reading a famous article by Peter Singer, in which he refers to this infamous thought experiment:

Imagine that walking through the park, you see a child drowning in a pond. Assuming that you can swim and are not in danger, should you help the child? Most of you are probably answering in the affirmative. Sure, you could walk away, but most of you would say that to the extent that humans have moral obligations at all, we’re obligated to save a drowning child if we can easily do so.

But now compare this analogous, and no longer fictional, problem. Every day, thousands of people around the world starve to death, or die of easily preventable causes. In a great many of these cases, we can easily prevent these deaths from occurring – in fact doing so is much easier than jumping into a pond to help a drowning child. Yet, most people feel much less motivated to help people in need when they’re far away than the person in need in front of us. Now, I know there are a lot of reasons why, psychologically, its easier to identify with the kid in front of you than the person far away (this is the Gyges problem, again). But I want to know about our moral obligations. Am I just as obligated to help the person in the second case as the person in the first case? Or am I more obligated to help the child in the first case? Why would that be? And if that’s so, does it imply that some people are just more important than others? If so, how ought we decide who is deserving of our moral concern? Or, conversely, are all people really equal, in the sense of equally deserving of my moral attention, based purely on need, regardless of where they live, whether they look like me, whether they’re Americans, or anything else? If I’m obligated to help the drowning child, am I just as obligated to help anyone in similar need who I’m just as capable of helping?