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Hey, buddy... can you spare $25 to save some lives?

Reviewed by: Ria Julien

Posted: 04/5/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

The Life You Can Save

Acting Now to End World Poverty

By Peter Singer

Random House, 205 pages, $25

GIVING is good. And right, according to this challenging work of popular philosophy.

Last year, former U.S. president Bill Clinton published Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World. Yet, increasingly, changing the world appears the purview of a wealthy, revolutionary class of geeks, celebrities and financiers aimed at eradicating poverty.

For acclaimed Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, however, giving is not the new noblesse oblige but the ethical obligation of us all.

To people of faith this will come as no surprise.

But for Singer, an Australian-born secular humanist best known for his 1975 classic, Animal Liberation, the challenge in The Life You Can Save is to provide a compelling philosophical basis for giving. And he finds it in a utilitarian ethics in which all lives are of equal value.

So far so good. But as Singer shows, this view of the equivalence of human lives has profound implications for how Westerners think about their "right" to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

If all disposable income is viewed in terms of potential number of lives saved, must that vacation or those dinners out be damned? The answer for Singer is yes. They must.

But as soon as Singer puts forward a challenge that would leave many looking deeply inward, he lets the air out, trotting out a bland program of secular almsgiving that for most of us will lead to belt tightening and still leave our nights out intact.

What he settles on its decidedly less than his philosophical stance suggests.

Singer's problem comes not from his willingness to take an overly realistic approach to a rather demanding philosophy. Instead, in this book, his ethical demands are misplaced.

Singer proposes a graduated system of giving in which the super-rich are ethically obliged to donate from five to 30 per cent of their incomes.

With donations from the top 10 per cent of the U.S. earners alone, the goals of eradicating extreme global poverty and achieving universal primary education could be met twice over. The noblesse oblige lurks.

But does the good society not have an obligation to prevent the accumulation of such wealth in the hands of so few?

Instead of examining the ethical obligations of the individual to donate, Singer might do well to examine the obligation of a political system to prevent ever-increasing economic disparity.

Singer's failure to examine the systemic causes of global poverty -- even found in aid itself -- leads to some rather outlandish statements in his discussion of a creating a "culture of giving." Here he praises Bear Stearns for its philanthropic culture.

Singer's book is seductive. It is easy to read it and feel stirred to action. And that's a good thing.

More difficult is to confront the lie that we, charged with the business of saving lives by obligation or otherwise, are not in part the creators of the problems that we so nobly attempt to solve.

In the end, the myth of the benevolently given dollar wins out.

Ria Julien is a Winnipeg writer

based in New York.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 5, 2009 B2

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