Book review
The Life You Can Save
Singer argues for giving more to effective charities and thinking carefully about where donations help most. A compelling case, with open questions about how much to give and how to assess charities.
You are walking past a shallow pond when you notice a child drowning. You can wade in safely, but doing so will ruin your expensive shoes and leave your clothes wet and muddy. Would you stop to weigh up the cost?
Peter Singer’s drowning-child example makes the answer feel obvious. Then he asks why our response changes when the person we could help is far away. If we would sacrifice those clothes to save a child in front of us, what follows when donating that money could help save someone elsewhere?
The Life You Can Save makes that argument clearly and takes the objections seriously. It is a very good introduction to thinking about the good we can do with what we have.
An idea I already knew
I first came across Singer’s ideas through an online lecture, around 2014 if I remember correctly. By the time I read this book in 2020, the ideas were familiar. What I appreciated was having them presented so clearly again, with the practical question of where to donate alongside the philosophy.
Lotte and I also listened to the celebrity-read audiobook. I remember listening in the car on holiday. The anniversary edition has different people reading its chapters, including Stephen Fry and Kristen Bell, and is available free as an eBook or audiobook. It is an accessible way to introduce someone else to these ideas too.
How demanding should doing good be?
Singer is a utilitarian: the consequences of our choices for wellbeing and suffering matter, including their effects on people we will never meet. The child in the pond gives that way of thinking a very concrete starting point, although you do not have to accept all of utilitarianism to feel the force of the example.
Taken seriously, this can be demanding. Once we recognise how much good a donation could do, there is always another purchase to question and another person we could help. Some people take that challenge much further than I do.
I think there is already something amazing in what more ordinary giving can achieve. For someone with room in their budget, a few thousand dollars a year can be a manageable share of their income and still have an outsized effect on someone else’s life. We do not have to give as much as the most committed person before our donations become worthwhile.
When I wrote the original review, “How much should I give?” was the question I wanted to answer for myself. I was thinking through spending, saving and giving in my financial independence post. Looking back in 2026, I give around 10% of my income on average, in line with my Giving What We Can pledge.
What a donation can make possible
Malaria prevention is a good example. GiveWell’s models for grants to its top charities during 2022–2024 estimated an average cost of around US$4,500 per life saved. That is an estimate across programmes, with considerable variation between places, rather than a guarantee attached to an individual donation.
Even with that uncertainty, I find the scale of the opportunity extraordinary. Preventing a death can mean many more years of someone’s life. Other programmes can improve those years, including work to treat depression. Lives saved and improvements in mental health are different outcomes, but both matter when thinking about how to reduce suffering.
The part of effective altruism that still draws me in
Much of what I see about effective altruism now concerns the distant future and AI safety. I am less convinced by the confidence behind some predictions of catastrophe, particularly when expressed as a precise probability. As I discuss in My Philosophy, human creativity changes the future we are trying to predict.
There is still substantial funding for practical work on global health. GiveWell reports that it directed US$427 million in 2025 to programmes and organisations across global health and development. That is one concrete example of hundreds of millions going towards helping people now.
Singer is one of the thinkers who helped draw me to these ideas. I still think this book is a very good place to start: it makes the argument understandable, answers objections and helps turn a willingness to do good into something we can act on.