What I've Read This Week

Last Saturday I started reading Peter Singer’s newly published book The Life You Can Save.

Last Sunday the Indianapolis Star had this story on page B1:

Notre Dame hopeful starts site

The name of 17-year-old Rachel Harris’ Web site says it all. The Muskegon, Mich., high school senior recently launched iwanttogotonotredame.com to help her raise money to attend the South Bend school. The site includes copies of her application form, letters of recommendation and her high school transcript. Harris expects to be accepted—the problem is Notre Dame’s $46,000 annual cost of tuition, fees, room and board. She hopes the site will generate donations but also has applied for at least 10 scholarships. Harris plans to pursue a degree in biomolecular engineering and then attend medical school to become a pediatric endocrinologist. “The only thing that is keeping me from possibly going is the financial aspect to it, especially with these economic times,” she said.

If you know anything about The Life You Can Save, you know how the timing of the two writings struck me as perfect. If you aren’t familiar with the book, read on. Peter Singer is the Australian philosopher who wrote Animal Liberation back in 1975. That book was the first to really introduce millions of readers to the idea of speciesism and how an unwillingness to accept that animals feel pain and suffer has lead to factory farms and irresponsible product testing on animals. I think that omnipresent little gnawing sensation in my gut can be attributed to reading Animal Liberation in 1990. So when I heard he had a new book coming out, the gnawing sensation insisted that I get a copy. More guilt? You betcha. Thanks, gnawing sensation!

The book is small, fewer than 200 pages if you skip the acknowledgments and notes. And it’s timely—he’s either a very fast writer or he had time rewrite passages to reflect the economic uncertainty of 2008. Like that of a lot of philosophers, his writing sometimes requires multiple readings. What may seem understandable at first glance gets twisted around and examined from different angles, and if you’re feeling thoughtful or distracted, you just might want to read it again to make sure you’re catching it all. For that reason, I’ve only gotten about a quarter of the way through the book. I may need to revise this entire entry if the book surprises be by heading in a different direction, but for today, let’s assume I’m following and understanding its intended message. Mr. Singer builds this basic argument:

First premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.
Second premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.
Third premise: By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong.

It’s hard to argue against the correctness of this argument. Certainly all of us want to prevent suffering, especially if we can do it without negatively impacting our own well-being. But, how far would you go to prevent suffering? You may already be donating money to charities—good for you. But if you still have money left to spend on non-essentials, like bottled water (Mr. Singer seems to have a special hatred for bottled water), then are you really doing enough? That’s where the basic argument above gets tricky. Singer writes, “When we spend our surplus on concerts or fashionable shoes, on fine dining and good wines, or on holidays in faraway lands, we are doing something wrong.” He suggests, “you must keep cutting back on unnecessary spending, and donating what you save, until you have reduced yourself to the point where if you give any more, you will be sacrificing something nearly as important as a child’s life—like giving so much that you can no longer afford to give your children an adequate education.”

An adequate education. That brings us back to Miss Harris and her Web site. Mr. Singer certainly values education. He studied at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford and these days he’s a professor at Princeton University. I’m sure he’d encourage any student to get the best education they could afford. But $46,000 is a lot of money. Could she earn a comparable degree from a comparable school for less? Turns out she could attend her home state’s University of Michigan, which is ranked as one of the top ten biomedical engineering undergraduate universities, and pay less than half of what she plans to spend to attend Notre Dame. (The U of M Office of Financial Aid estimates that a freshman could expect to spend $22,765 for tuition, room and board, books and supplies, and miscellaneous personal expenses.) So in light of the little bit of The Life You Can Live that I’ve read and thought about, I’m having a hard time accepting that anyone should send anything to Miss Harris’s Web site. Maybe we should just write her and encourage her to read the book and reconsider her options. Maybe she could use her site to educate others about their financial choices and moral obligations.

Now I’m wondering why the newspaper even covered her story and how the reporter came to find out about it. Did this creative forward-looking student send out press releases? Did the editor think this Web site creation idea was a good one and wanted to share it so other needy individuals would be inspired to create their own sites? Did the paper run the story because newspaper readers are typically old and old means cranky and there’s nothing that an old cranky person likes more than a reason to get worked up so they can rant all morning about today’s youth? I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s paper because there just might be a follow-up story.