Left-brained philanthropy

A decade ago (Nov. 27, 2004; Oct. 29, 2005) WORLD published profiles of radical Princeton professor and animal-rights activist Peter Singer, whose cold logic had left him not only pro-abortion but pro-infanticide. Now he’s written an extraordinary book, The Most Good You Can Do (Yale, 2015), that gives career advice opposite to what other leftist academics offered for decades.

Singer’s peers frequently told students not to major in “soul-killing” business pursuits, but Singer tells them to enter “the career in which they can earn most” to donate. His logic: “You would have been replaceable as a charity worker, you are not replaceable as a donor. If you had not taken the job with the investment bank, someone else would have and almost certainly would not have donated half of his or her salary to charity. So if you take the finance job, the charity will be better able to achieve its aims than it would have been if you had accepted their offer of employment.”

Singer contends that the choice to have children, like the choice of a career, should also depend on the effect on poverty-fighting. He describes one of his acolytes: “When Julia was young she felt so strongly that her choice to donate or not donate meant the difference between someone else living or dying that she decided it would be immoral for her to have children. They would take too much of her time and money.” Later, she decided she could have a child, since that would renew “her sense of excitement about the future. She suspects that her satisfaction with her life makes her of more use to the world than she would be if she were ‘a broken-down altruist.’”

Furthermore, Julia concluded that having her own child “would bring her closer to ‘the Other Woman’—the mother who has to struggle to give her children clean water and enough to eat.” Singer apparently sees no problem in making a child an instrument of someone else’s salvation. He does suggest that Julia not bring her child to intensive care: “The cost of saving a child’s life in an intensive care hospital in the United States is typically thousands of times higher than the cost of saving the life of a child in a developing country.”

Short stops

Singer leaves a sour taste in some mouths, so Owen Strachan’s The Colson Way (Nelson, 2015) is a palate cleanser that shows how Chuck Colson was tough-minded but warmhearted.

Ben Carson’s You Have a Brain (Zondervan, 2015) is a good book to give to teens who need to think big. I hope Bill Bennett and Robert White’s Going to Pot: Why the Rush to Legalize Marijuana Is Harming America (Center Street, 2015) gains an audience, or else more teens will think small. Many television shows seem to emerge from drug-addled brains, and Christopher Beha’s Arts & Entertainments (Ecco, 2014) has a cleverly woven plot that provides an arch look at our celebrity infatuations and the unreality of our “reality TV.” (Warning: contains vulgar language and a sex scene.)

Charles Cooke’s The Conservatarian Manifesto (Crown Forum, 2015) helpfully goes issue by issue on ways conservatives and libertarians can work together. The two factions have common enemies abroad, and Ilan Berman’s Iran’s Deadly Ambition: The Islamic Republic’s Quest for Global Power (Encounter, 2015) gives a much-needed warning.

Many pastors’ books work off the same template: Begin the chapter with a personal story, then pivot to your theological point. Some such books make me yearn for Puritan writing that emphasized objective logic rather than personal experience. But within the modern genre, Arizona pastor John Dickerson’s I Am Strong (Zondervan, 2015) is as good as it gets for people who are hurting, confused, angry, and scared—which is all of us at times. —M.O.