Famine, Affluence, and Morality
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"Famine, Affluence, and Morality" is an essay written by Peter Singer in 1971 and published in Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1972. It argues that affluent persons are morally obligated to donate far more resources to humanitarian causes than is considered normal in Western cultures. The essay was inspired by the starvation of Bangladesh Liberation War refugees, and uses their situation as an example, although Singer's argument is general in scope.
One of the core arguments in the essay is that if one can use his wealth to reduce suffering—for example, by aiding famine relief efforts—without any significant reduction in the well-being of himself or others, then it is immoral not to do so. According to Singer, such inaction is clearly immoral if a child were drowning in a shallow pond where someone could have saved the child but chose not to; putting greater geographic distance between the person in need and the potential helper does not reduce the latter's moral obligations. The affluent are constantly guilty of this, Singer argues, because they have large amounts of surplus wealth that they do not use to aid humanitarian projects in developing nations.
[edit] Quotations
- "Neither our distance from a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil."
- "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it."
- "People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look 'well-dressed' we are not providing for any important need."
