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The ruling royal family in Saudi Arabia

is immensely wealthy, mainly because the state has vast reserves of

oil. But who actually owns this oil? Saudi Arabia is not a democracy. Should we be buying

oil off the Saudis while it's still run by the House of Sald?

Leif Wenar of King's College London doesn't think so.

Leif Wenar, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thanks very much.

The topic we're going to focus on is trade and tyranny.

Could you just explain what connects those two?

You might not think of it, but when we do our everyday shopping, we may be putting money into the pockets of some of the most merciless men in the world.

When we buy gas or newspapers, house paint or nail polish, game stations

or cell phones, the money we spend may be going back to fund tyranny and violence in some of the most wretched

places in the world. So presumably that's not just on an individual level, we're talking also about governments buying resources on a larger scale too.

That's right. We're not talking about an aberration in how the world works.

We're talking about the rules that run the world that are putting us into business with these bad men overseas and which

empowers those bad men not only to be oppressive and violent in their own countries

but to act in ways that end up being very bad for us too.

Perhaps the easiest if you gave a specific example of this.

...