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ID: CPWt5SDY/biz/60671830#60672174
7/22/2025, 11:05:42 AM
>>60672160
Suffering is bad regardless of it being a white baby, black baby or a calf.
Also you could agree with much of what he's saying even if you're not a humanist you could be a Christian and believe everyone is made in the image of God, you could be a Buddhist or believe in Hinduism and see the virtue in giving your millions to dying toddlers to save their lives.
>>60672143
But I think we can make a much more direct argument: failure to give to effective charities is morally equivalent to walking past drowning children. Therefore, you have an obligation to give to effective charities, just as you would have an obligation to pull drowning children out of ponds (it seems this is how everyone has, in the intervening years, interpreted Singer’s argument, even though it’s not what was originally intended).
In both the case where you pull the child out of a pond and the case where you donate to effective charities, you can avert a death at the cost of just a few thousand dollars. This seems to be the salient feature of the situation—the reason to wade in and save the child seems to be that you can save a life at a small cost. The alternative is to come up with some gerrymandered explanation of why you should save the child from the pond but not from malaria, but that’s less plausible than the simple account that you should prevent terrible things from happening if you can do so at comparatively minor cost.
Suffering is bad regardless of it being a white baby, black baby or a calf.
Also you could agree with much of what he's saying even if you're not a humanist you could be a Christian and believe everyone is made in the image of God, you could be a Buddhist or believe in Hinduism and see the virtue in giving your millions to dying toddlers to save their lives.
>>60672143
But I think we can make a much more direct argument: failure to give to effective charities is morally equivalent to walking past drowning children. Therefore, you have an obligation to give to effective charities, just as you would have an obligation to pull drowning children out of ponds (it seems this is how everyone has, in the intervening years, interpreted Singer’s argument, even though it’s not what was originally intended).
In both the case where you pull the child out of a pond and the case where you donate to effective charities, you can avert a death at the cost of just a few thousand dollars. This seems to be the salient feature of the situation—the reason to wade in and save the child seems to be that you can save a life at a small cost. The alternative is to come up with some gerrymandered explanation of why you should save the child from the pond but not from malaria, but that’s less plausible than the simple account that you should prevent terrible things from happening if you can do so at comparatively minor cost.
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