hand once in passing but his metaphor proved so resonant and so enduring lee popular that it implanted deep in western culture the idea that individual selfishness could be beneficial for society as a whole which in turn suggested that if the moral goal was helping others as opposed to self or affection a selfish man might do better than a selfless one not long after the wealth of nations was published in the french revolution and after that came the terror the revolutionary leader ropes pierre became known both for his moral purity and for his extraordinary violence and partly through him the two became indissoluble indissoluble plea associated after the communist revolution in russia reinforced this association it was no longer possible to see a man who believed he knew about knew how to bring about a better world and was prepared to sacrifice himself for it without thinking of death a century after the wealth of nations darwin's origin of the species introduced the idea that the selfish struggle for survival was the basis for life itself darwin himself believed in altruism he believed that self sacrificing behavior had come about through natural selection because human survival was better ensured by groups of people  prepared to sacrifice for one another than by selfish individuals groups that co operated prospered and could defeat those that did not but to many people who believed in the darwinian scheme this rationale sounded contrived unconvincing around the same time the philosopher frederick nature argued that the christian idea of goodness humility compassion devotion to others at the expense of oneself was a morality for the weak greatness could thrive only if it were selfish so the idea that selfishness might be more effective at doing good than selflessness arose first it was followed in the twentieth century by the idea that trying to help other people might not only be ineffective but something even more insidious something twisted something aggressive something perverse for instance in one thousand nine hundred twenty five book the gift the french anthropologist marcel moss argued that giving was never quite what it purported to be in the archaic societies that most studied giving without expectation of return was not thought to be a higher more selfless act quite the contrary it was aggressive it set the giver up the superior to the recipient causing the recipient to lose face it imposed a burden of gratitude without permitting the relief of reciprocation in some ancient languages he wrote the word gift had a second meaning poison freud believed that while a certain amount of moral feeling was normal and necessary an excess of virtue might indicate a pathological masochism these th alcoholics anonymous popularized the idea that what it once been a sin drunkenness was actually a disease some years later al anon a group started by the spouses of alcoholics spread the idea that what  been a virtue trying to get a drunk to stop drinking was actually a symptom of the same disease these were both radical innovations but the second had further reaching moral affects after all whether alcoholism is a disease or a sin either way it's undesirable but if certain kinds of help and particularly the untangled tormented devoted helping of a drunks long suffering spouse were also in desirable that not made a whole realm of moral behavior look startlingly different over the decades that followed this founding idea of alan on that certain kinds of helping can be a disease that cripples both the helper and the help be spread from the families of alcoholics to very different situations when the austrian social critic of an ellipse attacked the moral delusions of the aid worker in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight he did so in language that could have been taken from al anon and this is what he said if you insist on working with the poor if this is your vocation that at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell it is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing or what people think of you and it is preval really damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do that you want to do as good a sacrifice and help i am here to challenge you to recognize your inability your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the good which you intended to do and of course finally in the  seventy s a term was coined that would take the moral ideas of alan on and spread them much more widely throughout the culture codependency co dependent described anyone who is preoccupied by helping or as its advocates put it controlling somebody else's behavior the suspicions of freud had merged with the teachings of al anon and selflessness had becomes tainted and suspect by the middle years of the twentieth century then this loosely related set of ideas about morality had established themselves in western culture that selfishness sometimes brings about more good than altruism that altruism is often just selfishness in disguise and that altruism can be unconsciously hostile or disease as ruinous as addiction but there is yet another realm in which extreme do gooders are undermined and that's fiction particularly in modern novels now this is odd because many novelists are driven by moral rage but most such novelists will rather show the thing that enrages them rather than show a character that tries to fix it now you could say that do gooders are pretty rare in real life and so they're rarity in realistic fiction is not surprising but while in life they are news will in fiction they're almost nonexistent real people are bad but fictional people are worse there is a sense in much fiction that the more a character cares for people far away the less he will love his family and the more he will find himself removed from ordinary human life in fiction moral intensity and a devotion to abstract ideals are often regarded with suspicion as if they were inimical to ordinary decency and human fellowship fiction many singularly good fictional characters or childlike innocence rather than do gooders characters like dostoevsky's holy fool prince miskin and idiot and many of the do gooder characters that do exist have a crucial flaw that ensures that no one can take them seriously either they're personally repellent like walter and jonathan franzen's freedom or their we can die young like george fernandes this country priest or else they're so completely ridiculous they make nonsense of the whole do gooder enterprise like mrs george eliot introduced dorothea in middlemarch as a founder of nothing who despite a certain spiritual grandeur failed to achieve anything significant there are exceptions of course such as the her chemist novel the plague but it's striking that many of these exceptionally good characters go out of their way to school to scorn do gooders and to reject ethical ambition when they perform their good deeds they say they're merely doing their jobs reus says heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me what interests me is being a man tolstoy is an exception among novelists in his early years he was known as a naturalist an anti moralist an aesthete but in later years tolstoy came to feel a kind of puritanical revulsion against art for the very qualities that he had valued in it when he was young it was on these grounds that he wrote an attack on shakespeare if you haven't read this it's amazing the play the prey the plays represented without judgement tolstoy felt and observed without conclusion in shakespeare's world he thought there were no moral principles that held true in all situations because human life in its infinite complexity did not admit of certitude the only thing one could be reasonably sure of was that moderation was good aspiration was bad or ridiculous or both and if you behaved more or less like everybody else you wouldn't go far wrong shakespeare told story wrote preached a reasonable mean natural to man between christian and heathen precepts of love towards one of love towards one's enemies on one hand and hatred towards him on the other thus excessive generosity ruins timon while antonio's moderate generosity confers honor shakespeare taught that one can be too good among the more startling moments in tolstoy's railings against shakespeare was his claim that uncle tom's cabin was a better work of literature than any shakespeare play because it flowed from the love of god and man this claim was particularly scandalous because uncle tom's cabin was such a low brow book a sentimental bestseller whose literary merits were rarely defended but if tolstoy is going to make an argument against shakespeare's a moral naturalism the way to do it was with a low brow book because in low brow books the kind of anti moralizing literary ethos that he objected to in shakespeare did not apply this was indeed one of the characters that defined them as a low brow book in a low brow book a character could be very good or very bad and an ambiguous morals could be clearly drawn and there was no sense of emotional propriety to restrict this flow of sentiment try to change the world now uncle tom's cabin did of course change the world published in eight hundred fifty two it was the best selling book the one nine hundred century and it was enormously influential in spreading the anti slavery calls from a cadre of marginal zealots to the american public uncle tom as a christ figure deeply pious self sacrificing brave incorruptible loving there were always those who hated to uncle tom's cabin for literary reasons and others who hated it for racial political reasons but when james baldwin wrote an essay in one thousand nine hundred nine to explain explain why he hated the book he argued that it's racism and its literary failures are one in the same in overlooking denying evading a man's complexity he wrote we are diminished and we perish it's only within this web of ambiguity paradox this hunger danger darkness that we can find ourselves in the power that will free us from ourselves it's this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist this journey towards a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims this is the novels and i do gooder each at its most passionate on the one hand there is complexity and life and feeling and on the other hand there's moralizing and violence in this scheme infinite complexity can seem like the only good the only kind of truth and hamlet is the only hero all action begins to look like violence and all principles like lies all people must be novelists or murderers no writer was more driven by moral moral rage than baldwin and in his nonfiction he describes that rage and the institutions that provoke it but in his novels as in many literary fiction this rage is transfigured as though something about the form compels a different way of expressing what's wrong and what's right and what a man should do moral beauty and his fiction becomes smaller more concrete more intimate something that's not abstract is not directed at strangers far away that exists between one person and another aaron loved his work at the animal rights organization so much so that after a while he began to feel that spending an entire day each week processing lentils was not an efficient use of his time when he was younger he had felt that his time was basically worthless so the thing to do is to use it to save money now that he was a specialist with a degree and a platform it occurred to him that his time was not worthless anymore he still donated about fifty percent of his salary but that was no longer his focus before long he had become as obsessive about time as he had about money he began to draw up drop flow charts and make lists to figure out how you could use his days most efficiently he experimented with sleeping less three hours a night four hours a night to see if you could get more work done that way he rarely spent time with friends never law allowed himself time to sit and reflect he knew intellectually that spending time with friends or meditating on the course of his life could be good for his work he might learn something important or realize he ought to change its direction but he was risk averse he spent time that way he might learn something or he might not if he spent the evening working he knew he would get something done shortly after he began working at the animal rights group erin met leanna the love of his life she worked there too he did chickens she did seals she was a vegan from waterford connecticut she was nearly as frugal as he was and she like he had suspected that her principles about money and other things would mean that she would always be alone she decided when she was thirteen that it was unethical to have children and she'd never change her mind in some ways she was even more ascetic than he was she cared more about the environment than he did and so when they moved together to a building where the heat and air  included in the rent he indulged himself in this free resource but she shut off the vents in her room and froze or sweltered depending on the season after several years of the animal rights organization things started to go really really well a a hand in bringing about a number of big significant victories for chickens both legislative and corporate several huge companies safeway bon appetit and costco among others promise to purchase humanely raised poultry starbucks promise to use only cage free eggs california men passed a law mandating that egg laying chickens be given almost seventy percent more space to live in and forbidding the sales from battery cage hens also where american meat consumption had been b dropping nearly every year which nobody had expected consumption of been going up and up and up since the fifty's but after all this time the message his message that meat was bad for you was finally getting through entire public school systems  taken on needless mondays he realized it was silly to despair because people were becoming vegans most people were never going to become beacons or even vegetarians but if they ate less and less meat then little by little things for animals were going to get better sometimes he let himself hope that the whole country was turning his way nobody wanted to see chickens tortured and it was getting harder and harder hearted did neither the awfulness of industrial agribusiness sometimes he felt that he was on the cusp of a kind of civil rights movement for poultry that would build and build until a point maybe even in his lifetime when the dreadful practices of family farms would seem as repellent and unimaginable as slavery when he felt this way he felt that he was doing good work had done good work and he felt a sense of guilt and in a radical debt that it drove driven him when he was younger ease he still needed to his cumulate a certain number of utility points each day to feel ok with himself to fill it he'd done his duty but since his work was going so well those points were easier to come by it had never occurred to him when he was younger that there might come a point in his life when he felt that he was doing enough mostly this was a good feeling but he was also suspicious of it what if the lesson of his effectiveness was not that he deserved to get bad back a little now but he was obliged to work harder than ever now that he was getting more done that would be more logical what if the sense of achievement was an illusion what if he was just getting soft and complacent as people so often did when they got older it was not as though the world were fixed they were still millions of people starving and life was still horrific horrific for most animals he still felt the enormous weight of that suffering the horror that existed just outside the door of his mind and to open that door even a chink was to see how horrible how hideous and infinite the suffering was he'd always look to the sixty's his parents decade as a time when many people were inspired into activism and rejected selfless selfishness but then he thought what happened to all those people where they slink off to write about the age that he was now they weren't activists any more no doubt they told himself some story about how making a money making money and having a family were natural and the sixty's were a long time ago he was pretty sure that wouldn't happen to him but probably they'd all thought that maybe there was some biological thing that happened to people at a certain age the odd thing was that he was happy he loved his job because he was doing work that only he could do he was stacking up victories one after the other he was in love with a woman who didn't need from him more than he could give her and he had joked with a couple of his closest activist friends that if they saw him getting too easy on himself and neglecting his duty rather than let him get old and complacent they should take a pillow and smother him to death thank you thank you very much for a fantastic talk thank you feel free to answer any question that you would like me to answer or ask but how does your weekly instruction how has your relationship with the topic changed as you work through this that's a very interesting question i think i started out this project really onsides i was very as i told you in the beginning that startled and then kind of polled by this instinctive path of these very good people i wanted to reject that and just say this is nonsense we we are the crazy ones for thinking that you must be crazy to do something something very good and and i still believe that i mean i cherry pick the people in my book i don't think any of them are crazy i think they are all they're all doing great work and they're not crazy i'm sure there are some crazy gooders out there but not these guys however in looking at psychological theories about do gooders there is some that did strike me so i was reading about a theory of the parental child and this is a theory that a child with at least one nonfunctional parent either because they're an alcoholic or they're mentally ill or for some reason they're just not serving as a parent that child may come to feel that all that's messed up in his family's his fault or at least that he needs to fix it and so he tries to become perfect he maybe tries to become the perfect student he takes care of the people in his family both kids younger than him and even the adults he tries to clean up and take care of the house and the idea is that this child may grow up as an adult to have an outsized sense of moral duty and when i first heard about this i thought about how this is another you know pathology psychological theory and you know but then i thought about the people in my book and i thought almost all of them have a parent that's either alcoholic or mentally ill that's quite striking and now mind you these people were not selected scientifically on making any scientific claims whatsoever but that was striking and i thought maybe there is something to that theory on the other hand then i was thinking well ok maybe having a bad family situation when you're growing up can produce in you a sense of moral duty but then think about another child who has a very good situation growing up to wonderful parents who teach him to help others and he also grows up with a sense of moral duty is i don't think that one is more or less free or true than the other so even though i think this this theory may have something to it i reject the idea that that means that that sense of duty experienced by such unreal i think you wrote in a chapter in the book and in a new yorker article recently about a family that adopted a number of children and i was struck by when i read the article was that it seemed like their biological children  about that with us and thought about it didn't seem like that came through in the book they the biological children or they the parents the parents but also just like how do you feel about that because it doesn't come through the chapter well first of all i should correct that a little bit that the there was really only one  this is a couple who had two biological kids and adopted twenty special needs kids special needs in the adoption context which means very unlikely to be adopted so for instance they adopted sixteen natures who were not did not have mental or physical disabilities but no one else was going to adopt sixteen insurers they wanted to keep the family together and it's actually not the case that the bio kids are doing best in worldly terms there's only one of them who's really you know a big worldly success which is one of the adopted kids who works as a banker in switzerland and he earns a ton of money and none of the rest of them really do but the way the moral problem faced by them was was similar to that face by all of the people in my book which was that the conundrum of how much do i give to family and how much should i give to strangers but with them it was stranger it was an art or form of it because they were dealing with strangers who then became family so  they started out thinking i'm going to we're going to have two children adopt to but then they felt well there are more than two children in the world that need parents and they kept they adopted some more and then some more and then some more and as the family got bigger and the children got older they would have family meetings about whether or not they should bring more kids into the family and as the family grew bigger some of the kids would say no we don't have enough of your time and attention as it is there aren't enough resources these are not wealthy people they had very little money and they would protest and this cut the parents to the quick you know they don't they didn't draw distinction between bio kids  that these are their children that they already had but whereas most of us i think if we felt that we would be hurting children we already had that would be it ok we're not going to adopt anymore but they felt ok it's true that it will deprive the children we have some measure of time and attention and resources but if it dramatically changes the life of a child who's still a stranger to us it's worth it and at a certain point they stopped that in twenty three kids and i should also point out that the husband in this family came from a family of sixteen biological kids so for him twenty two kids is not as crazy sounding as it is to many people it was normal to him but yeah i think you know people had very different reactions to their story some people feel like they were presumptuous or crazy to think that they could be good parents to so many kids and they cite as as evidence the fact that there were a lot of troubles in the family two kids went to jail every single one of the girl kids became pregnant before she was married and and this you know this contradicted the parents whole mission their whole thing was raising kids in a stable home and when you're ready to raise them and so this really distressed them but they created a family and they gave parents to children who would never have had parents otherwise and  know this is not an orphanage this is a real family and i think in my view yeah you're right i didn't express my i didn't give them a thumbs up or thumbs down at the end of the article my in my view is it really worked and you know you have to look more closely at the things that happened you know one of the kids who ended up in jail they adopted him when he was seventeen after an unbelievably final and awful childhood so you know he ends up in jail two years later can you really blame them for that like i don't think so  you know cept three of the kids died young but they had you know fatal diseases so you know they have failed it is not their fault so yeah i think it was a success many many painful things happened and you know certainly you could make the argument that had they adopted just two kids as what was their original plan when they met in high school that those two kids would have perhaps grown up to be more successful than they did otherwise but then there would have been eighteen others who would have grown up without parents so i think i think they're heroic but many people don't think so and that's i find very interesting mike so i guess i'm interested in your thoughts on how being close to suffering or understanding suffering proximal the suffering plays a role i think you know compassion empathy are big buzz words you didn't use them once i don't think which is really interesting not a criticism just kind of yeah and i've read some things i don't remember where that people who are in either our poor themselves or in communities that have a lot of kind of active suffering going on actually we see higher levels of people practicing charity and volunteerism and caring for people which i always thought is kind of interesting and so it just kind of makes me wonder is there something about people becoming remote from it like either not understanding it or feeling that they can actually make the leap in just escape it altogether and that's kind of desirable as a secure sign your thoughts on that yeah that's a that's a great question and actually i think that gets to the core of another thing that's very different about the people i'm writing about from regular people first i want to say you're right there's lots of data that says that people who are less wealthy give a higher percentage of their salary or you know their money to charity and time even though of course that's more costly for them so that is a very striking thing but what i would say is that for most of us you know we feel moved to give mostly when we see something that needs our help some something or someone so you know there's been a lot of bemoaning recently that no one that there was a huge outpouring of compassion for this refugee crisis in europe once we saw that photo that everyone saw in the world of that toddler drowning in the water and and so i think that's true for most people that you feel now i don't know if you can you feel empathy you feel compassion when something is presented in front of you and your move to help if something if you see someone in trouble on the street in front of you you feel it's your responsibility or if something's in your community or your family and compassion and empathy are very important motivators for that kind of normal moral impulse and i think the difference between the people i'm writing about and most of the rest of us is that they feel as strongly for something that exists only in their minds so they know that someone is suffering but they don't see them there's no photograph but they know and it's vivid to them it's as powerful to them you know some people aaron is relatively rational and then cold about his his activism but most of the people in my book have the ability to feel the kind of emotion that we would feel if we saw someone bleeding on the ground without anyone bleeding on the ground and i think it's a kind of vividness of imagination a sort of a static ability that contributes their to their moral sense of duty it's a kind of moral genius that enables them to experience something as vividly in the abstract as most of us need some someone actual in front of us to see and i think that's why peter singer's example that i said i mentioned briefly in the piece is is so clever and so powerful because he says well if you saw a child drowning in a pond in front of you and you could save him only by being your clothes would you and everyone says well obviously of course you'd be a monster not to and then he says ha but you're trapped there are millions of children drowning or dying in some other way all the time whom you could save with the equivalent money that muddied pair of pants would cost but you don't do it and that's just about he claims and that's pretty powerful argument that is a powerful argument thank you for writing about this and thank you for coming to speak about it a couple of slightly personal questions what first brought you to this topic and how frustrating was it for you personally as you're going through the process of researching and writing about it and then finally do you have any hope that we as a society can someday popularize idealism or is it too bad i think so i mean i it's funny i've been recently having conversations about a friend of mine  paper questioning the tax credit for charitable donations because in effect it's a subsidy for rich people's the things that which people want to give to i mean because you only get a tax deduction if you are passed a certain level of income and wealthy people often give to institutions like the opera or concert halls that are not available to ordinary people or to churches which obviously are just for certain people anyway so i've got i've been having a lot of conversations and many many people to my astonishment say well of course no one would ever give to charity if you remove the charitable to auction which i think is incredible i mean i just don't think that's true but i mean many people seem to think it's true so maybe it is i hope not i mean it's not as though with a deduction you end up with a profit you know it's you still giving money away so i don't know i mean i think i tend to think that people are less selfish than we think they are and that's part of the reason i wanted to spend so much time in the book analyzing what is going on with our sense that there is something wrong with people who are  unselfish because i think that part of the reason people tend to be selfish is because they think people are selfish people behave according to what is expected of them and it occurred to me that you know i was trying to think of how to explain why i think these do gooders are normal and i thought well in a certain kind of wartime or in a crisis the things that seem normal to do gooders all the time seem to come to seem normal to everybody so one of that the most of us go around thinking most of the time we're living in ordinary times we just go about our business but if there was a tsunami or an earthquake or a war suddenly everyone would feel obliged to help the community and you know a person who went off to war to defend his country abandoning his family in the process would not seem abnormal would seem just patriotic and someone who you know in ordinary life if you're asked to sacrifice your life for a stranger it seems outrageous but in a war it's perfectly normal and so again i think it's for these for these people it's it's always wartime they always feel that sense of urgency and i began to wonder is there some connection between between our our sense that it's normal to be selfish and care only about your family and the absence of the draft because now obviously in vietnam there was a draft but that was a bad war that most people many people disapproved of and so it didn't have the feeling of being drafted for something worthy so it's been a very long time since world war two since there's been a draft in this country for something that many people consider to be a just war a good war it's been there a very long time that people since people had the experience of being expected as a matter of course to give up a lot for something bigger than themselves and i wonder if that has an effect on what people expect and what they consider normal i think it probably does