The Ten-Percent Question

The problem: a couple earning comfortably asks what they owe distant strangers — Singer says much, Nozick says nothing enforceable, care says the near come first; referee the three.

Give each its strongest inning. The rescue principle at full strength: their restaurant budget, redirected, prevents grave harm at no comparable cost — the pond is open year-round. The demandingness reply answers: a morality that converts every comfort into rescue budget owns their whole lives, and a livable ethic must leave room for the projects that make a life theirs. The entitlement reply relocates the question: what they owe enforceably and what generosity commends are different claims — "should give" is not "owes," and collapsing them redefines property rather than enlarging charity. The care-and-justice settlement then does the sorting the slogans cannot: near obligations — children, parents, the town — are real and not exhaustive; distant claims are real and not unlimited; each corrects the other's blind side. Institutions carry part of the answer — the difference principle assigns structural duties to structures — which shrinks, without erasing, what falls to two people at a kitchen table. What remains is a values conflict, so run the ranking method on their own stated values: security, children, faith or its absence, the strangers they cannot see. The method's output is a shape, not a number: a fixed, chosen fraction, adopted aloud, revisited yearly — small enough to keep, large enough to mean it. The course declines to name their percentage; the course insists only that they name it.