Joshua Greene

Well, shit.

So if you have an obligation to wade into the pond and save the child at some expense to yourself, why don't you have a comparable obligation to save people nearby or on the other side of the world whose lives are in grave danger due to their circumstances?

And a lot of people spent a lot of time trying to argue why Singer was wrong, but I was convinced that he was right, even if it goes against the grain of human nature.

So Singer essentially made the argument that we in the affluent world should be doing much more for people

in desperate need, and typically your money goes farthest overseas, you can provide a treatment that rids a child of devastating parasitic intestinal worms for less than a dollar, right?

And for $100, you can do it 100 times.

There's effectively no limit, right?

And that argument really stuck with me and has motivated a lot of the other work.

Absolutely.

I mean, take the case of animal rights.

I mean, when Singer wrote Animal Liberation, it was just a tiny fraction of the population that was vegetarian or vegan for moral reasons, right?

Especially, you know, in the West or people didn't already weren't already part of a religious tradition, let's say that had that kind of norm.

Now there's nothing remarkable at all about meeting someone who's a vegetarian or these days even a vegan because they don't want to participate in killing animals and making them suffer.

And then the other thing is in terms of people in the affluent world using their money effectively to alleviate as much suffering as possible, which mostly means overseas, that movement really took off.

And billions have been raised very explicitly under this philosophical banner.

It's been a little complicated recently, so this is what I'm referring to as the effective altruism movement.

So all of the above, the sort of breakthrough experiment that I did while I was a philosophy PhD student, and this was done with my mentor, then Jonathan Cohen, who's still at Princeton.

I had the thought that what's going on in the footbridge case is there's a kind of an emotional response to the thought of sort of pushing this person and harming them in this very sort of direct and intentional way.

And that you could see that response in the brain.

So if you...