Being Good in a World of Need

by Larry S. Temkin

In a world filled with both enormous wealth and pockets of great devastation, how should the well-off respond to the world's needy?

This is the urgent central question of Being Good in a World of Need. Larry S. Temkin, one of the world's foremost ethicists, challenges common assumptions about philanthropy, his own prior beliefs, and the dominant philosophical positions of Peter Singer and Effective Altruism. Filled with keen analysis and insightful discussions of philosophy, current events, development economics, history, literature, and age-old wisdom, this book is a thorough and sobering exploration of the complicated ways that global aid may incentivize disastrous policies, reward corruption, and foster “brain drains” that hinder social and economic development.

Using real-world examples and illuminating thought experiments, Temkin discusses ethical imperialism, humanitarian versus developmental aid, how charities ignore or coverup negative impacts, replicability and scaling-up problems, and the views of the renowned economists Angus Deaton and Jeffrey Sachs, all within the context of deeper philosophical issues of fairness, responsibility, and individual versus collective morality. At times both inspiring and profoundly disturbing, he presents the powerful argument that neglecting the needy is morally impermissible, even as he illustrates that the path towards helping others is often fraught with complex ethical and practical perils. Steeped in empathy, morality, pathos, and humanity, this is an engaging and eye-opening text for any reader who shares an intense concern for helping others in need.

Genres: Philosophy, Economics, Nonfiction

432 pages, Hardcover

Published February 13, 2022

About the author

Larry Temkin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, specializing in normative ethics and political philosophy.

Reviews

[Travis Rebello · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though Being Good in a World of Need succeeds in raising many troubling concerns about international aid, I expected more from it and overall I was very disappointed. In the preface, Temkin tells you that his earlier views about charitable giving were challenged when he encountered empirical evidence from economist Angus Deaton and other aid skeptics. You would expect the rest of the book to involve a detailed examination of that empirical evidence and its philosophical implications. Instead, Temkin explores a variety of speculative worries. They are all the sort of thing that might be going on in international aid organizations, but also might not be.

Where Temkin tries to bring in real-life examples to support his worries, they are often of dubious relevance. Things went wrong when Temkin’s previous university tried to create a high school. Okay, so what? Does that tell us much about aid organizations? The Catholic Church hid a massive child abuse scandal for decades. Okay, but why suspect, say, the Against Malaria Foundation of anything similar? Jeffrey Sachs’s Millennium Villages Project failed because Sachs pursued it with a lethal combination of naivety and dogmatism. Okay, but what does that have to do with the main topic of that chapter—Angus Deaton’s claim that foreign aid often undermines responsive government?

What worries Temkin remains mostly speculative—that is, plausible but with a prevalence that is hard to estimate. Besides, many of his worries are simply about the sort of troubles that afflict international organizations in general: corruption, marketplace distortion, and so on. So it is not clear how bringing these worries up can help you decide between supporting Oxfam and buying yourself a Rolex.

Temkin’s most original contributions come in chapter 12. There he argues that if his favored theory of distributive justice is correct, then it may be collectively self-defeating for each of us to try to do what is right in giving charitably. Personally, I do not share the intuitions that motivate Temkin’s theory, and I do not think we need the theory to solve the theoretical problems he believes it solves. In chapter 13, he backtracks, saying that this worry can arise without his theory of distributive justice, as long as Deaton’s claim that foreign aid undermines responsive government is correct (a claim about which Temkin is agnostic). But then what did chapter 12 add?

After these chapters I felt rather unmoved. I felt similarly unmoved after Temkin’s discussion of “ethical imperialism” in chapter 10. I struggle to be as worried as him about development organizations trying to end female circumcision, keep girls in school, oppose the stoning of adulterers, and encourage men and women in practices that limit the spread of HIV. To compare that to colonialism is to misunderstand what made colonialism evil.

Being Good in a World of Need contains many valuable suggestions. But it is often frustrating. Part of the frustration comes from the fact that it is poorly written. If you were to remove all the excessive signposting and the voluminous repetition, you could summarize Temkin’s worries in a single chapter. After all, the point of the very long third chapter is simply that there is more to being a good person than doing the most good possible (a point that, if you are a consequentialist, you will reject, and if you are not, you will already accept). The point of all the rest of the chapters is simply that many important factors are left out of Effective Altruists’ calculations of how effective aid organizations truly are. Had these parts of the discussion been condensed, Temkin could have devoted greater space to an important question he more or less neglects until the last few pages: faced with all these worries, what should we do?

[VK · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would say this book raises two types of concerns with Effective Altruism:

1. Moral questions related to pluralism. If you are a firm consequentialist, I think you will find them uncompelling. If you are not - very interesting, and you should also read Rethinking the Good!

2. Practical questions of the effects of aid. Excellent questions that should be considered, and this book cuts to the heart of the major questions and their practical and moral implications. It will not give you the answers though - you have to find those yourself.

I am left wondering about the connection between these two questions. Does the author think that a pluralistic moral approach helps us avoid ideas that sound good in theory but fail in reality? That seems to assume an underlying assumption of consequentialism.

I started reading this book mostly in agreement with the (Global Health) Effective Altruism worldview, and finished it without changing that view. I think, however, that my understanding is now more nuanced, and that I more clearly understand exactly why some others are unconvinced by that view.

[Alexios Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, lucid expression of doubt, on both practical and theoretical grounds, of effective altruism and foreign aid. I wish the author had delivered a more clear path forward, both for the relevant professional community and the aspiring donor. But I really appreciated the honesty of an author writing a book revising a career’s worth of thinking, and I wish more books were written with this level of balanced, scrupulous attention to the truth. Ultimately this did make me think less of Singer and his movement, as I really felt Life You Can Save took for granted the efficacy of altruism, which Temkin convinced me we cannot (and must not!) do.

[D.J. Colbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a worker in the aid and development field, Larry S. Temkin has provided a template to assess and analyse the conflicts of interest we regularly encounter. It is a very effective ethical and theoretical tool with practical application. Thanks to Professor Temkin for writing this book, for highlighting the paucity of empirical data in the field, and for pointing the way toward improving the issues that exist.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would definitely be a 4 star book if it were about 35% shorter. Lots of good stuff in here, it's just too thin to fill the many many pages