Singer's 1972 essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality is the argument the whole movement is built on, and it is one page long in substance: if you would wade into a shallow pond to save a drowning child even at the cost of ruining your clothes, then distance, numbers and the presence of other bystanders cannot be what releases you from a comparable obligation to a child dying of a preventable disease elsewhere. Every subsequent effective altruist position is an attempt to live with that conclusion rather than escape it. Singer is filed as a teacher and not as anything more because the movement is genuinely hostile to veneration — its participants disagree with him in print, and he has criticised the longtermist turn himself. He is nevertheless the one figure every part of the movement, in both wings, cites.