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

Singer opens Chapter 1 with a thought experiment. He describes a drowning child and says that only the reader can save her; doing so, however, will ruin the reader’s new shoes and make them late for work. The average intuition, Singer writes, is that it would be morally reprehensible not to save the child for such a trivial reason. Singer then writes that over 10 million children under five years of age die each year from causes related to poverty. This poverty is preventable: If UNICEF and Oxfam, organizations that combat global poverty, had more money, then they could do more work and save more children. “Is it possible,” he writes, “that by choosing to spend your money on such things [as shoes] rather than contributing to an aid agency, you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved?” (5). The answer, he believes, is yes.

Singer incorporates well-documented, transnational oral reports of what severe poverty entails. The worst aspects include things like lack of education for children, food shortages, no access to safe drinking water, the inability to save money, and housing in disrepair or homelessness. Extreme poverty has other ramifications beyond lack of basic needs, generally including political powerlessness.

Singer wants his readers to be hopeful, saying that despite all this unjust and unnecessary suffering, standards of living have improved in the last 30 years. Globally, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has decreased by a large margin. Extreme poverty occurs around the world, but Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan African have the majority of the worst cases of poverty by a number of metrics. In total there are about 1.4 billion people in absolute poverty. Life expectancy in affluent nations is roughly 78, but in the least developed nations it can be under 50.

Singer contrasts extreme poverty in developing countries with the relative poverty of millions of people in affluent nations. In the latter case, people may be poor compared with the rich but often still have television, air conditioning, and a vehicle. Singer turns his full attention to the state of affluence in the world today, noting several of the ways in which the average citizen of a prosperous society has luxuries unimaginable to a 17th-century French king or the average person 100 years ago. He documents the lavish and bizarre ways in which the billionaire class flaunts its wealth, but he doesn’t want the reader to be too quick to feel morally superior to this decadence. Singer documents several simple ways in which the average person in an affluent country wastes significant amounts of money, e.g., by drinking bottled water, ordering lattes, and wasting canned foods.

He asks the reader to consider again the case of the drowning child. He hints that moral consistency would require that people save money for the poor in developing nations instead of spending it on trivialities.

Singer adopts a famous thought experiment developed by another moral philosopher, Peter Unger. In it, a man with his brand-new dream car must choose between letting a child die on a railroad track (from a runaway train) and flipping a switch so that the train diverts from the child; this diverted train will demolish his car. The essence of the thought experiment is to help an individual determine how much they would be willing to sacrifice for the life of another. Singer writes that most people intuitively understand that it is reprehensible to allow a child to die in order to save a car. Singer asks the reader to think about retirement savings in the same way. These retirement savings are not necessary, at least not like the life of a child is.

Singer realizes that our moral intuitions are not always reliable, as demonstrated by variations in what people in different times and places find intuitively acceptable or objectionable. “The case for helping those in extreme poverty,” he writes, “will be stronger if it does not rest solely on our intuitions” (15). To combat reliance on intuition, Singer creates a three-premise argument that presents the moral case clearly and logically. The argument relies on the premise that it is bad to suffer from the afflictions of poverty and that if someone has the opportunity to help the impoverished without sacrificing something of equal value, then they ought to do so. The full argument is as follows:

First premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.

Second premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.

Third premise: By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

Conclusion: Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong (15-16).

Singer’s goal in the first part of the book is to convince his reader of this conclusion.

Singer writes that ethical understanding requires empathetically thinking from the perspective of others. He mentions the Golden Rule as a prime example of an ethical imperative. All the various world religions hold some version of the Golden Rule, Singer writes, indicating its universal, intuitive appeal. This rule, which demands that individuals treat others as they themselves would like to be treated, is a reasonable basis for ethical thinking. Singer believes that his argument for responsible giving agrees with the Golden Rule. He writes that his argument may seem intuitive and acceptable to most but that it is in practice very demanding. According to Singer, sending some money to save one child does not forever get a person off the hook. One must keep giving until one is in danger of sacrificing something “nearly as important.” Determining exactly what is nearly as important as extreme suffering is a subjective element in an otherwise objective ethical position.

Chapter 2 ends with a brief discussion of the importance of charity in the three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Singer notes the extreme importance Jesus places on charity, the equation in the Hebrew language between justice and charity, and Islam’s demand that a portion of all one’s assets be donated to those in need each year. Singer includes a Confucian reference as well, showing that other traditions also value care for the poor.

In the United States, financial charitable giving is well above the global average. Even though Americans are somewhat less charitable with their time, The US still qualifies as the third most charitable nation (behind Sweden and the Netherlands). For Singer, though, this may not be the right kind of charity because most of it goes to local religious communities or universities. Very little money finds its way to the extremely poor in developing nations, which is where it would help the most.

Singer looks at various sources that have objected to his arguments on giving. One common objection is that individuals have differing views on charitable giving and that “all people are entitled to follow their own belief” in this matter (25). Singer writes that this is an expression of moral relativism—the idea that every individual has an equal right to follow their own moral compass. This is not a good idea, according to Singer, because it leaves no basis for criticizing those who do heinous things in the name of their own morality. One might then object that Singer has no right to tell others what they should do, to which he responds that he is simply exercising free speech in the hopes that people will consider his arguments. He is not trying to force people to do his bidding.

Another common criticism is that people should be able to spend their hard-earned money on themselves as they see fit. Singer contends that people who have worked hard for their money are still lucky to have been born in countries with good legal, political, and physical infrastructure. For many people in poor countries, hard physical work, which is necessary for survival, does not lead to affluence. Singer writes, “[H]aving the right to do something doesn’t settle the question of what you should do” (27). One may have the right to spend money on frivolities, but for Singer that doesn’t mean that person has proper empathy or can be called moral. Not killing and not stealing is not enough for Singer to judge a person as good.

He reiterates that the book is not about wealth redistribution or taxing the rich. It is about absolute poverty, not relative poverty or income inequality. That said, Singer does discuss various ways in which citizens of affluent nations benefit from international markets run by major corporations in collaboration with corrupt dictatorships. This same situation leaves the people of developing nations in dire straits (with early life expectancy, high infant mortality rates, and extreme poverty). He writes:

If we accept that those who harm others must compensate them, we cannot deny that the industrialized nations owe compensation to many of the world’s poorest people. Giving them adequate aid to mitigate the consequences of climate change would be one way of paying that compensation (33).

Singer writes that the US is at the bottom of a list documenting amounts given in foreign aid: “The average nation’s effort in that year came to 46 cents of every $ 100 of gross national income, while the United States gave only 18 cents of every $100 it earned” (33). US citizens mistakenly believe that their government spends far more on foreign aid than is the reality. Americans think that the government should decrease foreign aid, but they also think that the percentage of aid given should be much higher than the current reality.

Another common objection Singer combats is the idea that “philanthropic responses undermine real political change” (35). Singer’s response is that his is a practical question. In the absence of a realistic overhaul of the global economic system, philanthropy through global aid agencies is a good idea.

Others argue that giving aid creates dependencies. Singer responds that this is a legitimate problem and that except in emergency situations the kind of aid one gives should aim to create self-reliance in the long run. Still others argue that giving away income stifles capitalism’s growth. Singer argues that most people don’t have the kind of capital for this to be a serious issue and that they can generally have the most impact giving money away sooner rather than later. A related criticism is that if everyone gave away all they had, then the economy would collapse. Singer responds that not everyone has to give away everything. If everyone who could afford to contribute did so, there would still be plenty to spare, and over 1.4 billion people in poverty would become members of a larger global economy, which would expand markets, not eliminate them.

The final objection that Singer confronts is that people have more attachments to friends and families. People value the needs of people close to them more than the needs of those they don’t know. Singer disagrees with the view that the problems of people in affluent nations often meet the standard of extreme suffering. He writes,

The fact that we tend to favor our families, communities, and countries may explain our failure to save the lives of the poor beyond those boundaries, but it does not justify that failure from an ethical perspective, no matter how many generations of our ancestors have seen nothing wrong with it (41).