Philosophy paper budget $13

Peter Singer’s Solution to World Poverty, abridged

In his 1996 book, Living High and Letting Die, the New York University philosopher Peter Unger

presented an ingenious series of imaginary examples designed to probe our intuitions about

whether it is wrong to live well without giving substantial amounts of money to help people who

are hungry, malnourished or dying from easily treatable illnesses like diarrhea. Here's my

paraphrase of one of these examples:

“Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable

old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In addition

to the pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value

means that he will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. One day when

Bob is out for a drive, he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up

the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard, is running down the

railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be

killed by the runaway train. He can't stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the

danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is

parked. Then nobody will be killed —but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy in

owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob decides not to throw the switch. The

child is killed. For many years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and the financial security

it represents.”

Bob's conduct, most of us will immediately respond, was gravely wrong. But we, too, have

opportunities to save the lives of children. We can give to organizations like UNICEF or Oxfam

America. How much would we have to give one of these organizations to have a high probability

of saving the life of a child threatened by easily preventable diseases? (I do not believe that children

are more worth saving than adults, but since no one can argue that children have brought their

poverty on themselves, focusing on them simplifies the issues.) Unger called up some experts and

used the information they provided to offer some plausible estimates that include the cost of raising

money, administrative expenses and the cost of delivering aid where it is most needed. By his

calculation, $200 in donations would help a sickly 2-year-old transform into a healthy 6-year-old

—offering safe passage through childhood's most dangerous years. To show how practical

philosophical argument can be, you can easily donate funds by using their credit card and calling

one of these toll-free numbers: (800) 367-5437 for Unicef; (800) 693-2687 for Oxfam America.

Now you, too, have the information you need to save a child's life. How should you judge

yourself if you don't do it? Think again about Bob and his Bugatti. Bob did not have to look into

the eyes of the child he was sacrificing for his own material comfort. The child was a complete

stranger to him and too far away to relate to in an intimate, personal way. He did not mislead the

child or initiate the chain of events imperiling him. In all these respects, Bob's situation resembles

that of people able but unwilling to donate to overseas aid.

If you still think that it was very wrong of Bob not to throw the switch that would have

diverted the train and saved the child's life, then it is hard to see how you could deny that it is also

very wrong not to send money to one of the organizations listed above. Unless, that is, there is

some morally important difference between the two situations that I have overlooked.

Is it the practical uncertainties about whether aid will really reach the people who need it?

Nobody who knows the world of overseas aid can doubt that such uncertainties exist. But Unger's

figure of $200 to save a child's life was reached after he had made conservative assumptions about

the proportion of the money donated that will actually reach its target.

One genuine difference between Bob and those who can afford to donate to overseas aid

organizations but don't is that only Bob can save the child on the tracks, whereas there are hundreds

Peter Singer’s Solution to World Poverty, abridged

of millions of people who can give $200 to overseas aid organizations. The problem is that most

of them aren't doing it. Does this mean that it is all right for you not to do it?

Suppose that there were more owners of priceless vintage cars —Carol, Dave, Emma, Fred

and so on, down to Ziggy— all in exactly the same situation as Bob, with their own siding and

their own switch, all sacrificing the child in order to preserve their own cherished car. Would that

make it all right for Bob to do the same? To answer this question affirmatively is to endorse follow-

the-crowd ethics —the kind of ethics that led many Germans to look away when the Nazi atrocities

were being committed. We do not excuse them because others were behaving no better.

We seem to lack a sound basis for drawing a clear moral line between Bob's situation and

that of any reader of this article with $200 to spare who does not donate it to an overseas aid

agency. These readers seem to be acting at least as badly as Bob was acting when he chose to let

the runaway train hurtle toward the unsuspecting child. In the light of this conclusion, I trust that

many readers will reach for the phone and donate that $200. Perhaps you should do it before

reading further.

Now that you have distinguished yourself morally from people who put their vintage cars

ahead of a child's life, how about treating yourself and your partner to dinner at your favorite

restaurant? But wait. The money you will spend at the restaurant could also help save the lives of

children overseas! True, you weren't planning to blow $200 tonight, but if you were to give up

dining out just for one month, you would easily save that amount. And what is one month's dining

out, compared to a child's life? There's the rub. Since there are a lot of desperately needy children

in the world, there will always be another child whose life you could save for another $200. Are

you therefore obliged to keep giving until you have nothing left? At what point can you stop?

Hypothetical examples can easily become farcical. Consider Bob. How far past losing the

Bugatti should he go? Imagine that Bob had got his foot stuck in the track of the siding, and if he

diverted the train, then before it rammed the car it would also amputate his big toe. Should he still

throw the switch? What if it would amputate his foot? His entire leg?

As absurd as the Bugatti scenario gets when pushed to extremes, the point it raises is a

serious one: only when the sacrifices become very significant indeed would most people be

prepared to say that Bob does nothing wrong when he decides not to throw the switch. Of course,

most people could be wrong; we can't decide moral issues by taking opinion polls. But consider

for yourself the level of sacrifice that you would demand of Bob, and then think about how much

money you would have to give away in order to make a sacrifice that is roughly equal to that. It's

almost certainly much, much more than $200. For most middle-class Americans, it could easily be

more like $200,000.

At this point various objections may crop up. Someone may say: "If every citizen living in

the affluent nations contributed his or her share I wouldn't have to make such a drastic sacrifice,

because long before such levels were reached, the resources would have been there to save the

lives of all those children dying from lack of food or medical care. So why should I give more than

my fair share?" Another, related, objection is that the Government ought to increase its overseas

aid allocations, since that would spread the burden more equitably across all taxpayers.

Yet the question of how much we ought to give is a matter to be decided in the real world

—and that, sadly, is a world in which we know that most people do not, and in the immediate

future will not, give substantial amounts to overseas aid agencies. We know, too, that at least in

the next year, the United States Government is not going to meet even the very modest United

Nations-recommended target of 0.7 percent of gross national product; at the moment it lags far

below that, at 0.09 percent, not even half of Japan's 0.22 percent or a tenth of Denmark's 0.97

Peter Singer’s Solution to World Poverty, abridged

percent. Thus, we know that the money we can give beyond that theoretical "fair share" is still

going to save lives that would otherwise be lost. While the idea that no one need do more than his

or her fair share is a powerful one, should it prevail if we know that others are not doing their fair

share and that children will die preventable deaths unless we do more than our fair share? That

would be taking fairness too far.

Thus, this ground for limiting how much we ought to give also fails. In the world as it is

now, I can see no escape from the conclusion that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her

essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be

life-threatening. That's right: I'm saying that you shouldn't buy that new car, take that cruise,

redecorate the house or get that pricey new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit could save five children's

lives.

So how does my philosophy break down in dollars and cents? An American household

with an income of $50,000 spends around $30,000 annually on necessities, according to the

Conference Board, a nonprofit economic research organization. Therefore, for a household

bringing in $50,000 a year, donations to help the world's poor should be as close as possible to

$20,000. The $30,000 required for necessities holds for higher incomes as well. So a household

making $100,000 could cut a yearly check for $70,000. Again, the formula is simple: whatever

money you're spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.

Now, evolutionary psychologists tell us that human nature just isn't sufficiently altruistic

to make it plausible that many people will sacrifice so much for strangers. On the facts of human

nature, they might be right, but they would be wrong to draw a moral conclusion from those facts.

If living a morally decent life extremely arduous, well, then that is the way things are.

When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that railway switch, he

must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in which he must

choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was

not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation.