Peter Singer has often been called one of the most influential philosophers of the present time. In his famous 1972 article, “Hunger, Abundance, and Morality” the researcher, referring to the famine that broke out in Bangladesh in 1971, argued for the moral obligation of people in the wealthy West to help those in developing countries suffering from hunger, poverty, and disease. The reprinting of this article in 2016 suggests that the author continues to hold these views and has not changed his position on this issue. Singer’s argument is built around the idea that if a person can prevent something wrong from happening without sacrificing something of comparable moral importance to him, then morally, he should do so.
The philosopher argues that giving is a moral duty if not equal or comparable to sacrifice. In this article, Singer appears as a moral reformer. Charity, from a moral point of view, is an action whose commission is morally approved and encouraged but whose failure to do so is not morally condemned. In contrast, acts of moral duty are precepts whose violation is condemned and entails moral guilt. In other words, what used to be regarded as acts of goodwill, that is, non-binding but merely desirable, Singer suggests that they are obligatory acts derived from moral requirements (Singer 769).
Scientists tend to think more about how to improve amenities than how to prevent great suffering. The harm is eliminated as a result of the assistance must be greater than the harm people may cause to themselves or others in the process. It means that benefit that is ezpected to be the result of helping others must not be less than the benefit will have to be sacrificed in doing so. In other words, the total amount of good or benefit must increase as a result of people’s actions, and thus the total amount of evil, or harm, must decrease.
Helping someone far away is as much a moral obligation as helping someone close to us. As can be seen from this thesis, it already assumes that helping is a moral obligation and extends this principle to all people in general, regardless of the distance at which they are (Singer 769). This rejects the common notion that the moral scope of helping is limited to those closest to us, or at least that those closest to us have priority in getting help.
Death as a means and death as a foreseeable side effect of inaction is, in Singer’s view, morally equivalent, and almost all the distinctions can be made. Morally relevant Singer recognizes the differences in whether people know definitely what happened and what their motive is, but they only matter in condemning or praising the action of not helping the poor should not be condemned in the same way as murder. it can, however, be equated with the murder of a person by reckless driving, which is serious enough.
The philosopher’s persuasion may seem purely intuitive and is largely based on the example of the drowning child that Singer cites as an illustration. The immediate threat to the life of a child that could be easily saved involves powerful mechanisms of intuitive moral choice that do not require rational justification, especially since the situation requires a quick decision and does not involve time for reflection. However, if sientists reduce the emotional intensity of the moral choice situation, it is evident that this principle no longer seems so convincing.
Another common objection to Singer’s argument is to point out the excessiveness of the demands he makes, even in a moderate formulation of the principle. This excessiveness is felt especially acutely in an environment where most people ignore these demands, and those who would be willing to seriously recognize and act on them would be overly burdened. (Singer 768). This argument is also related to the problem of iterative help: if one were to draw the analogy of a pond to fit a real situation, one would have to imagine not a pond but a lake or sea overflowing with drowning children who appear there over and over again (Ogbujah 459). Demandingness is thus a hallmark not specifically of Singer’s principles but utilitarianism as a whole since every inaction becomes a positive or negative contribution to the most optimal state of affairs in the world.
At the global level, individual benefactors and intermediary organizations maintain the existing world order, which involves structural discrimination and allows prosperous countries to profit from unfair relations with those being helped. At the local level, intermediary organizations have a negative impact on states, replacing and discrediting local government structures, imposing certain ideological attitudes, and provoking a brain drain, not to mention specific cases of exploitation, harassment, and abusive treatment by the staff of these organizations themselves.
Accordingly, the problem is not only that Singer’s approach needs some moral theory to explain the concept of moral relevance but also that it requires a developed theory of justice to put it into practice. For example, Benedict suggests that the utilitarian benevolence approach and the justice approach should be seen as complementary (Ogbujah 458). He emphasizes the importance of conceptualizing persistent poverty as a massive injustice that questions the legitimacy of existing legal, economic and political structures (Ogbujah 459). The effective altruism approach, she argues, eliminates the manifestations of poverty but not its causes, and eliminating extreme poverty is impossible without identifying its roots and eradicating them. Helping the poor is thus both a duty of benevolence and a duty of justice.
The second implication of this principle needs more justification: the fact that there are millions of other people in a similar situation to mine in relation to O’Neil refugees does not make this situation significantly different from one in which I am the only person capable of preventing something very bad from happening (212). Again, I recognize that these cases are psychologically perceived differently: one feels less guilt for one’s own inaction if one can point out that other people in a similar situation are also doing nothing. However, this detail can have no real bearing on different moral obligations.
Thus, despite the criticisms to which Singer’s approach has been subjected in its nearly fifty years of existence, his basic argument has highlighted the important fact that helping those in extreme poverty is indeed an integral part of living a morally decent life in the current state of the world. But this obligation to help, which can no longer be called charity in the usual sense of the word, will be refined depending on the particular normative approach and picture of the world one holds.
Works Cited
O’Neill, O. “A Kantian Approach to Famine Relief”. Philosophy, vol. 72, no 2, 1998, pp. 211–228.
Ogbujah, C. N. “Benedict de Spinoza’s Virtue.” Dialogue and Universalism, vol. 31, no 2, 2021, pp. 456–459. Web.
Singer, P. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Ethics: Essential Readings in Moral Theory, vol. 3, no. 10, 2012, pp. 768–776.