From my interview with The New Society @NewStatesman:

Headlines are a bit of a misleading way to understand history because, you know, bad things happen, but bad things happened 50 years ago, too, and we tend to forget them. When you actually plot things like poverty, war, homicide, and literacy, most of these are way better now than they used to be. How did that happen? And there are a number of hypotheses that I float as to why cooperation and human flourishing in general have increased.

One of them is an expanding circle of empathy, another concept from Singer: as we rub shoulders, as we exchange stories with people who are unlike ourselves, we come to realize that we're not special just because we're us and they're them. You're bound to understand people when you kind of see the world from their perspective.

But another could be—and this, again, Singer suggested—that sheer raw reason can make us more moral, more cosmopolitan, more universal, as we realize that there's nothing special about me just because I'm me. There's something that is inherently disinterested and universal about reason. And, of course, I care about me more than I care about other people, but I can't convince you that that is a moral imperative—that you have to care about me more than you because I'm me and you're not.

And so, just that symmetry kind of pushes toward a kind of more ethical code: a golden rule, a categorical imperative, or the veil of ignorance, where simply discounting your own proprietary interest in yourself steers you toward a defensible morality.