PHIL 157- Singer's Pond Sept 12th, 2022 Premise 1 Suffering and dying from lack of food, shelter, and medical care is bad - Easily preventable and avoidable harms - Each is a way of suffering that renders a person worse off than they could have been - Someone could have a position philosophers call "egoist", meaning they don't care about an issue unless it affects their own life - Recognize distinction between effort and cost in easy intervention Premise 2 If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparative moral significance, we ought, morally, to do it - "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 bad thing" - The argument Singer presents is that the globe is a pond 1. There are tens of millions of people in the world who are suffering due to disease and malnutrition 2. Giving a little money to an aid agency is like pulling the child from the pond 3. Therefore, each of us ought to give money to aid agencies - Important that Singer's principle of spatially and temporally impartial - What matters is what we can do to prevent (distance, nationality, familiarity, do not matter) - Singer says we should give until more would involve giving up something of comparative moral importance What Does Singer's Principle Imply? # If everyone gave a little, the problem of suffering from malnutrition, disease, etc. could be solved - Each little could have a huge impact - Tens of millions of us are in a position to help
- Not everyone will give a little. Should you take up the slack? Or just do your fair share? - Singer's thought: if other people standing by the pond are doing nothing, does that mean I am not obligated to save the child? Premise 3 X Each of us should ask ourselves "what can I do to help end the suffering of the global poor?" not "what can we do to help end the suffering of the global poor" - The interpretation of Singer's principle he favours requires that each of us make up for others acting wrongly by contributing a great deal to help alleviate the effects of global poverty - His conclusion: given the state of the world, we all morally ought to be stretching ourselves to give us as much as we can to relieve great suffering due to poverty, disease, and other disasters - Not everyone will be moved by what they morally ought to do - Those who are moved have moral reason to do a lot What kind of life does Singer's argument leave us? # Is the implication of Singer's argument that we should all radically reduce our standard of living in order