TRY · 12 MIN
Circles of Obligation
TAIU
Family, neighbours, strangers. The same frame, one page.
Places obligations to family, neighbours and strangers in the same frame.
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Resources
Worth your time on this question
Everything worth your time on the question: What responsibility do I have beyond the people I know?
Seven things on this subject: one TAIU exercise and six things to read. It opens with Famine, Affluence and Morality by Peter Singer. The strongest version of the demanding case. Two of these take opposing positions, and both are kept, because the disagreement is the useful part.
This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.
What do I owe strangers: talk it throughREAD · ESSAY
Famine, Affluence and Morality
Peter Singer
The strongest version of the demanding case. Also the one most people have never actually read.
The argument that distance makes no moral difference: if you can prevent serious harm at modest cost, you should.
One view
Impartial obligation. Distance is morally irrelevant.
Another view
Special obligations. Partiality towards those close to you is not a failure of reasoning. Persons, Character and Morality
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READ · ESSAY
Persons, Character and Morality
Bernard Williams
Read after Singer. The disagreement is real. It matters for how you actually live.
The reply: a morality that treats your own family as one claim among millions asks you to abandon the projects that make you a person at all.
One view
Special obligations. Partiality towards those close to you is not a failure of reasoning.
Another view
Impartial obligation. Distance is morally irrelevant. Famine, Affluence and Morality
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READ · BOOK
Together
Vivek Murthy
Particularly useful if the exercise reveals that you've become socially busy but personally disconnected.
Loneliness isn't always about physically being alone. People can be surrounded by colleagues, family or social activity and still lack relationships in which they feel genuinely known.
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READ · BOOK
Bowling Alone
Robert Putnam
Best for seeing why turning up counts as much as giving.
Putnam's account of the decline of associational life is contested and largely American, and it still changes how you count your own contribution. Membership, attendance and turning up repeatedly for something small are treated here as real civic goods rather than as lesser versions of writing a cheque.
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READ · BOOK
Give and Take
Adam Grant
Best for contributing in a way you can sustain.
Grant's finding that givers occupy both the top and the bottom of most performance distributions is the practical heart of this. What separates them is not generosity but whether the giving is bounded. If you have ever concluded that you should do more while quietly running out of road, read this before you add anything.
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READ · RESEARCH
Spending money on others promotes happiness
Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton
Best for knowing what kind of giving actually registers.
The effect depends far less on the amount than on whether the giving was chosen and whether you can see what it did. That is a useful design constraint. A small, specific, visible commitment does more for the person giving than a larger anonymous one, which is worth knowing before you set up something you will never think about again.
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