The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer Pan Macmillan HK$247
In 1971, long before his controversial opinions on euthanasia, infanticide and animal rights made him the world's most famous bio-ethics philosopher, Peter Singer was a 25-year-old Oxford graduate publishing an essay titled 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality'.
In it, Singer argued citizens in the developed world were morally obliged to donate to the third-world poor to the point of 'marginal utility', at which by giving more, one would cause oneself more suffering than would be prevented in the third world. The essay was enthusiastically received in some academic quarters, but Singer was widely criticised for his hazily defined marginal utility concept, his tenuous profiling of the developed world's moral psychology and for neglecting the issue of the efficacy of aid organisations.
But in his new book The Life You Can Save, Singer delivers a brilliant study - equally wide-ranging and profound - of the many issues contributing to third-world poverty and the moral quagmire of aid.
Singer opens his book with a hypothesis: if you saw a child drowning, would you save it? If so, why would you not save a child in the third world who is dying of starvation, measles or malaria, all preventable afflictions?
Singer's apt hypotheses and logical methodology combine to form a compelling moral theory: in the interconnected modern world we are equally capable of saving an impoverished child in a faraway continent as we are a drowning child in a neighbourhood pool; and the only ethical way to give aid is to the point of marginal utility.