The drowning child, the starving child
On the axis: Moral demandingness · the rescue
Everyone grants that we must save the child drowning before our eyes, even at the cost of ruining our clothes; but if distance makes no difference to the duty, as Singer argues, why does it not extend to everyone a donation would suffice to save?
You receive a sum of money you were not expecting, the equivalent of several months' salary, with no strings attached. It is yours, freely, and no one will know what you do with it. That same evening you read a credible appeal from an organization showing, figures in hand, that a fraction of this sum would be enough to protect dozens of people from a preventable disease on the other side of the world. You have no connection to these people and no one is asking anything of you. You set down your phone and look at the transfer on your screen. What do you do with it?
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Anchors: Singer · Peter Unger
leads to: Partiality (The loved one or the stranger)