Famine, affluence, and psychopathy

I recently read Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test. It’s an engaging, entertaining and interesting read, and I’d warmly recommend it to people who like that sort of thing. It’s a book about psychopaths. Apparently they’re everywhere, but don’t worry: most of them don’t go round killing people. Mostly they’re just charming, lacking in conscience and empathy, easily bored, promiscuous, irresponsible and a few other things. It’s a dimensional thing rather than a binary one, but he said that by a pretty reasonable classification about 1% of us are psychopaths. Most are men. Lots are in prison.

Reading a Jon Ronson book tends not to make you an expert on anything, but it did get me thinking. Many of my readers are probably familiar with Peter Singer’s paper ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, in which he argues that rich people should give away most of their money to help save the lives of strangers in poor countries. Most people think it’d be terrible to see a child drowning in a shallow pond but not save it because you’d get your trousers muddy, and being surrounded by a crowd of equally callous onlookers doesn’t really get you off the hook. Peter Singer thinks blowing our disposable incomes on trivia when we could be saving the lives of strangers is much the same. Of course they don’t feel the same, but Singer doesn’t think that matters. Nor do I, really.

Now, the impression that I got from Jon Ronson’s book was that psychopaths are the sort of people who might see a kid drowning in a shallow pond and ignore it for the sake of their trousers. On the other hand, most of us seem to be the sorts of people who would hear of some children dying on the other side of the world and ignore them for the sake of something trivial. Maybe a nice new pair of trousers. Quite a lot of ink has been spilled trying to make excuses for us without excusing pond-ignorers, but maybe the psychopath analogy provides a more fruitful way of looking at it. My suggestion is that normal people stand to the kids in (at time of writing) Niger as psychopaths stand to the kids in the pond. If psychopaths are excused, so are we. If not, not.

One difference which I suppose is relevant is that if you’re not a psychopath and have a fully functional imagination you might be able to spot parallels between famine children and pond children and get appropriately worked up about the former. I guess that’s part of the point of those charity advertisements showing people suffering instead of just telling you about it. Maybe our failure to spot the parallels and engage our emotions consistently is culpable, so people who want to excuse the psychopaths but not the general public have a logical place to stand. But in any case, if there’s a reasonably common kind of person who would be as unmoved by a kid in the pond as the rest of us are by famine victims, then it seems kind of dense for the discussion of Singer’s arguments not to take them into account.

Please exit via the lobby

Like most sensible people who haven’t thought about it much, I would like cannabis to be legalized for both medicinal and recreational purposes. One of the arguments against legalization is that if cannabis were legal then lobbying on behalf of the cannabis industry would also be legal. If the cannabis lobby was as powerful as the tobacco lobby is, then presumably governments would do all kinds of pro-cannabis things which would put children at risk and turn a lot of us into whatever habitual cannabis users turn into. I don’t know whether this should change anyone's mind about legalization, but that’s how the argument goes.

One of the reasons this argument sounds peculiar is that governments ought to be able to ignore a lobby if it’s telling them to do things to which they’re ideologically opposed. It’s as if the governments are saying “we think X is fine and Y isn’t, but we can’t legalize X because then there would be more attempts to persuade us to allow Y, and these attempts might succeed”. Now although this sounds peculiar, I don’t think the reasoning is especially faulty. The straightforward reason is that the people getting lobbied will not always be the same people who made the decision to legalize the lobbying. Even if the government can guarantee its own obstinacy, it can’t guarantee that of its successors. The less straightforward reason is that there’s no reason to think that the government can guarantee even its own obstinacy. Lobbying works. Governments think one thing, lobbying happens, and governments change their minds. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be such big business. What I want to know is this: how does it work?

I can think of three ways it might work. One is simply that the lobbyists think up all the arguments in favour of whatever they’re lobbying for, and use the ordinary democratic channels to present these arguments to the government. Sometimes governments are persuaded by these arguments. I can’t imagine this is very effective. Governments know that lobbyists will present one-sided arguments, and would be fools to be persuaded by them. Of course, sometimes we elect fools. But it’s hard to believe lobbying would be very effective if that’s all they were doing.

Another thing lobbyists could do is devise strategies whereby their paymasters can use what clout they have to change the facts, and then present these new facts to the government. Maybe a government would be nicer to an industry which would otherwise go out on strike, so the lobbyist can come up with a plan to strike and then present this to the government. If not striking, then nasty ad campaigns or whatever else the government doesn’t like. It’s hard to believe this would work very well either, though. What exactly is it that the tobacco industry threatens to do? (Or oil, or motoring, or arms, or any of the other lobbies.)

So I suppose what lobbyists must spend most of their time doing is corrupting politicians. Perhaps they bribe them with political contributions, swanky dinners and holidays, jobs for the boys or good old-fashioned brown envelopes. Perhaps they find things to blackmail them with. But corrupting politicians is illegal, and my understanding is that what lobbyists do isn’t. If what they do is illegal then the police should be informed. And if it isn’t, then how exactly does it work? Lobbyists must know. Politicians must know. But I don’t know, and I’d like to be told.

Selling out

Without committing myself one way or another on the whole “are they selling out or aren’t they” debate (yet), I can at least see why celebrities endorse products. They’re paid to. If someone offers you a truckload of money to tell people to wear Nike trainers, that gives you a reason to tell people to wear them that you didn’t have before. Maybe it’s wrong to decide which trainers to endorse on the basis of who pays you rather than on the basis of who makes the best trainers. Maybe I’d vote for a party who said they’d ban paid celebrity endorsements. But it’s not illegal yet, and I can see what motivates the celebrities.

What I can’t see is why it works. People see Tiger Woods or Terry Wogan or whoever telling them to drink Coca-Cola or what have you, and they know they’ve been paid to do this, but they still respond by drinking Coca-Cola. Apparently, some people really respond this way. I hope I don’t, and you presumably don’t, but some people do. They must, or celebrity endorsements would be bad business. I’ve got a few theories about how it works, and I’m not happy about any of them.

My first theory is that people are extremely naive. They understand that celebrities are paid to endorse the products they endorse, but they think they pick the products they really like, and see the fee as a kind of bonus, or thankyou, or expenses. Or perhaps they’ve been watching Peep Show and think that money’s an energy and a lot of it seems to flow towards celebrities. If some of this is as fees for their autonomous and principled endorsements, well, that’s just the way the world works.

If people aren’t this naive, maybe they’re just suggestible and confused. Consciously they know that the celebrity is just doing what they’re paid to do, but unconsciously it still makes them want the product, as if the celebrity had endorsed it out of principle and for free. This doesn’t seem far-fetched to me. If a century or so of hilarious psychology experiments have taught us anything it’s that even intelligent people are easily manipulated in spite of themselves.

The third possibility is that putting a Nike logo on a celebrity is like putting one on a pretty girl. People like things they see next to things they like, so this will make the celebrity’s fans like the product.

So, are the celebrities selling out? I think it’s fairly obvious that if the second theory turns out to be true, celebrity endorsements are like subliminal advertising and it’s arbitrary not to ban the former once we’ve banned the latter. Even if we don’t ban endorsements, if that’s how they work then the people involved are much like subliminal advertisers. If the third theory is right, then I suppose the celebrities are selling out their fame, but only in the way that pretty people in car ads are selling out their prettiness. If the first theory is true, then celebrities who endorse products they wouldn’t endorse for free are, in a way, liars. But they are only lying to extremely naive people. At least they’re not lying to me.