Princeton philosopher Peter Singer has been a prominent, often controversial, figure. His most recent book, The Life You Can Save, looks at the responsibilities of individuals for addressing global poverty.
Q: You have written that in addition to an obligation to not harm, we also have an obligation to help. Could you explain that?
It's a mistake to think that our obligations are only to do no harm. I use the example of the drowning child in the pond. If you were walking through a park and came across a child drowning in a shallow pond, you knew you could save the child by wading into the pond and nothing would happen to you except that you would ruin the expensive shoes that you’re wearing, what’s the right thing to do? Everyone would say, you ought to save the child. It’s agreed that if you just walked past saying "I don't want to spoil my shoes," you've done something seriously wrong.
Q: You have pointed elsewhere to a study coming out of Duke showing life-saving measures taken by the U.S. healthcare system cost $2.2 million per person and the EPA has set a figure of $7.22 million as the theoretical value of a person. What is the significance of putting numbers on what a life is worth?
When we're looking at saving a life in developing countries, we're often talking about hundreds of dollars. Estimates vary with the type of program. Some appear to save a life for $300 to $400, Other go as high as $800 or even $1200, but we don't get anywhere near the figures of what we spend to save a life in the United States, which are thousands of times higher.
I hope people seeing those numbers will ask themselves whether they really support this, whether our professed belief in the equal value of all human life is just rhetoric or something that we live by. What does it say that we can accept these figures and do nothing about the situation?
If you say, I do believe in the equal value of all human life, then I think you have an obligation to give to those organizations that are saving human lives for hundreds of dollars rather than for millions of dollars. And that's something that I would imagine pretty much all of the people reading this have the capacity to do.
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