Famine, Affluence, and Morality

At the government level, no government has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the refugees to survive for more than a few days. Britain, for instance, has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given £14,750,000. For comparative purposes, Britain’s share of the nonrecoverable development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present estimates will reach £440,000,000. The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as highly as it values the lives of the nine million refugees.”

Singer writes in a direct and objective manner. He presents easily digestible facts to point out the sums of money that are available to governments, using one example of how the largest donor nation to Bangladesh will spend only half a billion pounds. A simple calculation leads to his conclusion that the government of Great Britain values an airplane more than millions of human lives. It’s an effective way to stir reader indignation.

“What are the moral implications of a situation like this? In what follows, I shall argue that the way people in relatively affluent countries react to a situation like that in Bengal cannot be justified; indeed, the whole way we look at moral issues—our moral conceptual scheme—needs to be altered, and with it, the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society.”

Singer prepares the reader for the profound consequences of his ideas, stating that they will alter the way we frame moral issues. The straightforward acknowledgement prepares readers for the fact that we will need to alter our way of life if we are to make headway in reducing human suffering.

“I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people will agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need read no further.”

Introducing his first assumption, Singer is confident and matter of fact. It’s an assumption that needs no explanation or defense. The last line is almost dismissive, implying that anyone who disagrees is not worth trying to convince. This gives Singer an air of righteousness, as he seeks to marshal readers to his noble cause.

“An application of this principle would be as follows: 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 the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.”

Singer’s vivid example of saving a drowning child has become famous because it is simple, direct, and easily accessible to all readers. It also appeals to pathos, gaining readers’ sympathy, which Singer draws on later when he makes a parallel between that scenario and refugees in Bangladesh.

“From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a ‘global village’ has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation. Expert observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed in famine-prone areas, can direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block. There would seem, therefore, to be no possible justification for discriminating on geographical grounds.”

Singer rebuts the notion that we ought to only help those in our local region. In the past, he argues, this made sense, as it was the only way to fully understand the need and to ensure that aid got to the right people. The advances brought by modern technology, however, negate this argument; people anywhere in the world should receive our attention and assistance.

“Should I consider that I am less obliged to pull the drowning child out of the pond if on looking around I see other people, no farther away than I am, who have also noticed the child but are doing nothing? One has only to ask this question to see the absurdity of the view that numbers lessen obligation. It is a view that is an ideal excuse for inactivity; unfortunately most of the major evils—poverty, overpopulation, pollution—are problems in which everyone is almost equally involved.”

This rebuttal addresses how other people who are available to provide aid should affect how we act. Singer’s tone is quite assured, pointing to the “absurdity” of the idea. He states that lessening our own sense of duty because of others’ presence would only encourage inaction, so must be rejected: We should take it upon ourselves to act in any circumstance, whether others are present or not.

“If my argument so far has been sound, 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. I shall therefore take as established the principle I asserted earlier. As I have already said, I need to assert it only in its qualified form: if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.”

Singer makes a change from his original assertion: The duty to act stops when it means sacrificing something “morally significant”—a lowering of the bar from his initial position that it stops when it means sacrificing something of “comparable moral significance.” This concession allows each of us to decide for ourselves how to define “morally significant.”

“The outcome of this argument is that our traditional moral categories are upset. The traditional distinction between duty and charity cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place we normally draw it. Giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund is regarded as an act of charity in our society. The bodies which collect money are known as ‘charities.’ These organizations see themselves in this way—if you send them a check, you will be thanked for your ‘generosity.’ Because giving money is regarded as an act of charity, it is not thought that there is anything wrong with not giving. The charitable man may be praised, but the man who is not charitable is not condemned.”

This is the far-reaching consequence that Singer warned the reader about earlier. If his principle is accepted, our whole set of “moral categories” stands to change. Charity will no longer be voluntary and noble, but rather expected and obligatory; it would now be considered wrong not to give one’s extra money to the poor—a huge shift in mindset from all of us.

“I am not maintaining that there are no acts which are charitable, or that there are no acts which it would be good to do but not wrong not to do. It may be possible to redraw the distinction between duty and charity in some other place. All I am arguing here is that the present way of drawing the distinction, which makes it an act of charity for a man living at the level of affluence which most people in the ‘developed nations’ enjoy to give money to save someone else from starvation, cannot be supported.

Singer acknowledges the difficulty of going “all in” with his principle. He’s not saying that all acts of charity should henceforth necessarily be seen as acts of obligation. Practically speaking, we would have to determine where to draw the line. However, the larger point still stands that our current outlook and way of life will need to change.

“Despite the limited nature of the revision in our moral conceptual scheme which I am proposing, the revision would, given the extent of both affluence and famine in the world today, have radical implications. These implications may lead to further objections, distinct from those I have already considered. I shall discuss two of these. One objection to the position I have taken might be simply that it is too drastic a revision of our moral scheme.”

Singer addresses the notion that his proposed change to our moral framework is simply too drastic to accept. By presenting counterarguments, he’s signaling to the reader that he is a reasonable person willing to listen to other people’s ideas. However, he rebuts this objection by stating that his arguments clearly lead to his conclusion and he is not pretending to be morally neutral on the issue. Moreover, people can (and do) adapt their behavior to meet norms based on expectations, so there’s a significant external factor at play.

“Equally, whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: ‘The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry; the clothing you shut away, to the naked; and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless.’”

To those who might argue that our present way of framing moral issues is the way it’s always been, Singer quotes the Christian philosopher and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica reaches even further back in time to support its argument. Singer dryly notes that Aquinas is “not normally thought of as a way-out radical” (23).

“A third point raised by the conclusion reached earlier relates to the question of just how much we all ought to be giving away. One possibility, which has already been mentioned, is that we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility—that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift.”

Singer considers how much people should donate to others in need. He is in favor of doing so until the point at which they would put themselves and their family in jeopardy of suffering. This is what he calls the “strong version” of his principle, using the standard of acting unless something of “comparable moral significance” is sacrificed.

“Yet looking at the matter purely from the point of view of overseas aid, there must be a limit to the extent to which we should deliberately slow down our economy; for it might be the case that if we gave away, say, 40 percent of our Gross National Product, we would slow down the economy so much that in absolute terms we would be giving less than if we gave 25 percent of the much larger GNP that we would have if we limited our contribution to this smaller percentage.” 

Singer thinks consumer society should be weakened considerably to reduce people’s focus on buying frivolous things, but concedes that consumption does contribute to economic growth. Weakening this influence too much would be counterproductive, as it would result in having less money to donate to people in need. Thus, he concludes that a delicate balance needs to be maintained.