The week in radio

IT'S about time we made our minds up about guilt. Not so long ago guilt was a desperately unhealthy emotion, something we had to purge ourselves of so that we could live happy, untroubled lives. But in the past few years guilt has become something people have to embrace, whether they're young offenders or monarchs of leading Pacific Rim economies.

Of course, you may argue, these are different kinds of guilt: the first, unhealthy sort is a generalised unease, often connected with sex and having little if any basis in actual wrongdoing; the second, the sort we want people to acknowledge, is all to do with admitting specific actions and recognising that they were bad.

I'm not so sure that you can draw a clear line between the two varieties, though. In an excellent edition of the development magazine One Planet (World Service, Tuesday), the moral philosopher Peter Singerset out his views on the relationship between the developed and developing worlds.

At bottom, his argument is very simple: not to save a life is as bad as actively ending one - although without the same level of malevolence involved. So if you spend money unnecessarily when you could donate it to save lives in the developing world, you are not much better than a murderer.

Put this bluntly, his argument seems pretty well unanswerable. Certainly Zina Rohan, despite pressing him hard on a number of objections, failed to find any substantial holes. Most of these he put down as making excuses; and I have to say, he's probably right. We really ought to give more, do more, think less of ourselves.

There are two objections she didn't raise which are worth mentioning. The first is that Singer's argument is all about money: but really, shouldn't he go further - shouldn't everybody in non-essential trades (including philosophers and journalists) retrain as nurses, agriculturalists, hydraulic engineers and so forth, so that they can offer their skills to the developing world? The second is the question of whether aid does any good: serious people have suggested that in the long term, aid's effects are negative.

In the end, though, the only answer to Singer is Johnson's Defence - that's Paul rather than Samuel: we are all sinners. We know it's wrong to waste money on buying booze and fishnet stockings, driving flash cars and collecting matchboxes from around the world, but we'd rather just live with the guilt. Now, which sort of guilt is that - the good or the bad?

On Private Passions (Radio 3, Saturday), Michael Berkeley's guest was Frances Partridge, last survivor of the Bloomsbury group. One of the pieces of music she chose was the fugue from Beethoven's C minor quartet - she felt that this piece of music asks a question about the nature of the universe. Bloomsbury? Music? The nature of the universe? Aren't all these frivolities when there are lives to be saved? Now I feel guilty I even listened.