The Life You Can Save: How to play your part in ending world poverty

by Peter Singer

This “identifiable victim effect” leads to “the rule of rescue”: we will spend far more to rescue an identifiable victim than we will to save a “statistical life.”

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”9

“money enhanced individualism but diminished communal motivations, an effect that is still apparent in people’s responses today.”

Evolution has no moral direction.

Literature is full of characters like Molière’s Tartuffe, who pretend to be altruistically motivated when they are really self-seeking. We have a word for them: hypocrites. But there are fewer examples of people who are really altruistic but pretend to be self-interested, and there is, as far as I know, no single word to describe them.