Singer’s argument is simple but challenging: we are like Bob, the fictional rich guy who values his fancy car over the life of a child. We'd rather let innocent children die than give up our completely trivial luxuries.
How can Singer make this argument? His logic is that we spend money on non-necessary items instead of directing our resources ("throwing the switch") to ways to make life better -- even to make life possible -- for poor people, especially in developing countries. Singer believes that both individuals and governments should send aid to people in poor areas for famine relief and other urgent problems.
The most common to this argument might be that the little bit that one person can donate won't make much of a difference. This is not compelling to Singer, since he believes both that every individual has a moral obligation to donate whatever we can and also that the sum total of many small individual donations will add up to significant amounts. Further, he thinks we should pressure our government to devote more funds to foreign aid, especially for direct relief for victims of famine and other crises.
I think Singer's argument has a lot in its favor, especially because it pushes us to take responsibility for our inaction as well as our action. Most of the time we don't think we are choosing to let children die, but Singer challenges this assumption and pushes us to make our choices explicit. Passively standing by while people die (or other bad things happen) is as much a choice as more obvious actions are, according to Singer. We are not off the hook morally just because we caused a death through our inaction rather than our action. This is a lesson that can be applied in many areas, not just the problem of hunger in poor nations.
Singer's argument makes me think of a quote attributed to Dante Alighieri (but probably not really by him). It suggests that remaining "neutral" is in fact a moral choice, and one that deserves judgment just as more explicit choices do.
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