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.”
Living High and Letting Die
I took two concepts away from Singer’s work on critiquing “moral intuitions” and the way people do ethics. One is “social distance”: how far removed a person—geographically or mentally—affects the weight placed on people for “moral calculus”. The motivating example is shown by the quote on the first page of Living High and Letting Die. What reason would you have to not donate and save plenty of people? If the answer is no, does it imply you don’t see them as “human” within the global community or is it a “Libertarian” justification? There may be a “pragmatic” out by saying moral decisions were never meant to be made for a universal community or doubting the efficacy of a single donation.
I will confess; I haven’t made the $100 donation yet, and I’m updating this post on 2026-04-09, nearly two years since I picked up the book. What reasons can I give for not doing so? For one, it wouldn’t be of a Libertarian strain, as there are certainly scenarios where “not-helping” is immoral. The reason I’m inclined to evoke is community-based1.
The second is “epistemic responsibility”: we all have the duty to ensure one’s beliefs, knowledge, and understanding are well-founded, justified, and based on reliable evidence2. Singer advocates for epistemic responsibility in both ethical and societal decision-making. On the face of it, being beholden to epistemic responsibility is an uncontroversial claim. Of course, everyone should be adhering to it, if not already are.
The problem lies in the backdrop of the soul, language, “normativity”, “fallibility”, and truth. Over the past couple of decades, the question of what even is “Truth” and humanity’s access to it has been in debate. Because to talk about truth is to have accepted background understandings of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. As a consequence, many -isms have spawned from different approaches to the truth: “postmodernism”, “idealism”, “realism”, “anti-realism”, “empiricism”, “constructivism” and so on.
In any case, the ideal of rigorous self-reflection and democratic debate still holds. A question can be asked if this ideal is a ploy to sell books by moral philosophers? Maybe.