Hey, I came across this post because it was cited (and rebutted) in the preface of the 2016 Oxford University Press edition of Famine, Affluence, and Morality. I thought it would be nice to provide the passage here. Here’s what Peter Singer wrote:
One very welcome development in philanthropy since the publication of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is that today there is much more emphasis on evaluating what charities seeking to help the global poor actually achieve. A great deal of research has been done into the effectiveness of particular charities, enabling people to make better charitable choices and thus to do more good with the money that they donate. This research has shown that many early estimates of the cost of saving a life did not include all the costs involved, or were based on inaccurate estimates of how often a form of aid such as providing bednets to protect people against malaria actually saved a life.⁶ GiveWell, which has led the way in rigorously evaluating the cost-effectiveness of charities, estimates that although it costs the Against Malaria Foundation no more than $7.50 to provide and deliver a bednet to a family in a malaria-prone region of Africa, the cost of a life saved as a result of this distribution is $3,340. The difference reflects the fact that most bednets do not save lives (although some of them prevent debilitating but not fatal cases of malaria, as well as other diseases carried by mosquitoes). In general, GiveWell considers a cost of less than $5,000 per life saved an indication that a charity is highly cost-effective.⁷ That figure is, for most of us, much more than the cost of our most expensive suit or shoes, so it was a mistake to compare that cost with what we would need to spend in order to save the life of a child at risk from poverty-related causes. It remains true, though, that most people who are middle class or above in affluent countries spend much more than $5,000 on items that are not of comparable moral significance to saving a life. Moreover as Unger has shown with his story of Bob and the Bugatti, which I retell in “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” our intuitive judgment in situations where we can save a child in front of us is that we should be prepared to sacrifice possessions worth much more than our clothes, and even more than $5,000. The change in the cost of saving a life does not, therefore, undermine the fundamental moral argument of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”
Hey, I came across this post because it was cited (and rebutted) in the preface of the 2016 Oxford University Press edition of Famine, Affluence, and Morality. I thought it would be nice to provide the passage here. Here’s what Peter Singer wrote: