“In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of the humanitarian emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at a minimum inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent, and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown. Similarly, if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so”
Peter Singer, “What Should a Billionaire Give—and What Should You?” (2006)
The passage above comes from a recent article by the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, which appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine over the holidays. In it, Singer argues that if we in fact believe what we profess to believe—that is, that all human beings have an inherent dignity and that no single human life is any more valuable than another—than we ought to be doing a lot more to eradicate global poverty and disease than we currently do. According to Unicef, for example, “more than 10 million children die every year—about 30,000 per day—from avoidable, poverty-related causes.” Yet, as Singer notes, “the amount of foreign development aid given by the U.S. government is, at 22 cents for every $100 the nation earns, about the same, as a percentage of gross national income, as Portugal gives and about half that of the U.K.” In other words, the citizens of the United States are watching a lot of children drown as they make their way to the mall to buy a new pair of shoes. These deaths, after all, are avoidable: it is within our capacity, assuming the will, to prevent them. That we do not, then, makes us—and our new shoes—in some sense responsible for their deaths.
The remainder of Singer’s article is given over to determining how much one should give in order to satisfy the basic ethical principles that we purport to live by. There are two sides to the debate. Either one should give their fair share, or one ought to give as much as they reasonably and comfortably can regardless of their fair share since, of course, not everyone will give their fair share and, thus, children will continue to needlessly drown. Singer favors the second position, and calculates, for each income bracket, the amount he believes households can and should give.
The top 0.01 percent of U.S. taxpayers, for example, all 14,400 of them, earn on average $12,775,000 per year and together $184 billion per year. Singer argues that it “seems reasonable to suppose that they could, without much hardship, give away a third of their annual income, an average of 4.3 million each, for a total of 61 billion. That would still leave them with an annual income of at least 3.3 million.” Moreover, that 61 billion would more than cover the 48 billion that Jeffrey Sachs has calculated the UN would need to make good on its Millenium Development Goals, which include reducing by half the number of the world’s people who live in extreme poverty, ensuring that children everywhere take a full course of primary schooling, reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5, and a host of other unarguably laudable goals.
But that 61 billion comes from just the very rich. Singer also calculates what the top 0.1 percent, the top .05 percent, the top 1 percent, and the top 10 percent of U.S. income earners could comfortably give. The income bracket that my household belongs to, for example, the top 10 percent (who earn at least $92,000 annually, with an average $132,000), could, if it gave 10 percent of its income ($13,200 per household), contribute 171 billion dollars to the cause. And if those households were to give only their fair share—that is, their share of the 48 billion dollars that would be needed to meet the UN Millenium Development Goals—those households should, by my quick and dirty calculations, be giving roughly $1300 per year.
But here is the problem. Our household gives nothing. Not a penny. And being reminded of this, as Singer surely intends, is disconcerting. Indeed, for someone who purports to care very deeply about national and global poverty, I do comparatively little about it. I started and direct a free college-accredited course for low-income people in our community, but the students who enroll in that course, while relatively poor, are not absolutely poor in the way that someone living on less than $1 per day or whose children die from diarrhea before age 5 is poor. I think and write and teach about poverty, but, as the saying goes—and seems especially apt here—I don’t put my money where my mouth is.
Why not? And why should I nevertheless? We'll see in Part II.
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