The Ethics of Charity Care

This is Bill Easterly, excellent as always, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Suppose you see a small child drowning in a pond. If you save him you will ruin your expensive suit. Do you save him? Of course you do. Now think about the world's extremely poor children who are going to die unless you give enough to a charity designed to help them, such as Unicef or Oxfam. Do you save them? Not often enough. In "The Life You Can Save," Peter Singer argues that the two situations are ethically equivalent….

[However,] measles epidemics in the eastern part of Upper Nile State in South Sudan….  killed hundreds of children, whose graveyards surround local villages. Urgent pleas to the World Health Organization and Unicef (the latter one of Mr. Singer's favored charities) for measles vaccines were met with bureaucratic excuses for inaction, or promises were made and not kept…..  As of this writing, there are still no vaccines in the eastern part of Upper Nile State, more than seven years after the first pleas for help.

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