The Amish

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A Look At Famine, Affluence, and Morality

David Claxton

PHI 208

Instructor: Noel Sauer

24 March, 2013

Singer’s primary goal in this article was to present his argument that people are morally obligated to give more of their own wealth to those trapped in starvation then feels comfortable by society norms. At the time that the article was written in the spring of 1972 a great famine had descended upon East Bengal in India. It was Singer’s belief that the nine million people who were affected by this famine could be helped by the richer nations through the “decisions and actions of human beings.”(Singer 1972) In this article Singer offers several arguments in favor of helping the needy folks of Bengal, or elsewhere in the world. He suggests that the way “people act towards situations like that in Bengal cannot be justified.” (Singer 1972) This is his primary argument and he offers reasons to back it up in the rest of his paper.

In one argument he suggests that if we can prevent something bad without giving up anything that is of “comparable moral importance.”(Singer 1972) then we have a moral obligation to do so. One of the arguments against this is human weakness. Since we are not willing to give up much of anything in our everyday lives for the welfare of another person it is within the human norms that we find the argument against this point that Singer makes. We tend to put out of mind the welfare of others when it comes to self-value. Singer uses the example of a child drowning in a pond of water. To jump in and save the child will be an inconvenience for the person doing the saving. Their clothing would be muddy and wet from the pond, but the child would be safe. In his argument getting muddy clothing is much less of a bad thing then the inconvenience of wet and muddy clothing. While I like to think that most people would jump in the pond, I know that there are those...