The Life You Can Save: How To Do Your Part To End World Poverty

In 2009, Peter Singer, philosopher and ethicist at Princeton University, published The Life You Can Save, a short treatise on the obligations of affluent persons to alleviate the suffering of those experiencing extreme poverty on a global scale. By this time in his career, Singer had spent several decades on ethical questions related to global poverty. In 1972, he produced a seminal essay in the field, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” After a much more recent publication in the New York Times (for which Singer received significant positive feedback), he decided to write The Life You Can Save, the culmination of a life’s work on this particular issue. Though Singer has published books and articles on fields as diverse as animal welfare, practical ethics, and bioethics, The Life You Can Save has arguably had the widest impact and is one of the achievements for which Singer is best known. Singer’s associated charity, also called The Life You Can Save, issued an updated 10th anniversary edition of the book in 2019. A free audiobook, featuring celebrity narration from Kristen Bell, Paul Simon, Stephen Fry, and others, is available for download here. This guide refers to the 2009 Random House edition of The Life You Can Save.