"The Singer Solution to World Poverty" (The New York Times Magazine, 1999) presses a stark moral argument: if we can prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought to do it. Money spent on luxuries could instead save the lives of children dying from preventable causes; therefore, Singer argues, affluent people are obligated to give away income beyond what they need for necessities. The essay uses vivid thought experiments to close the felt distance between a child drowning before our eyes and a child dying overseas.
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