She would then have become, in the eyes of the audience, a monster.

Suppose Dora had told her neighbor that it is a tough world, other people have nice new TV's too, and if selling the kid is the only way she can get one, well, he was only a street kid. Is it possible to quantify our charitable burden? In the following essay, Singer offers some unconventional thoughts about the ordinary American's obligations to the world's poor and suggests that even his own one-fifth standard may not be enough. ''From when I first saw pictures in newspapers of people starving, from when people asked you to donate some of your pocket money for collections at school,'' he mused, ''I always thought, 'Why that much - why not more?''' A recent article about Singer in The New York Times revealed that the philosopher gives one-fifth of his income to famine-relief agencies. Singer's penchant for provocation extends to more mundane matters, like everyday charity.

Similarly, his argument that severely disabled infants should, in some cases, receive euthanasia has been praised as courageous by some - and denounced by others, including anti-abortion activists, who have protested Singer's Princeton appointment. Many readers of his book ''Animal Liberation'' were moved to embrace vegetarianism, while others recoiled at Singer's attempt to place humans and animals on an even moral plane. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who later this month begins teaching at Princeton University, is perhaps the world's most controversial ethicist.

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