Famine, Affluence, and Morality
TL;DR — Singer’s 1972 argument that distance and numbers do not reduce the duty to prevent suffering — the founding text of effective altruism.
Written in November 1971, during the Bengal famine. “People are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. The suffering and death that are occurring there now are not inevitable, not unavoidable.”
The argument is short and hard to escape: if it is in our power to prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought to do it — and neither physical distance nor the number of other people who could also help makes any moral difference. The drowning-child thought experiment is here.
Eleven pages, and effective altruism is downstream of them. Whether you accept the conclusion, the premises are individually very hard to reject, which is the whole trouble.
Where this came from
11 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.