If your holiday shopping prevents you from reading Peter Singer's article "On Giving" in this Sunday's New York Times magazine, I'm here (suffering from a flu mild enough to catch up on my recreational reading) to give you the executive summary.

Saving Children from Drowning 

Peter Singer is a philosopher, one of those guys who we pay to keep asking the questions we generally stop asking at midnight after we move out of our college dorm rooms.  More particularly, he is the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

In an article Singer wrote more than thirty years ago, he used a hypothetical child drowning in shallow water to explore how we value our own material well-being when compared to the desperate circumstances of others.  

How desperate? 

A billion people who inhabit the planet with us live on less than the equivalent of one U.S. Dollar a day.  Their children, ten million of them to be precise, die every year of poverty-related causes. 

30,000 every day.  

Here's Singer's thought-experiment.  As you walk by a shallow pond,

you see a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning.  Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost eveyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so.  Anything else would be callous, indecent, in a word, wrong. 

The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown.  Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of the child, we ought to to do.   

Simple enough, you say, but remember the statistics that preceded Singer's hypothetical.

Every single year there are one million children drowning. 

30,000 per day.  

How Many Children Are We Morally Obliged to Rescue?

1.  We are Not Innocent of their Plight

We didn't ask to be born in the richest country the world has ever known.  But there it is.  We were.

We don't need to be told that "at least some of our affluence comes at the expense of the poor," not only as a result of the real, and negative, market forces imposed upon developing countries in exchange for foreign aid, but also as a result of our exploitation of the developing world's natural resources.

2.  We Didn't "Earn" the Resources Necessary to Save the Children Solely by Virtue of Our Own Efforts

"The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimate[s] that 'social capital' is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe." 

Included in this social capital are natural resources as well as "the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government."  

Singer quotes Warren Buffet,  

"If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil."

3.  The Millennium Goals

In the year 2000, the United Nations jointly pledged to meet a list of goals for reducing poverty by the year 2015.  That's nine years from now.  If we don't make progress on these goals, you can count those nine years in lives lost -- nine million of them children's.   

The goals:

1. reduce by half the proportion of the world's people in extreme poverty, i.e., those living on less than one U.S. dollar per day;
2. reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger;
3. ensure that children everywhere are able to take a full course of primary schooling;
4. end sex disparity in education;
5. reduce by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5;
6. reduce by three-quarters the rate of maternal mortality;
7. halt and begin to reverse the spread of H.I.V./ADIS and halt and begin to reduce the incidence of malaria and other major diseases; and,
8. reduce bgy half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

The cost?

A U.N. task force led by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, estimate the annual cost of meeting those goals to be $121 billion in 2006, increasing to $189 billion by 2015.

4.  We Can Meet the Millenium Goals Without Undue Inconvenience to Ourselves  

After proposing percentage giving according to income (below) Singer concludes as follows:

Measured against our capacity, the Millenium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest.  If we fail to achieve them -- as on present indications we well might -- we have no excuses.  The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions.  That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach.

Singer's Proposed Giving Goals by Income Group

(if you're anything like me, you'll note yourself nodding in approval until the income group discussed comes closer to your own; and yet I've lived on far, far, far less and been none the unhappier for it ) 

1. the top .01 percent of U.S. taxpayers who earn an average of $12.775 million per year could "without much hardship" give away a third of their annual income, or $4.3 million each for a total of $61 billion per year;
2. the remaining .1 percent earn just over $2 million per year.  Each could give a quarter of their income, yielding about $65 billion, leaving each with at least $846,000 annually;
3. the top .5 percent average $623,000 per year.  If they each gave one-fifth of their income, their giving would total $72 billion.
4. those in the top 1 percent with an average of $327,00 per year could comfortably afford to give fifteen percent of ehtir income, yielding $35 billion.
5. the reaminder of the nation's top 10 percent with an average of $132,000 per year could give the traaditional tithe -- 10% of their income -- yielding $171 billion.

As Singer notes, you might "spend a long time debating" whether these fractions are "just" or "fair."  But,

be that as it may, the remarkable thing about these caluclations is that a scale of donations that is unlikely to impose significant hardship on anyone yields a total of $404 billion -- from just 10 percent of American families.

So.  Save a child from drowning or buy a $300 bottle of vodka?  

We might not be prepared to make what we believe to be extraordinary sacrifices, but as the holidays come upon us and the year ends, shouldn't we be doing some serious thinking about it?