There's something that I'd like you to see.
我想先让大家看一段视频。
(Video) Reporter: It's a story that's deeply unsettled millions in China: footage of a two-year-old girl hit by a van and left bleeding in the street by passersby, footage too graphic to be shown. The entire accident is caught on camera. The driver pauses after hitting the child, his back wheels seen resting on her for over a second. Within two minutes, three people pass two-year-old Wang Yue by. The first walks around the badly injured toddler completely. Others look at her before moving off.
(录像)记者:这是发生在中国的 一宗令人深感不安的事故: 一名两岁大的小女孩 被一辆小型货车撞倒后血流满地而路人漠然置之, 现场惨不忍睹! 整个事故被监控录像录了下来。 司机撞人后停了一下车(然后逃逸), 汽车的后轮被录到停在小女孩的身上有一秒多时间。 事故发生后两分种内,有三名路人从受害人王悦的身边经过。 第一名路人直接从身受重伤的小女孩身边绕了过去。 其余两人停下来看了一下然后走开了。
Peter Singer: There were other people who walked past Wang Yue, and a second van ran over her legs before a street cleaner raised the alarm. She was rushed to hospital, but it was too late. She died.
彼得·辛格(Peter Singer): 当时还有另外一些人 从王悦身边经过, 接着,另一辆小型货车又碾过她的双腿, 最后是一名捡垃圾的阿姨报的警。 小王悦被紧急送院,但为时已晚。她最后不治身亡。
I wonder how many of you, looking at that, said to yourselves just now, "I would not have done that. I would have stopped to help." Raise your hands if that thought occurred to you.
我在想,看到这种情形,你们有多少人 (刚才)会对自己说:“我不会这样见死不救的, 我会停下来参与抢救“ 有过这样想法的听众麻烦举一下手。
As I thought, that's most of you. And I believe you. I'm sure you're right. But before you give yourself too much credit, look at this. UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases. UNICEF thinks that that's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good. But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference. The fact that they're not right in front of us, the fact, of course, that they're of a different nationality or race, none of that seems morally relevant to me. What is really important is, can we reduce that death toll? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day?
不出我所料,你们大部分人都会伸出授手。 我相信大家。我敢肯定你做对了。 但在表扬你自己之前, 我们来看看这个。 联合国儿童基金会报告说,2011年, 有六百九十万名五岁以下的儿童 死于可预防的、和贫穷有关的疾病。 联合国儿童基金会认为这是个好消息 因为这个数字已经从1990年的一千二百万 持续下降到目前位置。这是好消息。 可人数还是有六百九十万之多, 这相当于每天死于非命的儿童多达一万九千人啊! 与帮助这些孩子相比 我们在街头交通事故中救一个人就是小事一桩了吧? 难道他们离我们很远我们就可以漠然置之吗? 从道德层面来看,我认为两者没有很大的区别。 他们不发生在我们面前, 当然,他们和我们不同国籍和种族 这些对我来说并不重要。 重要的是, 我们能降低这些孩子的死亡率吗? 我们能救救每天面临死亡威胁的19,000个孩子当中的一些人吗?
And the answer is, yes we can. Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. You can think what your own habit is, whether it's a new car, a vacation or just something like buying bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is perfectly safe to drink. You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization, the Against Malaria Foundation, which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets like this one to protect children like this one, and we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria, just one of the many preventable diseases that are responsible for some of those 19,000 children dying every day.
答案是肯定的。 我们每一个人都有过 将钱花在无关紧要的事情上的经历。 你可以思考一下你的爱好者是什么, 是不是一辆新车、一次度假 还是只买瓶装水 而你明明可以 饮用这些绝对符合饮用标准的自来水。 你可以将这些花在无谓的事情上 过度开支省下来 将它捐给 防治疟疾基金会, 基金会将会用你的善款 买一些象这样的网 来防止象这样的孩子患上疟疾, 而我们明确知道如果我们能提供这种网, 它们就能降低 孩子们死于疟疾的数量, 疟疾只是很多种可防可控的、 能导致每天19,000多名孩子 死于非命的疾病之一。
Fortunately, more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement: effective altruism. It's important because it combines both the heart and the head. The heart, of course, you felt. You felt the empathy for that child. But it's really important to use the head as well to make sure that what you do is effective and well-directed, and not only that, but also I think reason helps us to understand that other people, wherever they are, are like us, that they can suffer as we can, that parents grieve for the deaths of their children, as we do, and that just as our lives and our well-being matter to us, it matters just as much to all of these people. So I think reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want. It does help us to put perspective on our situation. And I think that's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math. And that might seem surprising, because a lot of people think, "Philosophy is remote from the real world; economics, we're told, just makes us more selfish, and we know that math is for nerds." But in fact it does make a difference, and in fact there's one particular nerd who has been a particularly effective altruist because he got this.
幸运的是,越来越多的人 意识到了这点, 由此滋生了越来越多的 高效的利它主义。 利它主义很重要,因为它是善心与智慧的结合。 当然,善心是可以看得到的。 你自己可以感觉得到你对孩子的同情心。 但有同情心的同时还要有智慧 确保你所做的是高效的和正确的, 不仅如此,我认为,理性有助于我们 了解别人,无论他们来自哪里, 他们也都和我们一样会受到伤害 那些父母也会为孩子的逝去而悲伤 我们也会。 这就象生命和健康对我们来说很重要一样, 这对大家来说都很重要。 所以,我认为理性不仅仅是一种中性的工具 帮助你获得你想要的。 它确实有助于我们设心处地地为别人考虑 这就是为什么 很多在利它主义事业中做得比较成功的人士 都是一些有着 哲学或经济学背景的人。 这看起来可能有些奇怪, 因为很多人会想 “哲学离现实生活很远; 而经济学会让我们变得更自私, 我们还知道,学数学的都是些书呆子。” 可,事实上,学没学过这些学科差异是巨大的, 事实上,有一种书呆子 却是一种非常高效的利它主义者 因为他有这些素养。
This is the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, "All lives have equal value." That's the understanding, the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.
这是比尔和梅林达·盖茨基金会的网站, 其网页右上角上有一句话是这样说的 “所有的生命都有同等的价值” 这就是我们对我们所生存的世界的理解 ----理性的理解 而这种理解 使得这些人成了史上最高效的利它主义者----- 比尔和梅林达·盖茨和沃伦·巴菲特。
(Applause)
(掌声)
No one, not Andrew Carnegie, not John D. Rockefeller, has ever given as much to charity as each one of these three, and they have used their intelligence to make sure that it is highly effective. According to one estimate, the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more, people, getting diseases that would have made them very sick, even if eventually they survived. Over the coming years, undoubtably the Gates Foundation is going to give a lot more, is going to save a lot more lives. Well, you might say, that's fine if you're a billionaire, you can have that kind of impact. But if I'm not, what can I do? So I'm going to look at four questions that people ask that maybe stand in the way of them giving.
无论是安德鲁·卡内基还是约翰·D·洛克菲勒, 从来都没有一个人 象这三个人一样为慈善事业作出如此巨大的贡献, 而他们用的是他们的聪明才智 来确保他们所做的是最高效的。 据估计,比尔和梅林达·盖茨基金会 已经救了五百八十万生命 或更多 患了很严重疾病的人, 最终这些病人活了下来。 将来,毫无疑问,比尔和梅林达·盖茨基金会 将会发挥更大的作用, 抢救更多的生命。 可能你会说,如果你是一名亿万富翁 你才有那种影响力。 可我不是,我能帮得上什么呢? 所以,我们来看看人们常问的 成为他们捐赠障碍的四个问题。
They worry how much of a difference they can make. But you don't have to be a billionaire. This is Toby Ord. He's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford. He became an effective altruist when he calculated that with the money that he was likely to earn throughout his career, an academic career, he could give enough to cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left for a perfectly adequate standard of living. So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information, to unite people who want to share some of their income, and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty. Toby himself does better than that. He's pledged to live on 18,000 pounds a year -- that's less than 30,000 dollars -- and to give the rest to those organizations. And yes, Toby is married and he does have a mortgage.
他们担心他们的善款如杯水车薪一般帮不上什么忙。 可做善事你不必非得是一名亿万富翁。 这是Toby Ord。 他是牛津大学哲学研究员。 他之所以成为一名高效的利它主义者,是他算出 凭他一辈子从职业生涯中挣来的钱 ---也就是他在大学里挣的薪水--- 他可以捐出足够的钱来救治 发展中国家的8万名眼疾患者,让他们不至失明 而他自己仍然可以留出足够 维持正常生活水平的资金。 所以,Toby创立了一个 名叫"能捐多少算多少(Giving What We Can)"的组织来传播这一信息, 其目的是团结那些想与别人分享自己的薪水的人 并呼吁人们承诺 捐出自己一生所挣薪水的10% 来解决全球的贫困问题。 Toby 自己捐出的善款式远不止10%。 他承诺每年只给自己留出一万八千英镑的生活费用 ----不足三万美金---- 然后把其余薪水捐给那些组织机构。 当然,Toby也是一名已婚人士,也有银行按揭要还。
This is a couple at a later stage of life, Charlie Bresler and Diana Schott, who, when they were young, when they met, were activists against the Vietnam War, fought for social justice, and then moved into careers, as most people do, didn't really do anything very active about those values, although they didn't abandon them. And then, as they got to the age at which many people start to think of retirement, they returned to them, and they've decided to cut back on their spending, to live modestly, and to give both money and time to helping to fight global poverty.
这是一对年纪比较大的夫妇, 查理·布雷斯勒和戴安娜肖特, 年轻时,他们相识于 反对越南战争 争取社会公正的活动中, 然后他们象我们很多人一样开始自己的事业 并不再做一些与上述价值观相关的事情, 尽管他们并没有完全放弃。 然后,当他们差不多到了很多人考虑退休的年龄时 他们又重操旧业 他们决定减少开支, 过简单的生活,将省下来的钱和时间 投入到解决全球穷困问题当中去。
Now, mentioning time might lead you to think, "Well, should I abandon my career and put all of my time into saving some of these 19,000 lives that are lost every day?" One person who's thought quite a bit about this issue of how you can have a career that will have the biggest impact for good in the world is Will Crouch. He's a graduate student in philosophy, and he's set up a website called 80,000 Hours, the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career, to advise people on how to have the best, most effective career. But you might be surprised to know that one of the careers that he encourages people to consider, if they have the right abilities and character, is to go into banking or finance. Why? Because if you earn a lot of money, you can give away a lot of money, and if you're successful in that career, you could give enough to an aid organization so that it could employ, let's say, five aid workers in developing countries, and each one of them would probably do about as much good as you would have done. So you can quintuple the impact by leading that kind of career. Here's one young man who's taken this advice. His name is Matt Weiger. He was a student at Princeton in philosophy and math, actually won the prize for the best undergraduate philosophy thesis last year when he graduated. But he's gone into finance in New York. He's already earning enough so that he's giving a six-figure sum to effective charities and still leaving himself with enough to live on. Matt has also helped me to set up an organization that I'm working with that has the name taken from the title of a book I wrote, "The Life You Can Save," which is trying to change our culture so that more people think that if we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots and not cheat, steal, maim, kill, but that if we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little. And the organization draws together people of different generations, like Holly Morgan, who's an undergraduate, who's pledged to give 10 percent of the little amount that she has, and on the right, Ada Wan, who has worked directly for the poor, but has now gone to Yale to do an MBA to have more to give.
说到时间,可能你会想: “ 我真要放弃我的事业,然后将的我时间 投入到挽救那些 每天死亡19,000条生命中去吗?” 有一个人,曾考虑过这个问题 你怎么可能从事一个职业 又让它能最大程度地影响世界的人是威尔克劳奇。 他是一名哲学系的研究生, 他创办了一个名叫八万小时的网站, 据他估算, 大多数人一生中花在事业上的时间大约是8万小时, 建议别人怎么获得最好的、 最有效的职业生涯。 但是,你可能会惊奇地发现 他鼓励人们考虑的职业之一是, 如果他们拥有相关的能力和性格特征, 从事银行或金融方面的工作。 为什么呢?因为如果你赚到足够的钱, 你可以捐更多的钱, 如果你成了那个行业中的佼佼者, 你可以为一个支援机构提供足够的资金 这样它就可以雇佣5名 来自于发展中国家的支援工作者, 他们当中的每一个人将可能做得 和你们一样好。 所以,你可以将这种影响放大五倍 通过这种职业。 以下这名年青人采用了他的建议。 他的名字叫马特微格。 他是普林斯顿大学的一名哲学和数学系的学生, 实际上,去年他毕业时,他获得了最佳哲学论文奖 他获得了最佳哲学毕业论文奖。 可他却在纽约从事金融方面的工作。 他赚了不少钱 所以,他给一些高效的慈善捐了六位数的善款 而自己过得还相当富裕。 马特还帮助我创办了一个组织 组织的名字来自 我写的一本书的题目: ”你可以挽救的生命“ 书的愿意是要试图改变我们的文化 这样子,会有更多的人会想 如果我们能过一种道德的生活, 只做好自己的本份、 不欺诈、还偷窃、不残害和不杀戮是不够的, 如果我们有足够的财力,我们应该分离其中的部分 和那些几乎一无所有的人分享部分。 这一机构将 不同年龄阶层的人团结在一起, 比如说荷利摩根,她是一名本科生, 她承诺在自己微溥的工资中 捐出10%, 右边这位是Ada Wan, 她直接为穷人服务,但现在 为了能赚到更多的钱,她去了耶鲁大学生读MBA。
Many people will think, though, that charities aren't really all that effective. So let's talk about effectiveness. Toby Ord is very concerned about this, and he's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others, so it's very important to find the effective ones. Take, for example, providing a guide dog for a blind person. That's a good thing to do, right? Well, right, it is a good thing to do, but you have to think what else you could do with the resources. It costs about 40,000 dollars to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. It costs somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. So you do the sums, and you get something like that. You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness. I think it's clear what's the better thing to do. But if you want to look for effective charities, this is a good website to go to. GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities, not just whether they're well-run, and it's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three, of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one. So it's very tough. If you want to look for other recommendations, thelifeyoucansave.com and Giving What We Can both have a somewhat broader list, but you can find effective organizations, and not just in the area of saving lives from the poor. I'm pleased to say that there is now also a website looking at effective animal organizations. That's another cause that I've been concerned about all my life, the immense amount of suffering that humans inflict on literally tens of billions of animals every year. So if you want to look for effective organizations to reduce that suffering, you can go to Effective Animal Activism. And some effective altruists think it's very important to make sure that our species survives at all. So they're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction. Here's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently, when an asteroid passed close to our planet. Possibly research could help us not only to predict the path of asteroids that might collide with us, but actually to deflect them. So some people think that would be a good thing to give to. There's many possibilities.
可是,很多人会认为 慈善机构并不是那么有准备效率的。 所以,让我们来看看效率问题。 Toby Ord很关心这一点, 经过他的计算发现,一些慈善机构 会比另外一些慈善机构的效率 高出成百上千倍, 所以,找到高效的慈善机构很重要。 让我们从为一名盲人提供导盲犬为例。 这是一件好事,对吧? 对,这确实是一件好事, 但你得想一想,用这些资源你还可以做些什么。 训练一头导盲犬 和他的使用者以便它能更好地为盲人服务 大约要花费4万美元. 而我们大约只需要花20到50美元 就可以治好一名发展中国家的盲人 如果他们是因为沙眼致盲的话。 所以,如果你稍为计一下数,你就会发现 你为一名美国盲人 提供一头导盲犬的花费, 可以治好400 至2000位盲人。 我相信,我们应该做什么这是最明显不过的了。 但如果你想寻找高效的慈善, 你可以上这个网站看看。 GiveWell这个网站是一个专业的慈善评估网站, 它不仅仅评估慈善机构是否经营良好, 它筛选出了数百个慈善团体 而目前它为我们推介了三个, 排第一的是反疟疾基金会。 所以,它很不错。如果你想找其它的, thelifeyoucansave.com 和 Giving What We Can. 都可以为你提供一些选择, 但你可以找到高效的组织, 也不一定做拯救贫穷地区人们生命的领域。 我很高兴地告诉你,现在有一个网站 会提供一些高效的动物组织机构。 那是我一生一直在关注的另一项事业 由人类每年 给那些亿万的动物带来的 巨大痛苦。 所以,如果你想找高效的机构 来降低这些动物的伤害, 你可以访问 Effective Animal Activism网站。 一些利它主义都认为 确保所有物种的共存很重要。 所以,他们花了大量的心血来降低动物灭绝的风险。 而最近我们大家都知道的一个巨大风险就是 一个小行星接近地球。 研究不仅可以帮助我们预测 这颗小行星可能撞击地球的轨道, 而且还可以改变它的运行轨道。 所以,有人觉得很值得为些捐款。 可这事有很多可能性的。
My final question is, some people will think it's a burden to give. I don't really believe it is. I've enjoyed giving all of my life since I was a graduate student. It's been something fulfilling to me. Charlie Bresler said to me that he's not an altruist. He thinks that the life he's saving is his own. And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism, and now is one of the happiest people she knows. I think one of the reasons for this is that being an effective altruist helps to overcome what I call the Sisyphus problem. Here's Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian, condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder up to the top of the hill. Just as he gets there, the effort becomes too much, the boulder escapes, rolls all the way down the hill, he has to trudge back down to push it up again, and the same thing happens again and again for all eternity. Does that remind you of a consumer lifestyle, where you work hard to get money, you spend that money on consumer goods which you hope you'll enjoy using? But then the money's gone, you have to work hard to get more, spend more, and to maintain the same level of happiness, it's kind of a hedonic treadmill. You never get off, and you never really feel satisfied. Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment. It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living.
我的最后一个问题是, 有些人认为,捐赠是一种负担。 我不这样认为。 我一直都在乐善布施 这习惯是自从我研究生毕业时就开始了的。 捐赠对我来说有某种成就感。 查理·布雷斯勒对我说他并不是一个利它主义者。 他认为他的挽救的那些人的命就是他自己的命。 Holly Morgan 告诉我,她过去患有严重的抑郁症 直到她成为一名高效的利它主义者之前都这样, 而现在她成了世界上最快乐的人。 我想原因之一就是 作为一名高效的利它主义者有助于克服 那种被我称为“西西弗斯问题”。 这是提香画的西西弗斯, 他触犯了众神,诸神惩罚他把一块巨石 推上山顶。 每当他快要到达山顶,他就体力不支, 石头就又滚下山去, 于是他就得重头再来一次, 不断地重复这件事 永无休止地做这件事。 这会不会让你想起一种消费模式----- 努力赚钱 然后将钱花在消费品上 而你希望从中得到乐趣呢? 当钱花完了时,你得再努力赚钱 赚更多、花更多的钱来维系相同水平的幸福感 它是一种享乐跑步机。 你永远不会停下来,你也永远不会感到满足。 成为一名利它主义者 会给你的人生带来意义和成就感。 它让你有强大的自尊 会让你觉得活着很有意义。
I'm going to conclude by telling you about an email that I received while I was writing this talk just a month or so ago. It's from a man named Chris Croy, who I'd never heard of. This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery. Why was he recovering from surgery?
下面我想用我收到的一封电子邮件 来结束我的发言 大约一个月前,当我收到这封邮件时我正在写这个演讲稿 邮件是一名叫Chris Croy的陌生人写来的。 这是一张他做完手术后正在康复的照片. 为什么说他正在手术恢复中呢?
The email began, "Last Tuesday, I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger. That started a kidney chain which enabled four people to receive kidneys."
电邮是这样写的:“上星期二, 我匿名给一名陌生人捐赠了我的右肾。 这引起了一系列的捐肾连锁反应 这让病人能找到肾源。”
There's about 100 people each year in the U.S. and more in other countries who do that. I was pleased to read it. Chris went on to say that he'd been influenced by my writings in what he did. Well, I have to admit, I'm also somewhat embarrassed by that, because I still have two kidneys. But Chris went on to say that he didn't think that what he'd done was all that amazing, because he calculated that the number of life-years that he had added to people, the extension of life, was about the same that you could achieve if you gave 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation. And that did make me feel a little bit better, because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities.
美国每年大约有100个人 其它国家更多。 读至些外我很开心。Chris还说 他所做的受我的书的影响很大。 可我得承认,他这么说我也感到有点冏 因为我还仍然有两个肾。 但Chris说,他不认为 他所做的有什么了不起 因为他计算过, 他为别人延长的寿命 几乎和你捐5000美元给反疟疾基金会 所起到的作用是一样的。 他这样说让我好受一点, 因为我捐献的远不止5000美元 给反疟疾基金会 和其它高效的慈善机构。
So if you're feeling bad because you still have two kidneys as well, there's a way for you to get off the hook.
所以,如果你感觉不好 只是因为你还有两只肾的话, 还有这种办法可以帮你脱离这纠结。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)