Almost nobody defends the position that almost everybody holds, which is that a person may spend freely on themselves while children die of preventable causes elsewhere.
That is an unusual state for a moral question. The abortion and euthanasia arguments of the previous lesson have serious defenders on both sides. Here the argument for a large obligation is short, its premises are individually hard to deny, and its conclusion is rejected in practice by nearly everyone including most of those who accept it in print. Working out where it goes wrong, if it does, is a good final test of everything in this course.
The argument
Peter Singer published "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" in 1972, in response to the Bengal refugee crisis, and it runs in three lines.
First: suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad. Second: if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought morally to do it. Third: we can prevent such suffering by giving money to effective aid. Therefore we ought to give, up to the point where giving more would cost us something of comparable moral importance.
The famous illustration is the drowning child. You pass a shallow pond and see a small child face down in it. Wading in will save her and will ruin an expensive pair of shoes. Nobody thinks the shoes are a reason, and nobody thinks that saving her is admirable rather than required. Singer's claim is that the second premise is what everyone relies on when they judge the pond case, and that once stated it applies far beyond the pond.
He also offers a weaker version, replacing "of comparable moral importance" with "morally significant", which yields a much less demanding conclusion and is still enough to condemn most current behaviour. The strategy is deliberate: even a reader who rejects the strong principle is caught by the weak one.
What the argument costs
The obligation the argument generates depends on what money actually buys, and that figure is knowable.
GiveWell, which publishes its cost-effectiveness models rather than asserting a number, has for years estimated the cost per life saved through its top-rated malaria programmes at somewhere in the region of 3,000 to 5,500 US dollars, with the figure revised as evidence and funding gaps change. The underlying evidence for insecticide-treated nets is unusually good for aid: the Cochrane review of the large randomised trials found that nets reduce all-cause child mortality by roughly a sixth, on the order of five to six deaths averted per thousand children protected per year.
Work the personal arithmetic. Someone earning 50,000 a year who gives a tenth of it, for forty years, gives 200,000. At 5,000 per life, that is lives. At the lower end of the range it is closer to sixty. Giving one percent instead of ten gives four lives. These are not rhetorical figures; they are what the published models imply, with all the uncertainty those models carry.
The uncertainty deserves stating. Cost per life saved is a modelled quantity, not a measurement, and it depends on assumptions about baseline mortality, insecticide resistance, net usage, and what would have happened without the funding. The honest way to hold it is as an order of magnitude: thousands of dollars, not tens of dollars and not millions.
Example. Compute the lives implied by giving one percent and ten percent of a 50,000 income over forty years at 5,000 per life, and say what the calculation does and does not establish.
One percent gives , which at 5,000 per life is 4 lives. Ten percent gives 200,000, which is 40 lives. The calculation establishes that the difference between two very ordinary levels of generosity is, on the best published estimates, an order of magnitude in lives, which is a fact worth confronting whatever theory you hold. It does not establish that you are obliged to give either amount, because that conclusion needs Singer's second premise, and the whole argument of the rest of this lesson is about whether that premise survives. Nor does it establish that the marginal cost stays constant: the cheapest opportunities are taken first, so a very large increase in funding would raise the price per life, which is an argument about scale rather than about individual obligation.
Now you. Someone replies that they would wade into the pond but will not give, because the child in the pond is right there. State that reply as a premise and test it.
Answer
The premise is that physical proximity to a person in need affects the strength of one's obligation to them. Tested directly it looks very weak: a person who could save a life with a telephone call from another continent is not thereby excused, and nobody thinks a doctor may ignore a patient two streets away who is within reach. Frances Kamm has argued that proximity really does matter to our intuitions in a way that resists elimination, and even she does not claim to have a justification for it. Two better versions of the reply exist and should be distinguished from it. One is about certainty: in the pond you know that your action saves this child, whereas a donation buys a probabilistic contribution to a statistical reduction, and someone might hold that obligations attach more strongly to certain rescues. The other is about the pond being a one-off, while the world's need is unending, which is a demandingness objection rather than a distance objection and belongs below. The distance premise itself, stated plainly, is very hard to defend, and the fact that we all act on it is exactly the kind of thing this course teaches you to be suspicious of.
The serious objections
Three objections have real force, and they are not the ones usually offered.
The demand is unlivable. This is the objection of the earlier lesson on consequentialism, applied here. The strong principle requires giving until further giving would cost you something of comparable importance to a life, which means until you are near subsistence, and a morality no one can live by has failed at something. The reply that has most traction is not philosophical but practical: Singer himself, and the movements built on his argument, have mostly settled on a defensible threshold, such as the ten percent of the Giving What We Can pledge, on the grounds that a demand people will actually meet produces more good than one they will reject. That is a decision-procedure answer rather than a criterion answer, with all the awkwardness that distinction carries.
Aid may not work. This is an empirical objection and the strongest of the three. The debate between William Easterly, who argues that large-scale aid has a poor record and often entrenches bad governments, and Jeffrey Sachs, who argues that targeted investment can break poverty traps, ran for a decade without resolution because neither side had the right kind of evidence. What changed the field was the randomised evaluation movement, for which Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer shared the Nobel prize in economics in 2019, and its result is not that aid works or does not but that the variance between interventions is enormous. Some, like nets and vitamin supplementation, have strong trial evidence. Others, including much of what is popular with donors, have none. Even the movement's own flagship result, the finding by Miguel and Kremer in 2004 that school-based deworming raised attendance and later earnings, was contested by a re-analysis in 2015 and remains disputed. The correct conclusion is not that giving is futile but that where you give matters far more than how much, which is a conclusion the argument survives.
It is compensation, not charity. Thomas Pogge argues that the framing as beneficence concedes too much. The global order, in its trade rules, its recognition of whoever holds power as entitled to sell a country's resources, and its arms sales, is one that wealthy countries designed and from which they benefit, and it plays a causal role in sustaining poverty. If so, the obligation is a negative duty not to harm, which every theory in this course recognises as stronger than a duty to help, and its content is institutional reform rather than donation. The critical claim is causal and contested, and if it holds it makes the argument stronger rather than weaker, while relocating what it asks for.
Example. A donor gives 500 to a charity that sends shoeboxes of gifts to children in poor countries, and is told that the same money given to a malaria programme would avert roughly a tenth of a death. Assess the reply that the donor should give where they feel moved to give.
The reply confuses two things that should be separated. As a claim about motivation it is sound: people give more when they feel connected to a cause, the identifiable victim effect is well documented, and Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic showed in 2007 that donations to a named child substantially exceed donations prompted by statistics about many, and that adding the statistics to the named child's story reduces giving. So feeling is doing real work in getting money out of people at all. As a claim about where the money should go it is much weaker, because the feeling is responding to how the appeal was written rather than to how much good the money does, and the donor would presumably not endorse a policy of allocating aid by the vividness of its marketing. The honest position for a donor is therefore split: use whatever motivates you to give, and do not use it to decide where. That split is uncomfortable and it is the same criterion-and-procedure distinction that the lesson on consequences introduced, arriving in a domestic form.
Now you. Does the identifiable victim effect give any reason to think that the intuition behind the drowning child case is unreliable?
Answer
It cuts against Singer's use of the case as much as it supports it, and a careful reader should notice this. Singer relies on the pond intuition being correct and the failure to give being the error. But the same psychology that makes the pond vivid, the identified single victim in front of you, is exactly the mechanism the effect describes, so an objector can argue that our strong reaction to the pond is the distortion and our weak reaction to distant statistical deaths is the calibrated response. Singer's reply is that the debunking runs the wrong way: the effect explains why we underweight the many rather than why we overweight the one, and the moral question is which reaction survives reflection about what is actually at stake, which is the same death either way. That reply is good and it is not a proof, and the honest summary is that the psychology is evidence about the mechanism and does not by itself tell you which of the two reactions to trust. Applying a debunking argument symmetrically, to your own side as well as your opponent's, is the discipline the lesson on method insisted on.
One thought too many
The deepest objection is not about how much is owed to strangers but about whether an impartial morality can accommodate anyone in particular.
Bernard Williams's case is short. A man can save one of two people from drowning, and one of them is his wife. If he saves his wife, and the justification he gives is that she is his wife and in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one's wife, he has had, in Williams's phrase, one thought too many. What we want is for the thought that she is his wife to be enough. A morality that requires him to check his partiality against an impartial permission has misdescribed what it is to love someone.
The objection has bite against every theory in the course, and it is worth seeing why. Consequentialism has it worst, since his wife's life and the stranger's count the same in the sum, and he needs a permission from outside. Kantian ethics does better, since nothing requires him to weigh, but the theory's emphasis on acting from duty rather than inclination makes trouble of its own. Contractualism does better still, since a principle permitting rescue of one's own could not reasonably be rejected by anyone, who each have families of their own. Virtue ethics does best, because the loving husband is the paradigm rather than a case to be licensed, and this is one of the tradition's strongest arguments.
The standard reply distinguishes the reason that motivates from the reason that justifies. A good husband is moved by the thought that she is his wife; the theory's job is to say whether such dispositions are ones we should have, not to be in his head at the moment of the rescue. That is Railton's sophisticated consequentialism again, and Williams's rejoinder is that the distinction does not survive reflection: a man who knows that his love is licensed by an impartial theory cannot un-know it, and his relationship to his own attachments has changed.
Example. A parent spends 3,000 on their child's music tuition rather than on bed nets. Assess this from each of the four positions in the course.
An act consequentialist condemns it as clearly as any act can be condemned, since the tuition buys a marginal pleasure and the alternative buys most of a life, and a consequentialist who does not feel the force of that has not understood their own theory. A Kantian does not condemn it: the parent has an imperfect duty of beneficence with latitude in how it is discharged, and a perfect duty to their own child arising from the relationship, so the choice falls within permitted discretion. A contractualist asks whether a principle permitting parents to devote substantial resources to their own children could be reasonably rejected by a distant child, and the answer is contested, since the distant child's burden is far greater, though a world with no partiality towards one's own children may be one nobody could accept either. A virtue ethicist asks what a good parent and a good person does, and refuses to treat the two as separable, which is why the tradition's answer usually takes the form of a criticism of a life rather than of an act: a parent who spends lavishly on their child and gives nothing to anyone is displaying a defect, and the defect is not located in the tuition.
Now you. Does Williams's objection show that Singer's argument fails?
Answer
No. It shows that a certain way of holding the argument is corrosive, which is a different claim. Williams's target is the requirement that an agent's deepest attachments be held open to revision by an impartial calculation, and Singer's conclusion does not obviously require that: it requires that some of your money go to strangers rather than to yourself, which is compatible with your relationships being unmediated by any calculation at all. The objection tells against the strong version of the principle, which would require sacrificing your child's education if the arithmetic said so, and hardly at all against the weak one, which asks for what is not morally significant to you. This is a useful pattern to notice at the end of a course: many famous objections defeat the maximal form of a position and leave a moderate form standing, and a reader who reaches for the objection without checking which version it kills has done half the work.
Effective altruism, and what happened to it
The movement built on this argument is worth a paragraph as a test case, because it is what happens when a philosophical argument is taken seriously by a lot of people at once.
Its programme is simple: give a meaningful fraction of your income, and give it where the evidence says it does most good. The Giving What We Can pledge of ten percent, the growth of cost-effectiveness evaluation, and a substantial redirection of donations towards malaria and direct cash transfers are its results, and they are real.
Its problems are also real and were mostly predicted by its critics. Measurability bias pushes attention towards interventions whose effects can be counted, and away from political and institutional change that may matter more and cannot be evaluated in a trial, which is Pogge's objection in another form. The internal logic of expected value led parts of the movement from present suffering towards speculative long-run risks, where the numbers are guesses and the guesses do all the work, which is the population arithmetic of the earlier lesson on the good arriving with a budget. And the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2022, whose founder was a prominent funder and an explicit advocate of earning to give, was an object lesson in what a theory of criterion without a theory of character permits: a person reasoning entirely in expected value, with no constraint he could not calculate his way past, and enormous harm as the result.
None of that touches the original argument, and all of it bears on how the argument should be held. A reader who has followed this course to here should be able to say exactly why: the argument establishes a conclusion about what to do with money, the failures were failures of constraint and of character, and the three families are not competitors so much as answers to different questions that all have to be answered.
What survives
Strip away the movement and the numbers change less than the rhetoric suggests.
The second premise, in its weak form, is very hard to reject. Distance does not withstand examination as a moral variable. The empirical objection is real and redirects rather than defeats the argument. The demandingness objection defeats the strong version and leaves a substantial obligation standing. And the partiality objection shows that whatever the obligation is, it cannot be one that requires you to hold your own life at arm's length.
What that adds up to is a conclusion most people have never accepted and few can refute: that giving a real fraction of one's income, to interventions chosen on evidence rather than on appeal, is not generous but required, and that the amount is a matter for argument rather than the principle. If a reader disagrees, this course has given them the tools to say which premise they deny, and that is the last thing it has to teach.