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People sometimes say: Oh well this ideal of
the humanistic good life is only really possible

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for people who live in places of peace and
prosperity of opportunity, and there are so

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many hundreds of millions of people who live
in conditions of deprivation, of conflict, and

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suffering, and impoverishment. But you know,
even in those cases, when you read somebody

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like Primo Levi, who talks about the kindness
and human fellowship that there was in the

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concentration camps during the holocaust,
you see that even in very bad conditions,

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human beings can forge positive relationships
with one another, and perform acts of kindness

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and find things that are valuable to them,
and which makes their existence a little more

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meaningful than not. However, it’s true
that the best kinds of possible lives are

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lives which are lived in conditions which conduce
to the best possible lives. So that puts an

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obligation on those of us who do live in places
of peace and prosperity to try to do something

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to help our fellow human beings so they can
have something like the same opportunities

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as we have. This is where thinking about society,
thinking about political matters for example,

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also places a kind of challenge before us
- to be part of the story where we’re trying

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to make things better. Nothing in human life
or human history is ever going to be perfect,

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but plenty of things can be made better. There
was an old controversy between the perfectibilists

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and the meliorists. The perfectibilists were
those who said they wanted to make the world

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a perfect place; well, that’s going to be
very difficult to do. But meliorists are people

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who think that we can make things better and
that we should, and I think that part of the

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humanist outlook on life is that we should
definitely be meliorists.