Peter Singer - The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty

When he saw the man fall onto the subway tracks, Wesley Autry didnt hesitate. With the lights of the oncoming train visible, Autry, a construction worker, jumped down to the tracks and pushed the man down into a drainage trench between the rails, covering him with his own body. The train passed over them, leaving a trail of grease on Autrys cap. Autry, later invited to the State of the Union Address and praised by the president for his bravery, downplayed his actions: I dont feel like I did something spectacular. I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.

What if I told you that you, too, can save a life, even many lives? Do you have a bottle of water or a can of soda on the table beside you as you read this book? If you are paying for something to drink when safe drinking water comes out of the tap, you have money to spend on things you dont really need. Around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than you paid for that drink. Because they cant afford even the most basic health care for their families, their children may die from simple, easily treatable diseases like diarrhea. You can help them, and you dont have to risk getting hit by an oncoming train to do it.

I have been thinking and writing for more than thirty years about how we should respond to hunger and poverty. I have presented this books argument to thousands of students in my university classes and in lectures around the world, and to countless others in newspapers, magazines, and television programs. As a result, Ive been forced to respond to a wide range of thoughtful challenges. This book represents my effort to distill what Ive learned about why we give, or dont give, and what we should do about it.

We live in a unique moment. The proportion of people unable to meet their basic physical needs is smaller today than it has been at any time in recent history, and perhaps at any time since humans first came into existence. At the same time, when we take a long-term perspective that sees beyond the fluctuations of the economic cycle, the proportion of people with far more than they need is also unprecedented. Most important, rich and poor are now linked in ways they never were before. Moving images, in real time, of people on the edge of survival are beamed into our living rooms. Not only do we know a lot about the desperately poor, but we also have much more to offer them in terms of better health care, improved seeds and agricultural techniques, and new technologies for generating electricity. More amazing, through instant communications and open access to a wealth of information that surpasses the greatest libraries of the pre-Internet age, we can enable them to join the worldwide communityif only we can help them get far enough out of poverty to seize the opportunity.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued convincingly that extreme poverty can be virtually eliminated by the middle of this century. We are already making progress. In 1960, according to UNICEF, the United Nations International Childrens Emergency Fund, 20 million children died before their fifth birthday because of poverty. In 2007, UNICEF announced that, for the first time since record keeping began, the number of deaths of young children has fallen below 10 million a year.children under five still die annually; this is an immense tragedy, not to mention a moral stain on a world as rich as this one. And the combination of economic uncertainty and volatile food prices that marked 2008 could still reverse the downward trend in poverty-related deaths.

We can liken our situation to an attempt to reach the summit of an immense mountain. For all the eons of human existence, we have been climbing up through dense cloud. We havent known how far we have to go, nor whether it is even possible to get to the top. Now at last we have emerged from the mist and can see a route up the remaining steep slopes and onto the summit ridge. The peak still lies some distance ahead. There are sections of the route that will challenge our abilities to the utmost, but we can see that the ascent is feasible.

We can, each of us, do our part in this epoch-making climb. In recent years theres been a good deal of coverage of some among the very rich who have taken on this challenge in a bold and public way. Warren Buffett has pledged to give $31 billion, and Bill and Melinda Gates have given $29 billion and are planning to give more. Immense as these sums are, we will see by the end of this book that they are only a small fraction of what people in rich nations could easily give, without a significant reduction in their standard of living. We wont reach our goal unless many more contribute to the effort.

Thats why this is the right time to ask yourself: What ought I be doing to help?

I write this book with two linked but significantly different goals. The first is to challenge you to think about our obligations to those trapped in extreme poverty. The part of the book that lays out this challenge will deliberately present a very demandingsome might even say impossiblestandard of ethical behavior. Ill suggest that it may not be possible to consider ourselves to be living a morally good life unless we give a great deal more than most of us would think it realistic to expect human beings to give. This may sound absurd, and yet the argument for it is remarkably simple. It goes back to that bottle of water, to the money we spend on things that arent really necessary. If it is so easy to help people in real need through no fault of their own, and yet we fail to do so, arent we doing something wrong? At a minimum, I hope this book will persuade you that there is something deeply askew with our widely accepted views about what it is to live a good life.

The second goal of this book is to convince you to choose to give more of your income to help the poor. Youll be happy to know that I fully realize the need to step back from the demanding standards of a philosophical argument to ask what will really make a difference in the way we act. Ill consider the reasons, some relatively convincing, others less so, that we offer for not giving, as well as the psychological factors that get in our way. Ill acknowledge the bounds of human nature and yet provide examples of people who seem to have found a way to push those bounds further than most. And I will close with a reasonable standard that, for 95 percent of Americans, can be met by giving no more than 5 percent of their income.