for anyone with a less strenuous sense of the moral life. If failing to live up to their example is wrong, how many of us want to be right?
MacFarquhar also knows that, in our day, a moral paragon is someone who goes to extreme lengths to save people far across the globe. The title of her book alludes to a question that the philosopher Peter Singer asked more than four decades ago to explain why people are morally obligated to do what they can to alleviate famine.4 If you passed a dying child, would you really not feel impelled to save her? If so, then why should the intermediation of long distances matter? Singer was spurred to make this argument by a civil war and a cyclone in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). He preaches effective altruism today in some of his popular books, and his TED Talk on the subject long ago passed a million views.
MacFarquhar’s book begins with a scene in a restaurant in which a philosophy student who has clearly read Singer’s work is explaining to his professor—a family man—why the welfare of abstract humanity matters as much as that of his own children. MacFarquhar takes a long look at another young man who, already burning with idealism, reads Singer’s famous essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and sets out to live frugally in order to bring his personal life into conformity with altruistic justice. To buy a can of soda, it might be argued, is to opt for killing a child far away—because absent that dollar spent on humanity, somebody somewhere will die. And once you know this, how could you spend that dollar on a can of soda for yourself? If the amount spent on luxuries for the 1 percent were redirected to Africa, how many more people would survive?
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