Thoughts on Peter Singer's Book

“Writings on an Ethical Life” is an anthology of excerpts, essays, and articles by Peter Singer on a variety of ethical questions. I don’t recommend this book as I fundamentally disagree with many of the basic assumptions and conclusions of Dr. Singer. However, I must say that he clearly states his assumptions and then explores the implications of these with incredible intellectual integrity. My next few posts will be some truly half baked reflections on my reading of this book.

The first thing I want to say is very weak on my part because I remember reading this but I couldn’t actually find it anywhere in the highlights I made in the book when I read it. I don’t want to reread it. So, I’m going to have to depend on memory. Somewhere in there he discussed the impact of one’s belief in evolution verses creation. He indicated that one’s belief in either of these will likely significantly impact one’s ethical views. I think this is a really good point. However, he went on to say that as far as he knows all truly intellectual individuals that are affiliated with our academic institutions don’t believe in creation. They believe in evolution and because of this he did not feel the need to address the implications a creationist view has on ethics. This is the one area where I felt he lacked integrity. Basically he is saying that because the people in his club, the academic crowd, don’t believe in creation it is not a legitimate point of view with out taking the time to defend that position.

As someone who believes in creation, this, I feel, is one of the fundamental flaws in his system of ethics.

Wonder Extended

Okay, I’ve been a bad blogger. I was out of town and I haven’t kept things up to date. I don’t have anything too great to post at this time but I thought I would jump on the “Wonder” band wagon from Mythic Reality a few weeks back. This weekend I was at the Mall of America at the Rain Forest Café. We sat right next to this waterfall fountain thing that had a giant statue of Atlas holding up the world. There were lights and waterfalls and lots of water shooting around. A little girl maybe three years old walked up with her grandma. The little girl squeezed past our table as grandma gave her permission and watched. The girl got as close as she could and took it all in. She looked up at the statue and all around at the lights and water fall. She shifted over to get a better view. She was awestruck and quietly soaked in all the sensations. After a few minutes she went back and took her grandma’s hand and they walked away.

It was a joy to me to watch another person look at a new part of the world for her with so much wonder.

History of Micro Finance – Grameen Bank

Mohammed Yunis, the 2006 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, as a young economics professor in the mid 70s was the Head of the Rural Economics Program at the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh. During that time the country was going through a famine. He found this quite frustrating as after all of his education he had no tools that enabled him to help solve the situation.

He went out and made a list of all the very poor people he knew. He had 42 people on his list and after talking to them he determined that for all of them put together they needed a total of $27 to improve their situation. So he loaned them each the money they needed out of his own pocket. They each paid the money back and improved their life.

One person was a lady who made bamboo chairs. She did not have the few cents needed to buy the materials to make her chairs each day. So she borrowed the money from a money lender who required that she sell her chairs to him at a drastic discount to the market. This kept her in a poverty trap of never being able earn enough money to buy her own materials and sell her chairs at market price and thus earn a much more livable wage. Dr. Yunis loaned her the money to buy the materials herself and from the profits she made by selling her chairs at the market price she was able to pay back her loan and break out of the poverty trap.

This was the beginning of GRAMEEN BANK which was founded by Dr. Yunis.

Based on the information I have the bank has had a total of 6.61 million borrowers 97 per cent of which are women. The bank has 2,226 branches. It works in 71,371 villages with a total staff of 18,795. The amount of loans disbursed by Grameen Bank, since inception, is US$ 5.72 billion. $ 5.07 billion has been repaid. Currently they have outstanding loans of $ 457.52 million

You can get more information about Grameen Bank at http://www.grameen-info.org/

History of Micro Finance – ACCION

Founded in 1961 by Joseph Blatchford, Accion is the oldest Micro Finance organization in the Western Hemisphere. Joseph was a young man who wanted to help Latin American Urban poor by implementing various infrastructure projects. He worked on projects like installing electricity and sewer lines, starting training and nutrition programs, and building schools and community centers.

According to former ACCION director Terry Holcombe, in the 1970s the Accion team made this observation. "We began to sense that a school or a water system didn't necessarily have long-term impact. We were simply reorganizing the resources that a community already had within it, rather than increasing their resources."

They also observed two phenomena: First, Most Urban Poor worked at Micro enterprises making products like belts or selling food items. Second, most credit they obtained came from loan sharks at rates as high as 10% per day.

In 1973 Accion began to experiment in small loans at reasonable interest rates to people in Latin America. This experiment was successful and their program grew In the 1980s they began to tap into commercial credit and established Bancosol in Bolivia. Bancosol was the first commercial bank dedicated to lending to micro enterprises.

Today Accion works in Latin America, Africa, Central Asia and the US. In 2005 Accion partners served more than 1.88 million active borrowers. Since 1996 these partners have loaned $9.4 billion to more than 3.97 million people.

Accion provides excellent opportunities to participate in Micro Finance as a lender/donor. You can make contributions as they are a non-profit. Also, you can make loans to Accion and earn a little interest.

You can learn more about Accion and its history at their web site.

www.accion.org

Our Errand

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. (Truman)

How Micro Finance Works

In my previous post I introduced the concept of Micro Credit or lending. I'd like to expand on that here.

There are many models for Micro Lending around the world. However, probably the most common is group lending. Poor entrepreneurs in developing countries don’t have collateral to put against a loan. So, instead Micro Finance Institutions organize their borrowers into small groups of 5 or ten borrowers. The borrowers in the group help to guarantee each others loans. If one of the borrowers does not pay back their part of the loan, the entire group will not be able to get another loan even if the rest pay theirs back. This puts peer pressure on the entire group to be responsible for paying back their loan.

Typically Micro Finance organizations do not set up an office where people come and talk to the loan officer about getting loans. The loan officers go out into the field and meet the borrowers in group meetings in their homes. They may have weekly or biweekly meetings with each group where they discuss business plans and collect payments or savings deposits. As this would indicate, payments are made regularly and often. Not monthly as is typical in the US.

Many Micro Finance Institutions offer business training, savings as indicated above, as well as money transfer products, and some offer insurance products.

All these products are great but the product that fuels the development opportunity is access to credit for the poor. These loans give small entrepreneurs the opportunity to buy a cow or goat to provide milk which they can sell in the market. Or to provide materials for making a product like belts or furniture. Or to purchase inventory for their small shops.

More on Systemic Need

I believe that all peoples and societies everywhere have the capacity to excel and thrive when it comes to generating economic value. Stated negatively I don’t believe that there are some groups of people who lack individuals with the innate talents needed to generate wealth as society as a whole. That is, under developed countries have just as many people per capita with the talents and aptitudes needed do drive economic success as developed countries.

For example some of the human aptitudes for affecting economic growth are leadership, the ability to organize, analyzing, working well with people, and being competitive. There are of course many others. If you took a random selection of say 1,000 people from the U. S., another set of 1,000 from Laos, another from Nigeria, and another from El Salvador you would find that roughly the same percentage of people in each group has strong leadership aptitude, and roughly the same percentage of people in each group has an aptitude for organizational skills, and so forth.

This thought just reiterates that for most people in underdeveloped countries the problem is not with the individuals in the society but rather how the society is organized. It is not set up to leverage the talents innate in the given society. If we want to help people in these situations we don’t need to send them aid (the solution for acute aid). Rather, it makes more sense to assist in fixing the system. So, the society does a better job of leveraging the innate aggregate talents of its society.

One might propose many approaches to changing the system from military coups and interventions to install new governments to various macro economic policy changes. I would like to suggest one a little less radical but empowering. In developed countries most people have easy access to credit for things like home mortgages, school loans, and the financing of business ventures. Traditionally in most developing countries poor people have do not have this same access to credit and when they do it is at exorbitant interest rates from loan sharks. Micro Credit is a means to provide very poor people with small loans they can use to expand their small business ventures and improve their lives.

Human Economic Need

Human economic need (by which I mean the lack of the ability to successfully feed, house, and clothe oneself and those one loves and is responsible for and to advance their wealth) can be categorized into three types. These categories are acute need, personal need, and systemic need.

Acute Need:

This is human need that is born out of some type of catastrophe. A flood has wiped away a person or family’s or community’s home(s) and their means of producing food. Under normal circumstances they get along just fine but something has happened that in the short term puts them at a distinct disadvantage. People in this situation need help. They need to have others come to their aid on a temporary basis to provide them with food, water, shelter and clothing until they can get back on their feet.

Personal Need:

Not put too delicately, this is need that arises because of a gap in individual competency. An individual may be blind or have a mental handicap which inhibits their ability to generate economic value and provide for their needs. As an example, in America many homeless have mental illness which is the main reason for their poverty. This need is best addressed by family support and special accommodations and programs supported by their society.

Systemic need:

This need occurs when the way in which a society organizes itself does not promote but rather discourages economic prosperity. Examples of this may be a land ruled by an extreme communist regime or a corrupt dictator or government that siphons off resources for the elite. People can not provide for their own needs or improve their lot because their societal system prevents them from doing so. There is nothing wrong with the individuals that prevent their success. There is no calamity that has wrecked their system of commerce. They are just stuck in a system that makes it difficult if not impossible to escape poverty.

The Soul: A Final Note

Near the end of his book Damasio notes that it’s not that we don’t have a soul “it is just that soul and spirit, with all their dignity and human scale, are now complex and unique states of an organism.” It is fine if we continue to refer to the human soul. For example one may still refer to one’s loved one as their “soul mate.” Perhaps what we really need to do is redefine the term soul. Regardless, given what we are learning from scientific study regarding human behavior and the complexities of how an immaterial soul would function, it is probable that man has no immaterial soul and that we are right to believe that man has no immaterial soul. What soul we do have is tied to the wonderful array of feelings and ideas and experiences grounded completely in our biology. There is nothing immaterial about us.

The Soul: Some Practical Problems

All this has led me to do some of my own thinking. It seems to me that there are some practical problems for the soul. In order for the human soul to function in practice, several complications need to be addressed.

First there is the question of the means by which the soul would initiate, prompt, instigate or influence action in the body. To my knowledge no one has identified a means for the soul to do this. One could speculate. For example, one’s soul might have a means to stimulate certain nerves in the brain that it knows would trigger certain intellectual responses or perhaps it could cause certain glands to secrete chemicals to evoke a desired emotion. This of course could happen but I don’t know that any one has ever demonstrated that it has happened or does happen.

Even if one could conceive of how the soul could affect the body, how would the soul know what to affect when? The soul must have a means by which it determines the condition of the body. So that the souls actions on the body would be relevant to the body. That is, it must know whether the body is energetic, tired, sleeping, in peril, remembering something happy or sad, etc. Otherwise your body might be at a funeral and if the soul can’t tell what’s going on it might try to influence you to be happy and laugh. This would appear to be rude at best and insane at worse. In order for the soul to know what the body is up to it might follow around the body and constantly monitor what the body sees and hears, what it thinks, and its various emotional states, and what information it processes at a given time. Certainly it would have to if it were to act with any relevance with the body. Is this probable? Verifiable? No.

In addition the soul would need a means to share the memory of the body. I can think of two ways this might happen. The soul could constantly poll neurons and regions of the brain responsible for memory. So, it would know all the past relevant experiences of the person and if need be prompt the body as indicated above. Or the soul could develop and maintain its own parallel memory. That is, every time an event occurs affecting the body the soul could “bank it” and the means of recalling it in the physical memory and then perhaps, as discussed above, anytime it perceived something happening with the body which something in the memory bared upon the soul could perhaps prompt the body to recall the same memory stored in the brain.

The previous difficulties involved how the soul affects the body in this soul body relationship. Now we turn to our attention to how the body affects or acts on the soul. I can’t think of a method or mechanism or apparatus by which the body could affect the immaterial soul. That is, I can’t think of how the body would engage the soul. Perhaps a body could think or feel soul thoughts or feelings. Perhaps the body/brain could sort of say “I’m not sure how to handle this issue of love…” (or morals or some other soul issue) “…I’m going to pass this off to the soul.” Some of the artistically oriented readers might be thinking that that is exactly how it happens. They might point to times when a good idea or feeling just came to them out of the blue or after they slept or while they were in an attitude of openness to their soul. However, the serendipity that happens to us occasionally when we take a break and just reflect on something can just as easily be explained by brain/body function. Even if it couldn’t be, how could you be sure it was your soul that caused the serendipity? How do you know it’s not some other force?

This leads us to the alternative of the body being merely passive in this relationship. If the body is a purely passive entity in it’s relation to its soul then it would seem that the soul would be nothing more than another of the myriad of external forces acting on the physical organism. It would stimulate various functions of the body not unlike the external physical world around us acting on our various senses and bodily functions. And taking this a step further, since the body has no way to actively engage the soul, unlike the physical world, then the actions this mysterious soul would take on the body would appear random to the body. (Although there may be certain trends or themes which might appear.)

Another option exists where the soul functions as a passive recorder of the body’s experiences. So, that it can carry that background and history into the afterlife. That is, so it could be us, after we die. This is possible but I’m not sure it is probable. And as far as the here and now is concerned, it concedes the point that the body functions essentially independently and does not need the soul.

As you can see, explaining how the soul would work is very challenging and complicated. In my estimation more complicated than explaining human behavior based completely on the physiology of the body. This leads us to call on an old tool for clear thinking called Occum’s Razor. Occum’s Razor is a principle that states that if there are multiple ways of explaining something, the simplest explanation is probably the best. I think that while you can’t prove we don’t have a soul tagging along with us it is simpler to explain life and human behavior without a soul.