Peter Singer Suffering

In this article, Singer argues that prosperous people should give all money not used on necessities to charity. This bold argument will either persuade or disinterest someone fully. There are many pros and cons of Singer’s argument.

We all heard countless solutions on how to solve world poverty. In Peter Singer’s article “Rich and Poor”, he discusses how he thinks this problem can be fixed. Singer claims that we all have a responsibility to support people who are in extreme need and are suffering from absolute poverty. Singer believes that poverty could be fixed if people give up their luxuries and give the money that they spent on unnecessary things to those who are destitute. In Singer 's mind, we all have a duty to give until we are no longer able to, or until the problem with the world poverty will be solved. Singer feels that it is necessary for people who are more wealthy to help those who are less fortunate by donating money right away to organizations that help fight poverty. In his opinion, by not helping those in need we are negatively responsible for their suffering and thus failing to live a moral life.

In this paper I will defend John Arthur’s argument of entitlement and desert against Peter Singer’s theory of our duty to the global poor. We as privileged citizens, living in a prosperous country, do have some responsibility to help the tens of thousands of children under the age of 5 who die everyday from starvation and treatable disease. It seems natural that we as citizens of a first world country have a duty to help the global poor through charity. However that “duty” is vague and is under heavy moral debate. We as privileged citizens, living in a prosperous country, do have some responsibility to help the global poor. However, this rightful duty should not necessarily live up to the extreme and overwhelming expectations of Peter Singer. John Arthur’s argument of entitlement and desert is more realistic, logical, and more applicable to the world we live in today.

In Singer’s last argument he states a blunt and simple responce to Lucy’s opinion on giving. “ My aim is to convince you, the individual reader that you can and should be doing a lot more to help the poor.” By having the right to controle your own money and because we were fortunate enough to live in such great economical conditions, we should work harder to help others that will never have the same chances.

The Premise of Peter Singer’s basic argument for the issue of whether or not individuals should help others is a very probable argument. Singer argues that all individuals should be contributing to those who are in need, that way one individual is not giving more or less than another. In addition, if a person or group is able to prevent a bad thing from happening, then they might as well do so. There is not a need for them to sit around watching bad things happen, but there is a need to stand and rise to help others who are worse off than them. Singer provides the idea that possibly, one of the best ways this can be done is through raises taxes for all citizens.

At any given moment, there are people around the world suffering and dying due to severe poverty. According to Peter Singer, there is much more that we can do to help create a better life for these people. He makes the obvious statement, in which most people agree with, that suffering and death due to poverty are very bad. His second idea is that if we are able to prevent that from happening without sacrificing too much for ourselves, we should. Essentially, we should prevent a bad thing from happening if it is in our power to do so without causing harm to ourselves in any way. An example of this that Singer points out is, “if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while

He states that “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.” He persuades that people should help someone if someone is suffering that is comparably significant than the sacrifice they will have to make in order to save someone. For example, our clothes will get wet if we save a drowning child. A drowning child could end up to death if nobody saves him. Obviously, the death is more significant than our clothes get wet; therefore, we have moral obligation to save him even though our clothes will get wet. In order to consolidate his premise, Singer proposed two statements to support his principles; he suggests that distance and the existence of other people who could help are not the factors that matter our moral obligation. We should always help as much as we can if the action is considered as morally

In Pete Singer’s article, The Singer Solution to World Poverty, he describes several scenarios where people are put in a situation to choose between helping other people by giving money or giving it up over keeping it for yourself. Singer says that we shouldn’t be spending money on nonessential items but only for necessities. He also tells us that we should feel guilty for not helping or saving others and should be heading in the right direction. Finally, he says it is immoral for us to not donate money or to sacrifice something less valuable to save the lives of others. I strongly disagree with what he says and think he is overdoing it with what he says and he expects us to feel the same way on his stance which is wrong.

The average american, however, can cut the cost of things they do not need and donate extra money to charity. Although this would help others, it would remove the same incentive to earn money for pleasure and the reward of spending money on things we enjoy. Even though we do not nessasarly need these things to survive, it allows people in our society to work harder to earn things they want to spend money on. Spending money is good for our economy and if we instead, donate all of the extra money we earn to charity, we are removing large amounts of american money from our economy to be given away to other countries. Singer supports the idea that those who are able to provide for themselves should be obligated to donate extra money to charity and foreign aid. Helping those in need is a good action, but an excessive amount of money being removed from America and placed into other countries economies could lead to many suffering in our own country. Not only could the removal of large amounts of money affect our own economy negatively, but also could create a dependency problem between developing countries and the aid we

In his article Rich and Poor, Peter Singer argues that we have a moral obligation to give assistance to people in absolute poverty. He derived this conclusion from three premises. The first states that if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought to it. The second premise is that absolute poverty is a bad thing. The third premise is that we are able to alleviate some portion of absolute poverty without giving up anything of comparable moral significance. To illustrate the urgency of our duty to assist the poor, he believes that in a case where we happen to walk pass a child drowning in a shallow pond, the vast majority of people would agree that it would be seriously morally wrong to not rescue the child. Connecting this scenario to Singer’s argument, we can say it is seriously morally wrong to not assist the poor because the lives of these people in need are of greater moral importance than the excess income we would otherwise spend on luxury goods. Thus, Singer is correct in saying that we have a moral obligation to assist the poor, and that failing to do so is equally as morally wrong as failing to rescue the drowning child.

Next, Szalavitz bolsters her previous statement that people can benefit from selfless acts by presenting statistics and facts discovered by a study from BMC Public Health. To give the reader a sense of reality, Szalavitz offers a reminder that genuine and regular benevolence is required to reap such rewards. Next, she mentions a few more health benefits that one can acquire from helping others before describing the harm it can incur. Szalavitz continues her argument by describing a more general danger of benevolence and recognizes the limited verification of the research findings. She concludes the article with statistics of how people are being encouraged to volunteer around the world and establishes the purpose of helping others in the first

Why we are Obligated to Help the Less Fortunate? From the book The Life You Can Save written by Peter Singer, he addressed that poverty is one of the biggest problem that most of the world faced today. Singer defined poverty as shortage of food for all of a year, do not have saving, do not afford education, do not live in stable house, and do not have safe source of drinking water (5-6). This can lead to the death of children.

In the reading, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality", the author argues that people should tend to help others in regards that were all equal in the sense of morality (231). Furthermore, Singer talks about that we can help each through charity, helping people in times of need, and helping through times of emergency. The author’s main reasons to support his or her view are that in times of struggle or life and death we need to help. For an example, the author talks about it is morally wrong for a person not to help a child that is drowning if there is no harm against you (232). Also, the author talks about the negative side of morality that we should not have to help people that are close to us but help people that are extremely far as well in

Being able to acknowledge the one in need of help, really can make a difference. There are many ways of helping through the small deeds, but also through the greater ones, such as food banks. The two models discussed in class covered a moral model, in which help is based off of a personal characteristic (Collver: September 20, 2017). And the other is the charity model in which it is the practice of help emerging from the notions of mortality (attitudes and beliefs about the right and wrong) (Collver: September 20, 2017). Both models are influenced by a moral discourse of deservingness. Within the learnings in class and through discussions in tutorials, I can reflect that the notion of helping through food banks or from any form of help in that matter, is not always wanted. Some individuals refuse to accept the help they receive because they believe that others think of them as ‘weak’. There is often pity associated with wanting to help. However, there are also people who take food banks for granted because they are getting ‘free’ food and not making an effort to change or find ways to get them out of that state. Food banks put a lot of effort in meeting the standards of

The sphere of moral attitudes and values supersedes all other natural attitudes and values as far as the human race is concerned. Sometimes people encounter situations that require them to take some proactive actions, and the actions they execute become critical bases to define their moral status. In other words, the way people treat each other, particularly in events of injustices or in situations inflicting pain, defines their morality to some appreciable extent. While acting in a way revealing care and compassion may make one to be regarded as morally decent, a reaction to human suffering that depicts elements of callousness and heartlessness may make one to be considered as morally perverse. This essay explores the parable of the Good Samaritan in the book of Luke10:25-37 to provide arguments to support that the Samaritan is an appropriate model for how human beings should treat one another.