Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophized this no sponsor today. Patreon.com slash

philosophize this. We also have the Amazon banner. If you want to click through it, support the show.

Both on the front page of philosophize this.org. Thanks for anything you can do. Today we're

going to be talking about the philosopher Peter Singer and the ethical approach to life known as

effective altruism. Let's get on to the program. So I want us all to imagine something.

Imagine you just went out to dinner with your friends or your family or whoever.

Imagine it was a good meal. Tasty meal. Imagine you had a really good time there. You know,

the staff of the restaurant only sung happy, happy birthday to seven people around you on this

particular trip. And as you're exiting the restaurant and you're heading out to your car,

you hear a sound, you look over to your right and you're shocked to see a little girl,

maybe four or five years old, lying in the gutter, crying, bleeding out of her head, looks terrified.

You look around and nobody's really helping her. She doesn't seem to have any parents around

getting help. What would you do if you're in that situation? Would you stop and try to help the girl?

Or would you look at her and continue walking to your car and just go on about your day pretending

nothing happened? Well, I think somewhere around 99% of people would say that they would stop and at

least try to help the girl. Now, new situation. Imagine instead you're watching this all unfold on

the news. You know, there's a story about a four year old girl that died in front of a restaurant

and they were showing security footage of 10, 20 people coming out of the restaurant looking at

this little girl dying on the ground and they just kind of shrugged their shoulder, say, oh, well,

and keep going to their car. What would you think of those people? Well, again, I think most of us

would say, how could they possibly do that? More than that, how could you possibly live with your

self or the rest of your life knowing that you could have saved this little girl's life? You

...