If you'd ruin your shoes to save a drowning child, Singer says distance is no excuse

Philosopher Peter Singer asked readers to imagine walking past a shallow pond and seeing a child drowning: almost everyone agrees you must wade in and save them, even if it ruins expensive shoes. He then argued distance shouldn't change the moral calculation, a child starving on the other side of the world is no less worth saving than one at your feet, if you can help at little cost to yourself. The 1972 essay became a founding argument of the effective altruism movement.

— Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality — Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1972