If You Think You're Good, You Should Think Again

By: Dwight Garner
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Book Review
NYT-The Arts, C6

This article is based on the book “The Life You Can Save” written by Peter Singer. The lede questions the readers whether they are a good person or a bad person. You can’t really tell what the review is going to be about based on the lede. He then introduces the book and says a little biography of Mr. Singer, saying he is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, but insults him a little bit by saying that Mr. Singer made his career out of making people feel uncomfortable. After this statement, the reader can tell Garner does not like this author or his book.

But Garner does mention an interesting point Mr. Singer wrote in his book, “It‘s a volume that suggests given that 18 million people are dying unnecessarily each year in developing countries, that there is a ’moral stain on a world as rich as this one.’ We are not doing enough to help our fellow mortals.”

Garner feels personal when Singer says people makes so much money and waste it on things that are less important, “Am I ‘financially comfortable?’ My mortgage, my credit-card bills and my other debts scream no. But the $3 coffee I‘m drinking while I type this, and the Lucinda Williams concert tickets I just bought, tell me there is wiggle room in my budget.”

This review ends with a message to his readers, “You don‘t have to agree with everything in ‘The Life You Can Change’ to feel that there‘s no real debate: When it comes to living the so-called ‘good’ life, one‘s moral omissions count more than ever.”