The life you can save

The last couple of years I have been doing a better job of keeping notes on the books I read. So I figured I would make something out of it and post them periodically.

I chose to start with Peter Singer's The life you can save, because I am a supporter of his utilitarian views.

Singer is a philosopher whose life goal has been to get people to recognize that it is morally wrong not to help others when you have the chance to do so. Not with the objective of making you feel bad, but to make you see the huge positive impact you can have on the lives of others with an effort you will not even notice.

He has a famous thought experiment called "The drowning child", it goes like this:

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather's cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.

As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don't wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown.

Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her, and change your clothes, you'll be late for work. What should you do?

So given that you are not a psychopath, you will save the child. So what happens if the child is not in front of you, but you still know it is dying? is it morally ok to ignore it?

In this book Singer makes a point of how little of your income can make a huge impact in saving lives in places that have conditions that developed countries consider fiction: measles, malaria, hunger, etc. And he argues that the bigger your income, the bigger moral responsibility you will carry.

I usually hear two main critics to his arguments, one of them more right-leaning, the other more left-leaning:

Governments have the responsibility to help, not individuals. And by paying taxes we are already contributing what we must.

The root problem is systemic, and we must change the system to overcome it. Individuals must not be held responsible for systemic problems.

But they are really about the same thing, not making individuals responsible and expecting governments and corporations to solve this.

While this is true, it also gives you an easy way out. An individual cannot change a system, but they can do much better to help other individuals than to post an angry tweet and a black photo on Instagram.

Systemic problems must have systemic solutions, and we should always push for systemic changes. But I find it profoundly cowardly when people feign to be powerless and use the "system change" as an excuse not to acknowledge the level of agency they can have as individuals.

What I love about Singer's message is that it encourages you not to only acknowledge our current problems but to also take practical action. If you have a chance to save a life, why wouldn't you?

Quotes

This “identifiable victim effect” leads to “the rule of rescue”: we will spend far more to rescue an identifiable victim than we will to save a “statistical life.”
Our focus should not be growth for its own sake, but the goals that lie behind our desire for growth: saving lives, reducing misery, and meeting people’s basic needs.
I guess basically one wants to feel that one’s life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one’s done the best one can to make this a better place for others.
Take the death of this small boy this morning, for example. The boy died of measles. We all know he could have been cured at the hospital. But the parents had no money and so the boy died a slow and painful death, not of measles but out of poverty.
Most of us are absolutely certain that we wouldn’t hesitate to save a drowning child, and that we would do it at considerable cost to ourselves. Yet while thousands of children die each day, we spend money on things we take for granted and would hardly notice if they were not there. Is that wrong?
There is an amount of money one needs to live a decent life—to pay for a reasonable amount of rent, clothes, food, and leisure. And if you have more than that amount, he posited, you should give it away—because you don’t need it, and someone else does.
The world is not running out of food. The problem is that people in high-income countries have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible if they were to eat the crops we grow directly.
If we want to bring about lasting cultural change, it is important that parents model effective poverty giving so their children see it as a normal part of what decent people do.
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 effective charities, 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 effective charities, you are doing something wrong.
One reason why we should not cut off aid to countries with high population growth is that there is an abundance of evidence that reducing poverty also reduces fertility.
If you are as skilled as Buffett in investing your money, I urge you to keep it until late in life, too, and then give away most of it, as he is doing. But people with less spectacular investment abilities might do more good by giving it away sooner and directing it to where it will go the furthest and do the most good.
In 2015, the Kaiser Family Foundation asked Americans what portion of government spending (not national income) goes to foreign aid. The average response was that 26% of government spending went towards assisting other countries. The correct answer is less than 1%.
If we look at the percentage of the population that gives to charity, the United States ranks only 12th, with 61% of the population giving, well below the top-ranked Myanmar where 88% give.
Their results, which are borne out by other trials of cash transfers, have demonstrated that giving money to poor families: Does not reduce the amount that adults work, but does reduce child labor; Raises school attendance; Increases economic autonomy; Increases women’s decision-making power; Leads to greater diversity in diet. Stimulates more use of health services.