"archival series"

Living High and Letting Die

“If you’d contributed $100 to one of UNICEF’s most efficient lifesaving programs a couple of months ago, this month there’d be over thirty fewer children who, instead of painfully dying soon, would live reasonably long lives.”

I took away two concepts from Singer’s work on critiquing moral intuitions and challenging the way people have reasoned on ethics. One is social distance: the idea that how far removed a person geographically or mentally reduces the urgency / need in performing moral calculus. The second is something Singer argues for not only in ethical decisions, but also the broader social decisions as well, which is epistemic responsibility. That we all have the duty to ensure that one’s beliefs, knowledge, and understanding are well-founded, justified, and based on reliable evidence.

What’s missing for me is the practical application of the ethics set out in “Living High and Letting Die”. How do you know the amount that you can contribute while still being left well-off? There is also the interesting reaction I have when reading the starting page which is the section on contributing $100 to UNICEF’s program. The reaction is an immediate anxiety I have regarding my capital and the uses of such. The anxiety necessarily hinges on the destruction of my own trust in global institutions for actually converting that donation into any moral good. Given the amount of controversy that has gone around non-profits, I am skeptical. It’s just odd because the act of donating $100 and economic structures contributes to the problems of social distance.