“The whole way we look at moral issues—our moral conceptual scheme—needs to be altered, and with it, the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society,” he wrote, in that first of what would be a lifetime of similar salvos. We needed to go way beyond ruining our new shoes. Eventually he came to the view that we needed to give what we had to others until the cost to ourselves outweighed the benefits to them. We needed to stop thinking of charity as a thing that was nice to do but okay not to do, and begin to think of it as our duty.
