The life you can save
This is the right time to ask yourself: "What should I be doing to help?"For the first time in history, it is now within our reach to eradicate world poverty and the suffering it brings. Yet around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than many of us pay for bottled water. And though the number of deaths attributable to poverty worldwide has fallen dramatically in the past half-century, nearly ten million children still die unnecessarily each year. The people of the developed world face a profound choice: If we are not to turn our backs on a fifth of the world's population, we must become part of the solution. In The Life You Can Save, philosopher Peter Singer, named one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time magazine, uses ethical arguments, provocative thought experiments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving to show that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but ethically indefensible.Singer contends that we need to change our views of what is involved in living an ethical life. To help us play our part in bringing about that change, he offers a seven-point plan that mixes personal philanthropy (figuring how much to give and how best to give it), local activism (spreading the word in your community), and political awareness (contacting your representatives to ensure that your nation's foreign aid is really directed to the world's poorest people).
Stats for nerds
13recommend
27mentions
20people
2009–2025years
63% recommend37% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Absolutely.
I recently read "The Life You Can Save" by Peter Singer, and it really does a great job of making the case for generosity even amongst middle class 1st world individuals.
ebook/audiobook are free from their website: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org.au/the-book/
- Another resource I’ve found super helpful is The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer. Very interesting read/listen and gets you thinking about the most impactful ways to give. Free to download or listen as well: https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/the-book
- The author of the article isn't playing fair. He opens with SBF's downfall and then says even without that, there are so many reason EA is suspect. But then he keeps reintroducing SBF into the narrative, and conflates the billions that SBF swindled with the millions he gave to EA, shading it to seem that the total amount was dirty EA money.
He also says things like, "leading EAs were spending large sums of money on Oxfordshire palaces". One is bad enough and I don't fully trust his reporting on it when he blithely claims that that multiple palaces were bought.
I've recommended "The Life You Can Save" to multiple people because the book had a great impact on me. Most of the things being claimed critics make of EA sound completely alien to me, such as justifying getting filthy rich because at some point you will be giving half of it away. I'm sure people use EA in that way, but does EA promote that view? In the same way, the eugenics movement try to hijack the theory of evolution to justify behavior that the theory itself says nothing about.
- Singer publishes his book, "The Life You Can Save" for free -- it was revised for the 10th anniversary. It is available in various formats, including an audio book. It is a short, easy read. It is also one of the most impactful books I've ever read.
https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/
Along the header there is an item "free book" if you want to get the book.
In short, there are a few theses in the book that combine in a compelling way. This isn't his summary, this is the summary I got out of reading it. (1) the suffering of someone you don't know is just as real as the suffering of someone you do know. (2) there are many worthy causes, but we aren't allocating enough resources to address them all, so it is best to allocate them such that they do the most good for the worst off (3) if you are reading hacker news, you are likely in the 1% (worldwide) and your primary needs are already being met and you can make meaningful contributions to help those most in need without affecting your lifestyle much.
Each chapter tackles a topic. For instance, part of it brings up many the counter arguments about why someone might not want to donate and then debunks them. Eg, in a poll, most US citizens believe that 10-20% of their taxes are going to foreign, and say about half that, say 5%, would be reasonable. In fact it is well under 1%. Or people will say there have always been poor people and there will always be poor people (counter argument: to the people who are helped, aid makes a huge difference to them personally, and there have actually been great strides in the past 30 years at reducing global poverty).
Another chapter talks about the typical feel good news item about someone in the community who has gone blind and so the community pitches in to pay for a seeing eye dog for the person (it costs up to $50K to train and vet such dogs). Yet that same $50K could have prevented river blindness for thousands of children, or been enough to perform cataract surgery on thousands of blind adults.
People often say, why give to a charity in Africa? It will just end up in someone's pocket before it helps anyway. The book talks about the effective altruism movement and describes how charities are vetted and monitored. The website above has links to many such vetted charities.
Another chapter talks about where to draw the line? Sure, I can afford $700 to pay for corrective surgery for a woman suffering from fistula and feel good about myself. But in reality I could afford another $700, then another $700, etc. Do I need to keep donating to those worse off until I am one of the worse off people? (spoiler: no)
- For someone who claims to read a lot it's odd that he would use a passage from an unrelated source to describe the motivation for EA. Why not just read some of the direct sources and their motivations? The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer is quite short and accessible. Maybe it's easier to attack straw men...
Having read Singer, I'd say that the motivation is to take the sense of "doing good in the world" and apply reason to it. There's a kid drowning in a pond in front of you and there's a kid drowning on the other side of the world. Why do we act differently, Singer asks? From there he goes on to build an ethical case that it's our _obligation_ to give significantly more to charity.
I don't recall Singer ever advocating for earning ever more money, nor certainly doing so at the expense of others. And I'm fairly certain Singer would strongly object to deferring giving to some uncertain future point.
Setting aside this article, where's all the hate for giving to charity coming from? Guilty consciences? Shouldn't we as a society celebrate and encourage giving? It seems the alternative more often then not is to accumulate.
- I liked it too. It's the argument from Australian philosopher of ethics Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (2009).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_You_Can_Save
Singer started a charity of the same name, designed to make your charity dollar do the most good. The site also has info on the best charities to give to.
https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/
He followed that book with The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (2015)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Good_You_Can_Do
Slightly off-topic: I'm (genuinely) curious what other essays you had in mind when you wrote that second sentence! I'd like to read them.
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