Peter Singer on Life, Lattes, and Charitable Giving
Enjoying those orange-and-black-bedecked water bottles you just stocked up on at late meal? How about that latte you just bought at Small World? Or those cans of shaving cream you just invested in to spray all over residential college hallways during pickups?Well if so, check out these great lines from a profile of Princeton’s very own Peter Singer, professor of bioethics extraordinaire, that was printed in Melbourne’s Sunday Star-Times.
“The money you spend on these luxuries, he says, is money you have not given to help the wretched of the earth. You are, he suggests, like someone who refuses to wade into a pond to save a drowning child because he doesn't want to ruin his new shoes. Death sits at your cafe table, and will not go away.”
Ahem. How does that latte taste now? Want to go collect that shaving cream and reuse it?But Professor Singer is definitely not all talk. He went on to tell the Times that he gives somewhere between a quarter and a third of his own income to carefully-chosen charities. To those who question the legitimacy of such charities, he promptly directs cynics to the Give Well website, founded by hedge-fund employees Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld and which posts evaluations of charitable foundations.Singer holds that he’s not trying to make us feel guilty. (Interesting, because I don’t know about you, but I’m currently making a mental tally of the number of coffees I’ve purchased in the past week, and let’s just say I can’t count them on one hand. Or two. Or all of my extremities put together. If that’s not worthy of guilt by this argument, I’m not sure what is…)Rather, Singer focuses on a productive arrangement of “reasonable giving” that, he says, would provide $1.5 trillion per year in aid and would ultimately end world poverty by helping the poor to help themselves. Here’s the plan (which reads something like those "Choose Your Adventure" books—if you have six fingers on one hand and successfully slay the dragon, proceed to page 75, otherwise, stop reading, kind of thing):
- If you earn more than $100,000 per year, contribute 5% of your income to charity.
- If you earn over $150,000 per year, contribute 10% of each additional dollar to charity.
- ....and so on until…
- Those earning over $10 million should be giving 1/3 of every extra dollar to charity.
So maybe these figures don't directly apply to the average, Scrooge-like undergraduate, but the idea is powerful and consistent, regardless of income. (Read more about Singer's giving theory in his recent book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty.)The tendency, Singer fears, is to assume that genuine altruism doesn’t exist, and so there’s no real point in giving. How many of us can truthfully say we called Angelina Jolie’s insistence on adopting five? six? seven? twenty? children from impoverished environments little more than a publicity stunt? But the truth of the matter, Singer says, is that “contrary to what so many of us believe, there is an enormous amount of altruistic, caring behavior in everyday life.”He leaves us with this profound thought:
“If you and other comfortably-off people in affluent nations were all to give, say, 5% of your income for the fight against global poverty, it would probably not reduce your happiness at all. You could well end up happier, because taking part in a collective effort to help the world’s poorest people would give your life greater meaning and fulfillment.”
Just something to chew on next time you pass by a water fountain on your way to late meal.(image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Singer1.jpg)
