Peter Singer

say to somebody look um you know if you're going to live an ethical life you have to give away everything down to the point at which if you gave more you would be just as poor as the poorest person that you're giving to uh and if they then are just going to throw up their hands and say oh if that's what ethics requires um i'm giving up ethics because i just can't live like that then you're not going to get anything um whereas perhaps if you have a more

modest scale of giving still significant but more modest um you're going to get a lot more so that's what i've tried to do and in the book i mentioned before the life you can save i draw up a scale of giving um which is progressive like a tax scale so it starts off with people modest incomes giving one or two percent and then by the time you get up to the

People who are earning millions each year, it suggests giving a third, which is still, I think, modest enough in that if you're earning millions every year and you give up a third, you're still very wealthy and you probably still have a lot more than you can really spend in a way that adds to your enjoyment.

So I think that that's a kind of reasonable scale that we can ask people to give.

And in putting it forward, I'm hoping that it will actually maximize the amount that people do give if they think of it in those terms.

Yes, exactly.

And so we have to tailor that, you know, asking people to give is itself an action and utilitarians will weigh those actions in terms of their consequences.

So you have to think about trying to put the ask which will have the best consequences.

Yes, absolutely.

And I think Jonathan Birch is doing exactly that.

And the Jeremy Collar Center for Animal Sentience at LSE that he's directing is actually remarkably effective.

I don't know if you're aware of the story, but it's an unusual example of a

philosophical work or joint philosophical and scientific work on the sentience of cephalopods, octopuses and squid, and a certain group of crustaceans called decapod crustaceans, which is basically lobsters and crabs.

having had an immediate legislative effect in the UK because that report came out at the time when the UK was bringing in its new laws to say that animals are sentient beings, which when it was part of the EU had always been part of EU law, of UK law.

But when the UK left the EU, the animal movement protested that this will mean that animals are not sentient beings in the UK.

And Boris Johnson said, don't worry, I'll bring in a law to say that they're sentient animals.

And that's a promise that Boris Johnson actually kept.

And he did bring in such a law.

And it was just going through parliament when that report came out.

And the House of Lords debated it and amended it, because it had been just vertebrate animals, amended it to include cephalopods and decapod crustaceans.