Thompson: Spare a beer, save a life

By Dan Thompson

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Let me present to you a bit of information, which I hope you’ll take a moment to consider.

In the introduction to his remarkable book “Living High and Letting Die,” New York University Professor Peter Unger writes, “If you’d contributed $100 to one of UNICEF’s most efficient lifesaving programs a couple of months ago, this month there’d be over 30 fewer children who, instead of painfully dying soon, would live reasonably long lives.”

This statement remains as true today as it did a dozen years ago when it was first written.

Unger’s observation is a call to action, and contains within it an implicit answer to the fundamental moral question regarding what, if anything, people owe each other. For three dollars — the cost of a beer or a Big Mac — you can save a life. You can and you should.

By now you may well have concluded that this sort of solicitation is trite and annoying, similar to some late-night infomercial assailing you with pictures of emaciated children wandering listlessly through a filthy slum in some impoverished, fly-infested corner of the world. Making people feel guilty seems to be a thoroughly distasteful way to get them to do something. It’s self-righteous moralizing, too.

But heck, these are the facts. Unger explains that millions of children die annually from easily preventable diseases. For example, everyone who suffers from untreated dehydrating diarrhea could be saved with a treatment of oral rehydration salts, which, according to his estimation, cost only a few dollars.

I’ll be the first to admit that after I read Unger’s book, I didn’t send any money to UNICEF. I had to buy groceries and pay rent — not to mention the beer. But it made me think: Why do I care about those luckless kids on the other side of the planet?

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of rational self-interest, right? I, too, read “The Fountainhead” in high school. But such blatant disregard of others’ various misfortunes, brought on by no fault of their own — as is presented in the book — has always struck me as somewhat odious and self-serving.

On the other hand, there are many good arguments for why we should be concerned with the well-being of others. One that I find particularly well-reasoned and compelling was made by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his view, our duties to others respect no boundaries because each of our lives is an accident of birth, a result of genetic lottery.

For example, it is sheer happenstance that I was born in prosperous America and not as an AIDS orphan in the slums of Harare.

At the very least, those of us lucky enough to have been spared the myriad evils of poverty, disease and insecurity should keep in mind our tremendous good fortune and consider giving up just a little bit — just one beer — to save a human life.

— Thompson is a Topeka senior in economics.

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