>>719828412
Long before I was born, Peter Singer argued that this case shows that we have an obligation to donate to effective charities. The best charities—which you can, at any time, donate to—save lives for a few thousand dollars each. Just as you’re obligated to sacrifice a few thousand dollars to pull the child out of the pond and save them, you’re obligated to sacrifice a few thousand dollars to save a far-away child who would otherwise die of malaria.

In Singer’s original formulation, he used the drowning child case to support the following principle: if you can prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral value, you should do so. For example, if you can prevent a woman from being raped or a person from being murdered at the cost of 700 dollars, you should do so, because averting rape and murder is more valuable than 700 dollars. From this, he deduces that you should give your discretionary spending to effective charities. You shouldn’t spend 5,000 dollars going to Hawaii when you could instead save a person’s life.

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.