The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty

by Peter Singer

this doesn’t mean we should accept that everyone is entitled to follow his or her own beliefs. That is moral relativism, a position that many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.

living in a society with good institutions, such as an efficient banking system, a police force that will protect you from criminals, and courts to which you can turn with reasonable hope of a just decision if someone breaches a contract with you. Infrastructure in the form of roads, communications, and a reliable power supply is also part of our social capital. Without these, you will struggle to escape poverty, no matter how hard you work. And most of the poor do work at least as hard as you or I.

donating money yourself is not the only thing you can do. It is also important to be an active citizen in informing others about how little your country gives and letting your political representatives know that you want your country to develop an effective foreign aid program that meets the United Nations target of giving at least 0.7% of gross national income.

have demonstrated that giving money to poor families: Does not reduce the amount that adults work, but does reduce child labor; Raises school attendance; Increases economic autonomy; Increases women’s decision-making power; Leads to greater diversity in diet. Stimulates more use of health services.

will providing a guaranteed basic income create greater dependency than a single cash transfer? And are cash transfers more effective than other forms of aid? We do not yet have sufficient evidence to answer these questions.

The problem is that 12 identifiable children trapped in a cave makes for a gripping news story, while 746 fewer children dying each day — when no one can point to a particular child and say that child would have died had she not been immunized against measles, or not slept under a bed net — doesn’t make the news at all.

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”[ciii] If we pause to think about it, we realize that “the mass” is made up of individuals, each with needs as pressing as “the one.”

demonstrated, instant communications and air travel mean that we can help those far from us in ways that were impossible in Smith’s day.

Even if some evolved intuition or way of acting were still conducive to our survival and reproduction, however, that would not, as Darwin himself recognized, make it right. Evolution has no moral direction.

Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN) now supports over 350 groups that aim to use reason and evidence to guide their efforts to do as much good as possible.

“Giving Tuesday”—the Tuesday after Thanksgiving—as a day on which to donate to people in need and to celebrate giving. The idea began in 2012, as an antidote to “Black Friday,”

several studies have found that countries requiring explicit consent for organs to be removed after death have fewer organ donors than countries in which consent is presumed unless one explicitly refuses consent.

“Giving Games” are workshops that provide the experience of philanthropy.

GiveWell, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the transparency and effectiveness of charitable giving.

Fistula Foundation

The hundreds of millions of dollars that went into the Swiss bank accounts of the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko were part of the “aid” that is included in Easterly’s figure. No surprise that it did little to reduce poverty.

Although the Cold War ended long ago, aid is still not allocated solely—or in some cases, even primarily—to the places where it will do the most for people in extreme poverty.

Our focus should not be growth for its own sake, but the goals that lie behind our desire for growth: saving lives, reducing misery, and meeting people’s basic needs.

If making our aid conditional on reform can help to improve corrupt or inefficient governments and to avoid conflict, there are circumstances in which that is the right thing to do.

Perhaps more disappointing, however, was the fact that the project was not more rigorously evaluated.[ccxlv] As we saw with Evidence Action’s No Lean Season, it’s important to acknowledge mistakes and apply the lessons to future projects.

But should you put your own child’s life at risk in order to save hundreds of others? Fortunately, few of us will ever face that question. The real dilemma, for most of us, is whether it is wrong and unnatural to reject our children’s pleas for the latest trend in toys or cool brands of clothing, and to send them to the local (entirely adequate but not outstanding) public school rather than the admittedly superior but much more expensive private one.

right. Kravinsky, however, sees it differently. In his view, “the sacrosanct commitment to the family is the rationalization for all manner of greed and selfishness.

No principle of obligation is going to be widely accepted unless it recognizes that parents will and should love their own children more than the children of strangers, and, for that reason, will meet the basic needs of their children before they meet the needs of strangers. But this doesn’t mean that parents are justified in providing luxuries for their children ahead of the basic needs of others.

setting so many goals and targets is a distraction from the first goal,

is the fact that other people are not doing their fair share a sufficient reason for allowing a child to die when you could easily rescue that child? I think the answer is clear: no.

first step toward restoring the ethical importance of giving as an essential component of a well-lived life.

for moral rules to be widely accepted and acted upon, they have to be attuned to our evolved human nature, with all its quirky relics of our tribal past.

we are used to thinking of morality as black or white. You either do what is right, and deserve to be praised, or you do what is wrong, and deserve blame for failing to do what is right. But moral life is more nuanced than that.

The effective altruism movement has reignited this ancient discussion of how much we should give.