The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
By Peter Singer
Picador £14.99, 214 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

You’ve had a tough week at work, the children are home and there’s only a bag of pasta in the cupboard. Time to reward the family by going out for a slap-up meal?

No, that would be wrong. Chuck the penne in the pan and give the money you would have spent at the restaurant to a charity working to aid the poor. Oh – and forget that bottle of rioja. Fill your glass from the tap and add the cost of the wine to the donation.

That, essentially, is the message of The Life You Can Save, Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s rallying cry to affluent westerners to end global poverty by donating their surplus wealth. If that sounds overly austere, it is built on the moral imperative that as long as people in the world are dying unnecessarily of hunger and disease, those with the means to do so have a duty to help them. Singer expresses it: “You must give to the point where if you give any more you would be sacrificing something nearly as important as a child’s life.”

He goes further, questioning our “natural” tendency to value the wellbeing of our own children over the lives of others. “Do your obligations to your own children override your obligations to strangers, no matter how great their need or suffering?” he asks.

This is challenging stuff. Of course I value the lives of my children more than those of strangers. Do I have to apologise for that?

There are other issues. One is how the charities and NGOs would cope with a big rise in private giving. Singer says that aid organisations – he most often cites Oxfam – have become better at delivering development programmes. But would a flood of new aid really be the best way to generate sustainable economies and end poverty?

And what would be the broader effect? Would there not be unintended consequences – if we didn’t buy “non-essential” goods, unemployment might rise in east Asia, for example, where poverty levels have fallen in recent decades.

But it is impossible not to acknowledge that there is something badly wrong with a world where a fifth of the population lives in poverty and 10m children die each year from preventable, poverty-related causes. The global recession threatens to make that worse. Singer is also pragmatic enough to recognise that fortunate westerners are not going to stop buying their families luxuries.

Instead he proposes a sliding scale similar to a progressive tax regime: the wealthiest 10 per cent in society – those who earn more than $105,000 a year – should pledge to give away 5 per cent of their income, rising to 25 per cent of any income over $10.7m.

That would raise $471bn a year in the US – more than twice the estimated spend needed to meet the UN’s millennium goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2015. The total would rise to $510bn if the other 90 per cent of taxpayers gave 1 per cent of their income.

Faced with this argument, it is hard not to ask yourself how your own giving measures up. Yes, I will go on buying things I do not really need. But, yes, this book has persuaded me that I should give more – significantly more – to help those less fortunate.

Hugh Carnegy is the FT’s executive editor