What We Owe Each Other

From Duty to Capability

Peter Singer's 'drowning child' argument says if you'd ruin your clothes to save a drowning child, distance shouldn't excuse ignoring distant suffering you could relieve, a foundation of effective altruism. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum shifted the question from wealth to 'capabilities': what people are able to do and be. Michael Sandel argues some goods, like votes or human organs, are corrupted when treated as market commodities, reminding us that markets have moral limits.

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought to do it.”

Where this sits in the course

“What We Owe Each Other” is lesson 3 of 3 in Justice Now, a course about apply ethics to society: fairness, liberty, and obligation.. The lessons are sequenced rather than a menu, so this one assumes what came before it.

Justice Now is itself one of 18 courses in thinkr. The set opens with what philosophy is, moves through the Stoics and the Eastern traditions, then into what can be known, what exists, how to act and how power works — closing on practical reasoning you can use in an argument this week.

In the app this lesson is followed by 5 exercises that check whether the idea actually landed — and every answer, right or wrong, is explained rather than scored. That is the part a written page cannot reproduce.