(Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer.)

A classic example of a choice between an ethical and unethical action that you have quoted before comes from New York University philosopher Peter Unger’s book Living High and Letting Die: A man expects to retire comfortably someday by selling his Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. One day he parks the Bugatti near a railroad track and sees a runaway train about to run over a child who is playing on the track. The only way he can save the child is by throwing a switch that will divert the train and send it crashing into his car. Surely, no one in that situation would think twice about what to do.

Most People, face-to-face with a child they can save, would not value the Bugatti above a life. On the other hand, there is a disconnect between that scenario and what we do when we see television footage or read articles about people who are dying from malnutrition or poverty-related illnesses. The point is what are we doing about them? For much less than the cost of a sports car, people with money can give away enough to save lives.

Between the charity galas, the family foundations, the nonprofit board memberships and volunteer activities, philanthropy is a way of life for a great many affluent individuals.

Going to charity benefits is not really a very efficient way of giving. You spend a lot of money to raise a certain amount of money. I think it is better to say, “No thanks, I don’t want to go to the event, but I’ll give a donation.”

It seems to me that a lot of people really do not think very carefully about their priorities when they give money. Support for the arts, the opera, etc., carries a certain cachet in some circles. But the world is in a pretty desperate situation. Every day some 10 or 15 times as many people die from poverty-related causes as the number who died in New York on 9/11. If you were to see those people dying, you might decide that the opera is very nice, but that first we should straighten out the world and get the real suffering taken care of. Of course, there is the argument that the arts can bring meaning to the lives of inner-city children and others whose lives are bleak, but I go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and I have not seen many visitors who look as if they are leading meaningless lives.

I believe that people with means should give up major percentages of their income or assets to help those in need. Over the years, I have suggested different percentage figures, but what is more important is to think about the issue and take the first step. Ten percent is a nice traditional figure, the traditional tithes that you were supposed to give to the poor. But plenty of people could give a much higher proportion and still satisfy their own needs and live in a certain amount of luxury. If they give away 20 percent of what they earn and still have enough to drive a Mercedes or Cadillac, they are still doing more than most, and they ought to be commended. They might, however, think about raising their contributions gradually.

A person who creates wealth also creates jobs, thereby adding to the world’s net wealth.

I have no problem with creating wealth, but I rather share Andrew Carnegie’s view that it is shameful to die rich.

If a wealth creator gives all of his money to charity and leaves none for his heirs, he denies them the chance to carry on a multigenerational family mission. Future generations might have to earn their living in jobs that are neither fulfilling nor socially redeeming, when they could have been using the family capital to make a big difference in the world.

I agree with what Warren Buffett has said: It is harmful to let anyone have a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb. Sure, you want to give your children a nest egg for security, but I do not think you do them a great favor by giving large amounts of wealth.

Going to charity benefits is not really a very efficient way of giving. I think it is better to say, “No thanks, I don’t want to go to the event, but I’ll give a donation.”

Even without a large inheritance, the children and grandchildren of a wealth creator will start adulthood with more advantages than the average person. They have the family name. They probably have had a great education, and they probably inherited some of the talents that it took to make the money in the first place. They have no doubt grown up in a comfortable home and had the advantages of living in a good neighborhood and going to good schools. I think from there they should be pretty much on their own.

Nonprofits in the United States are holding their hands out to the private sector as public-sector funding dries up, but if the estate tax is permanently repealed after 2010, people will have less incentive to set up foundations.

The estate tax is actually one of the fairest ways to tax people that I can think of, and eliminating it is quite wrong. If the United States is going to continue with the system of relatively modest government aid, it ought to preserve the tax incentives for people to give. While there are many philanthropists in Europe, less private money goes to charity there because the government provides more social services and people feel that they are paying for it through their taxes.

There is a big advantage in having the public sector pay for programs, which is that the government makes sure everyone contributes a fair share through taxes. The public sector is not ever going to do it all, however, and bureaucracies move slowly, so there will always be room for private-sector philanthropy.

It is easy to tell others to live at Walden Pond with an economy car and to give away the excess, but it is harder to practice what you preach.

I give away around 20 percent of my income. I do not own a car, although I will occasionally rent one.

Increased globalization creates new opportunities to make money, but even if the playing field is level, not everyone is going to win.

I think globalization holds a lot of promise for bringing people out of poverty—if it is done right—but the way it has been done in the past has not created a level playing field for the world’s poorest countries. There has been some effort to redress that in the five years since the WTO meeting in Seattle, and I hope we will continue moving in that direction.

One of the most obvious ethical violations in world trade is that the United States and Europe—the rich powers—subsidize their farmers and therefore can undercut developing-country producers on the world market. If the U.S. subsidizes 25,000 cotton producers at a cost of $3 billion a year, that means that even if their production cost is 75 cents a pound, they can sell cotton for 18 cents a pound and undercut the cotton growers in Mali or Benin or somewhere, although they produce cotton for much less than American growers. It is really unconscionable for America, which holds itself up as a champion of free trade, to be subsidizing these products.

I also think the way the WTO rules require you to focus on the product rather than the process of production is a mistake, and one that has ethical consequences. It does not address whether we should have restrictions on importing a product because, for example, it contributes to the extinction of sea turtles or is produced with an element of cruelty to animals. We might ban such practices within our own borders, but still buy foreign products that use them.

The fact that we have refused to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol will give U.S. industries an unfair pricing advantage, because they will not have to factor the same emission controls into their production costs as the competitors in the Kyoto signatories will. In the future, the rest of the world will bear the environmental costs, which might include climate changes, more erratic rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa or rising sea levels flooding low-lying farm regions such as the Bangladeshi delta. We are a wealthy nation getting a free ride on the backs of poorer countries.

People familiar with your ethical stance have been shocked to learn that you believe globalization has been beneficial to low-wage workers in developing countries.

Some westerners take the view that if people in developing countries are not paid as much as people here then they are being exploited. But obviously it may be a better wage for them than they would get if we were not buying the product. I would rather ask if the job will make the workers better off than they would have been if this industry did not exist in their country. What really counts is their buying power.

There is, however, the question of how little it costs the company to make the product. You might define exploitation this way: Are people suffering from the company cutting costs? Just as the U.S. businesses that pollute have an unfair advantage, it is unfair trade when China is able to produce a gadget cheaply because the manufacturer does not have to worry about safe disposal of the toxic wastes that are a byproduct, and instead pours the wastes into a river, giving local residents cancer. That is a case of unethical trade because the people, who probably do not have the power to sue the corporation, are paying the hidden cost of producing the gadget.

The last thing the WTO is going to do is police corporate accountability, especially if it drives prices up.

Consumer pressure is the other option. We have the option of buying fair-trade coffee, for instance. If consumers were able to find out which corporations are producing things in an environmentally sustainable way and which are not, or, for that matter, which ones are protecting their workers from sexual harassment or whatever, and if they then make an effort to buy from ethical businesses, they can perhaps have an impact. It is difficult, of course. It depends on being able to trace a product’s origins. You need to be able to work at each level: the consumer, the stockholders and at the level of government policy.

Like the starving people on the other side of the world, victims of unethical trade are not real to us the way a child playing on the railroad track is. Individuals, no matter how powerful, can do only so much, and governments have too many strategic and economic interests to set policies by principal alone.

Well, it is a lot to ask, but as one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations, the U.S. is in a better position than most to do something. We say one of our founding principals is that we are ruled by law rather than by people, but it seems we do not want to apply this concept to the rest of the world.

It is hard to prove that ethical rules will serve self-interests. If you run a corporation that is saving money by buying a product that can sell at a low price because the manufacturer is not paying for waste cleanup, and as a result polluting the environment in China, it is hard to say that it is not in your self-interest to do that. But maybe it is in America’s self-interest to enforce ethical trade rules, because it will help our workers retain their jobs. Granted, the idea of tying ethics to self-interest does not seem to be working very well at the moment.

The British Parliament’s recent decision to ban foxhunting notwithstanding, we live in a canine-eat-canine world.

We are pretty ruthlessly using animals for our own purposes. The fact that a being is a member of a different species should not give us a right to disregard that being’s suffering or pain, and animals do suffer when we raise them in factory farms, where the animals are confined to stalls or cages or sheds their whole lives.

Those who are determined to eat meat could at least try to avoid factory-farm products and buy only free-range meat and chicken. At least those animals lived their lives outdoors, though, granted, they will have suffered when they were taken to the slaughterhouse.

I am not absolutely strict about being a vegan. When I eat out, I might be just vegetarian rather than vegan. I have not worn leather shoes in 30 years. It used to be hard to find hiking boots that were not made of leather, but these days there are more options.

Ethics will continue to take a backseat to efficiency.

I am more optimistic that at least the practice of giving money to needy people will become more widespread. It obviously is a reality in the sense that there are some people who give very large amounts of money away. The question is how many of them are there. We could reduce the numbers of people who are starving or dying of AIDS or tuberculosis or malaria, so that instead of it being a billion people, it is just small pockets of people. The world has the resources to do that. And I am hopeful we will work up to doing that over the next 20 to 30 years.