Singer, who is also the author of the seminal 1975 book Animal Liberation that helped launch the animal rights movement, can now say it twice. Very few authors can claim to have seeded actual movements. Its rerelease in these formats (following an update in 2019) seems like a good occasion to reflect on the book’s far-reaching influence. This year, Singer and his publisher released The Life You Can Save for free as both an ebook and an audiobook. And it inspired thousands of people to take the Life You Can Save pledge, to give what they can afford to save lives elsewhere. It inspired major donors to give more effectively. The book played a powerful role in birthing the effective altruist movement, built around the principle that charities should take a rigorous approach to doing as much good as possible. Singer’s thought experiment has been provoking people for decades, but The Life You Can Save was more than thought-provoking: it got people to act.
Instead, he argues, they just need to be people who would rather save a life than not. Singer is a utilitarian - a school of philosophy that holds that actions should be evaluated based on their consequences, and that you ought to do whatever maximizes overall utility or well-being - but he doesn’t expect his readers to share that worldview. It’s a compelling argument, precisely because it’s not all that complicated.
But if you don’t think that matters (and Singer doesn’t), then shouldn’t we be, well, saving them? They aren’t right in front of us the children who die if we ignore them are mostly far away, born to families we might never meet. But Singer contends that our world already presents opportunities to save lives that are about as straightforward and low cost as his hypothetical. Ought you, morally, to save the child?Īlmost everyone says yes. You could save them, but doing so would ruin your suit. His original argument, which he introduced in a paper published in 1972, goes like this: Imagine you’re on your way to an important meeting, when suddenly you see a child drowning in a pond you’re walking by. In 2009, the philosopher Peter Singer published a book called The Life You Can Save, which contained a restatement of one of his most famous arguments: that you should help people, if it’s not exceptionally costly to you.
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