PY1103 Moral Problems: Giving Aid

Two questions:

1. Is it wrong for affluent people not to give money and time to aid organizations?
2. If so, when is it morally acceptable to stop giving?

Singer’s argument:

P1: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad.

P2. If we can prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of [comparable] moral significance, we ought to do it.

P3. There is some absolute poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance.

Concl: We ought to prevent some absolute poverty.

P1 involves two assumptions:

(i) Lack of food, shelter and medical care causes suffering and death.

(ii) Others’ suffering and death are bad in themselves.

P2 involves two assumptions:

(i) The importance of suffering and death is unaffected by its geographical location.

(ii) It is morally irrelevant whether I am the only person who could prevent something very bad from

occurring.

P3 assumes that some aid agencies have a reasonable chance of preventing suffering and death, and that

they will be able to prevent more suffering and death if we donate to them.

Two versions of P2:

1. (The version Singer favours): The sacrifice to us must be comparable to the seriousness of the suffering it would prevent.
2. The sacrifice to us must be sufficiently serious to have significant moral weight.

Some responses to Singer:

1. Singer’s argument ignores agents’ right to keep their own savings (Arthur)

Negative rights are rights not to be interfered with and harmed in various ways

Positive rights are rights to be helped in certain ways.

Arthur argues that negative rights are much more extensive than positive rights, and that positive

rights are incurred only as the result of some previous agreement or interaction.

Utilitarians (incl. Singer) will argue that the chronically poor have a positive right to life, which entails a

claim to be given the basic essentials needed to stay alive.

2. Singer’s argument ignores the fact that agents may sometimes deserve to keep savings they have earned.

One response: the chronically poor have done nothing to deserve their plight.

3. Singer ignores agents’ egoistic reasons to give priority to their own interests, and their reasons of partiality to give priority to the interests of their friends and family.