We must save the children
But how many of them?
Marc raises an interesting question about the demands of justice. He mentions Peter Singer as forwarding a particular demanding interpretation of personal morality. Here is an outline of Singer’s famous (and famously difficult to disprove) argument that concludes that we ought to be giving nearly all our money to the global needy.
From Peter Singer, “Famine Affluence and Morality” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1972
Premise 1A: (Strong Principle): “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.”
Premise 1B: (Moderate Principle): “If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything significant, we ought, morally, to do it.”
We must save the child from drowning pond at the cost of getting clothes muddy.
Premise 2: Suffering and death from lack of basic needs (e.g. food, shelter, and medical care) are very bad.
Premise 3: Millions of people experience suffering and death from basic need deprivation.
Premise 4: Distance doesn’t matter morally; “it makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.” To conclude otherwise is to be unfair; it is to allow a morally irrelevant fact about somebody (i.e. their skin color or where they were born) affect our treatment of them.
Premise 5: Global communication and transport makes it easy to know the needs of people far away and to deliver aid to them.
Premise 6: One’s duties are unaffected by the existence of other people able to fulfill those same duties. “Should I consider that I am less obliged to pull the drowning child out of the pond if looking around I see other people, no further away than I am, who have also the child but are doing nothing?”
Premise 7: If everyone gave a little, basic need deprivation would disappear. But very few people are likely to give substantial amounts
Conclusion from 1A: One ought to reduce oneself very near the material circumstances of the world’s poorest. Only at that point would giving more sacrifice something of comparable moral importance.
Conclusion from 1B: One ought to give to the world’s poor until he sacrifices something morally important. This would likely mean, argues Singer, the slowing down or disappearance of consumer society. A designer sweater is not morally important, and that money could be used to save a life.
- Jake
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- We must save the children!
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- Won’t somebody think of the children?
- How we feel versus what we do
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12 Responses to “We must save the children”
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Seeger offers a basic “distribute the wealth” strategy. This would not increase the freedom of the poor, but would likely result in their dependency upon welfare. Such dependencies happen all the time.
Also, American charity too often gets hijacked at the distribution centers by those who are a little more powerful. How can Pete’s idea keep from getting hijacked like this?
I would also argue that distance is an important moral ingredient because of Jesus’ admonition to love our neighbors as our selves. “Neighbor” necessarily implies nearness. And in actual fact, we too often ignore our neighbors as so many churches do with regard to evangelism. We send missionaries overseas and neglect our own children.
Why not use an “increase the wealth” strategy by teaching the poor how to grow an economy? This is the old “Give a starving man a fish and you will feed him for today. But teach him how to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime” approach. A strategy like this will also do more for the giver than to assuage his guilt by acknowledging his supposed superiority because he sent a “check.”
Jacob,
You might want to take a look at this
http://ifamericansknew.org/
and
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
and dozens of other websites before you blame Muslim suspicion of Jews and Neocon Americans on genetic disposition to conspiracy theory.
Although your article on Muslims seems like transparent Muslim bashing by someone with an axe to grind, I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Alex
[...] other day I outlined Peter Singer’s famous argument that we, as individuals and a society, must give an enormous [...]
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[...] of justice and the relevance of borders to these demands. In describing a Peter Singer argument, Jake wrote that “distance doesn’t matter morally” for “it makes no moral difference whether the person I [...]