The Singer Solution to World Poverty
PETER SINGER
The New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1999, pp. 60-63
In the Brazilian film "Central Station," Dora is a retired schoolteacher who makes ends meet by
sitting at the station writing letters for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an opportunity to
pocket $1,000. All she has to do is persuade a homeless 9-year-old boy to follow her to an
address she has been given. (She is told he will be adopted by wealthy foreigners.) She delivers
the boy, gets the money, spends some of it on a television set and settles down to enjoy her
new acquisition. Her neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling her that the boy was too old
to be adopted —he will be killed and his organs sold for transplantation. Perhaps Dora knew
this all along, but after her neighbor's plain speaking, she spends a troubled night. In the
morning Dora resolves to take the boy back.
Suppose Dora had told her neighbor that it is a tough world, other people have nice new TV's
too, and if selling the kid is the only way she can get one, well, he was only a street kid. She
would then have become, in the eyes of the audience, a monster. She redeems herself only by
being prepared to bear considerable risks to save the boy.
At the end of the movie, in cinemas in the affluent nations of the world, people who would
have been quick to condemn Dora if she had not rescued the boy go home to places far more
comfortable than her apartment. In fact, the average family in the United States spends almost
one-third of its income on things that are no more necessary to them than Dora's new TV was
to her. Going out to nice restaurants, buying new clothes because the old ones are no longer
stylish, vacationing at beach resorts —so much of our income is spent on things not essential
to the preservation of our lives and health. Donated to one of a number of charitable agencies,
that money could mean the difference between life and death for children in need.
All of which raises a question: In the end, what is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian
who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and
upgrades to a better one —knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that
would use it to save the lives of kids in need?
Of course, there are several differences between the two situations that could support
different moral judgments about them. For one thing, to be able to consign a child to death
when he is standing right in front of you takes a chilling kind of heartlessness; it is much easier
to ignore an appeal for money to help children you will never meet. Yet for autilitarian
philosopher like myself —that is, one who judges whether acts are right or wrong by their
consequences— if the upshot of the American's failure to donate the money is that one more
kiddies on the streets of a Brazilian city, then it is, in some sense, just as bad as selling the kid
to the organ peddlers. But one doesn't need to embrace my utilitarian ethic to see that, at the
very least, there is a troubling incongruity in being so quick to condemn Dora for taking the
child to the organ peddlers while, at the same time, not regarding the American consumer's
behavior as raising a serious moral issue.
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. Unger agrees. But then
he reminds us that 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-yearold —offering safe passage through childhood's most dangerous years. To show how practical
philosophical argument can be, Unger even tells his readers that they 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. [http://supportunicef.org/forms/whichcountry2.html for
Unicef and http://www.oxfam.org/eng/donate.htm for Oxfam —PS]
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. Unlike Dora, 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.
Unlike Dora, too, 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 and differs from Dora's situation.
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 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.
Isn't it counterproductive to ask people to do so much? Don't we run the risk that many will
shrug their shoulders and say that morality, so conceived, is fine for saints but not for them? I
accept that we are unlikely to see, in the near or even medium-term future, a world in which
it is normal for wealthy Americans to give the bulk of their wealth to strangers. When it comes
to praising or blaming people for what they do, we tend to use a standard that is relative to
some conception of normal behavior. Comfortably off Americans who give, say, 10 percent of
their income to overseas aid organizations are so far ahead of most of their equally comfortable
fellow citizens that I wouldn't go out of my way to chastise them for not doing more.
Nevertheless, they should be doing much more, and they are in no position to criticize Bob for
failing to make the much greater sacrifice of his Bugatti.
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 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 it is the case that we ought to do things that, predictably, most of us won't do, then
let's face that fact head-on. Then, if we value the life of a child more than going to fancy
restaurants, the next time we dine out we will know that we could have done something better
with our money. If that makes living a morally decent life extremely arduous, well, then that
is the way things are. If we don't do it, then we should at least know that we are failing to live
a morally decent life —not because it is good to wallow in guilt but because knowing where we
should be going is the first step toward heading in that direction.
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.
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