Societal Welfare> Utilitarianism> Singer > moral to assist those in need > promotes community
> society welfare > less poverty/poor/those in need of assistance > utilitarianism
RESOLVED: Individuals have the moral obligation to assist people in need.
TABITHA AFFERMATIVE
I affirm.
Definitions provided by Webster’s Dictionary
Need: lack of the means of subsistence
Observation: We will look at this topic in the narrower terms of assist being more crucial toward
those whom need help with health, living conditions, and aspects that relate to poverty
A’priori:
My value is Societal Welfare. Through promoting societal welfare we promote the bettering of
society and its people. Through assistance individuals for that they are a means to our end.
With the standard of utilitarianism we promote societal welfare to the best of our ability for the
mass majority is not happy, safe, and there. If we do not protect the mass majority then what is
there to protect.
C1A:
Singer’s Principle Advocates for the utilitarian actions in assisting others
Singer 72’
explains that “by without sacrificing anything of
comparable moral importance” I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to
happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good,
comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent.” The relation of this principle to act utilitarianism is as follows:
Singer’s principle amounts to asserting act utilitarianism except for (1) setting aside the demand to violate moral constraints when doing so would
Consider the Strong Singer Principle. He
promote more good overall and (2) limiting itself to requiring that one prevent the most bad that one can and not requiring that one positively bring about good if nothing bad is preventable by one’s actions. Singer is affirming, One
ought morally always to do whatever would prevent the greatest amount of bad from occurring, unless one could only prevent this bad by doing something that is wrong in itself. So Singer is not saying that if one can prevent people
from starving, but only by stealing or lying, one ought to do so (if stealing and lying are wrong in itself). He does not actually go so far as to affirm any moral constraints as actually correct and binding, he just sets the issue of doing
evil that good may come of it to the side. Even with these two qualifications in place, Singer’s Strong Principle as he interprets it has radical implications regarding how affluent people who are living well ought to conduct their
lives. Suppose my family income is $200,000 per year and, moved by the plight of distant needy strangers I have read about, I give ten dollars to a global disaster relief agency such as Oxfam or Doctors without Borders. Now I
propose to go to the movies. But wait, I could instead donate another ten dollars to Oxfam. And another, And another. The choice problem reiterates, and time I find the money I could spend on myself would instead do more good if
channeled to distant needy strangers, until I get down to a monthly income such that my next dollar, spent on myself, would do more good than I could do by way of preventing bads by donating to poverty
and famine relief. Roughly I would be reducing my monthly income to the level of the global poor. In effect, in a world in which large bad things happen frequently and I can significantly
mitigate or block their bad effects, I morally must spend my life doing that. Example:
Suppose I am walking by a pond in the woods. I’m alone. I
see a small child drowning
in shallow water. I could save the child easily and without risk to myself. I will suffer the slight
inconvenience of getting my pants muddy, that’s all. Singer says one morally must pull the
drowning child from the shallow pond to prevent the drowning. (The Weak Singer Principle also implies I morally must save the child in this
example.) Suppose we agree. Is there a morally significant difference between the drowning child case
and the decision problem I face, when I could spend money on myself or instead donate
resources to famine relief? Singer: No. So if you agree that you morally must save the child in the drowning-in-the-pond example, you ought to extend the judgment, and agree with Singer that
you ought to do all you can to relieve human misery around the globe, up to the point at which
the dollar kept for yourself would do more good than the dollar contributed to distant needy
strangers. Singer comments that the upshot of his argument is that the traditional, conventional
way of drawing the line between moral duty and charity cannot be drawn, or anyway cannot be drawn in anything like the way
we usually understand it. On the usual conception, one is morally bound not to harm others in certain ways, that is a strict duty. But helping others is morally optional. IF you do
help others, even just a bit, you are going above and beyond the call of duty, and are to be commended for being charitable—doing good you were not duty-bound to do. On Singer’s Strong Principle, this way of characterizing the
relationship between duty and charity is turned upside down.

Peter Singer [Prof. Bioethics at Princeton] “Famaine, Affluencey, and Morality” Philosphy and Public affairs, Spring 1972
http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/courses/blackbdnotessinger.pdf
C2A: Community welfare is promoted in actions of helping
A strong duty to help those in need best promotes utility
Singer 72’
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. This would mean, of course, that one would
reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee. It will be recalled that earlier I put forward both a strong and a moderate version of the principle of preventing bad occurrences. The strong version, which
required us to prevent bad things from happening unless in doing so we would be sacrificing something of comparable moral significance, does seem to require reducing ourselves to the level of marginal utility. I should also say that
the strong version seems to me to be the correct one. I proposed the more moderate version - that we should prevent bad occurrences unless, to do so, we had to sacrifice something morally significant -only in order to show that, even
on this surely undeniable principle, a great change in our way of life is required. On the more moderate principle, it may not follow that we ought to reduce ourselves to the level of marginal utility, for one might hold that to reduce
oneself and one's family to this level is to cause something significantly bad to happen. Whether this is so I shall not discuss, since, as I have said, I can see no good reason for holding the moderate version of the principle rather than
would have to give away enough to ensure that
the consumer society, dependent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than giving to famine
relief, would slow down and perhaps disappear entirely. There are several reasons why this
would be desirable in itself. The value and necessity of economic growth are now being
questioned not only by conservationists, but by economists as well. [5] There is no doubt, too, that the consumer
society has had a distorting effect on the goals and purposes of its members. Yet looking at the matter purely from the point of
the strong version. Even if we accepted the principle only in its moderate form, however, it should be clear that we
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.

Peter Singer [Prof. Bioethics at Princeton] “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1 Spring 1972
C2B:
In exchange for protection by the community individuals are obligated to assist others
Heyman 94’
This Part has sought to challenge this understanding through a reading of Locke and other classical liberal writers. According to Locke, individual liberty is not
absolute, but is limited by the law of nature. The content of that law is not exhausted by the prohibition against harming others. Instead, natural law
also requires individuals to preserve mankind by preventing violence.162 This obligation relates to matters of justice rather than
morality. In addition, individuals have a natural duty to assist others in need. Although this obligation is generally one of charity or
morality, it becomes a duty of justice in cases of extreme necessity.153 For classical liberal thought, then, affirmative obligations do not necessarily conflict with individual liberty. Indeed, even free and
independent individuals in a state of nature would have obligations to aid and protect others, by
virtue of their common membership in the natural community of mankind.1" When individuals
enter into civil society, the political community assumes responsibility for preserving the lives of
its members against violence and other forms of harm. In return for this preservation, individuals
undertake to assist the community in performing this function.165 In this way, the natural duty to aid and protect others is transformed into a
civic one. Once again, this is not a mere moral obligation, but a fundamental responsibility of citizenship that can provide the basis for a legal duty.

Steven Heyman [Prof. Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology] “Foundations of the Duty to Rescue”
Vanderbilt Law Review. Vol. 47, 1994.
C2C:
Many countries require their individuals to assist those in need
Shelto 2000’
Continental legal systems, following the tradition of Roman law,38 generally require assistance to those in peril
and provide criminal and civil penalties for violators. Such statutes exist in Belgium, China, France,
Germany, Italy, Denmark, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland,
Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, the U.S.S.R., and Turkey,39 The obligation applies to
strangers and is not fault based. The French statute is typical: anyone who abstains from rendering assistance to a person in
peril when he could do so without risk to himself or to thir parties may be punished by up to five years in prison and
a fine of 20,000 French francs,50 The duty applies if the peril is constant and necessitates immediate intervention, regardless of its cause or nature."

Dinah Shelto [Prof. of Law, University of Santa Clara] “The Duty to Assist Famine Victims” IOWA LAW REVIEW, vol. 70, 2000
C3A: The Conditions around the world are in need of help
Moral atrocity demands action
Glover 2000’
With disasters on the scale of some in the twentieth century, any ethical theory which either justifies them or can give no help in avoiding them is inadequate. The thought at Auschwitz and other places, ‘never again’, is more
compelling than any abstract ethical principle. (There is a parallel with a thought sometimes expressed about another part of the philosophy: belief in the existence of the physical world is more compelling than belief in any
philosophical theory which purports to disprove it.) If persuaded that an otherwise convincing ethical theory could justify the Nazi genocide, I should without hesitation give up the theory. In reconstructing ethics, revulsion against
. For those of us whose everyday life is in
relatively calm and sheltered places, the horrors of Rwanda or Bosnia or Kosovo seem unreal.
The atrocities can be put out of mind. The television news reports torture or a massacre and we feel relief when it
moves on to political scandals or sport. We bystanders look away. Repressing each atrocity
maintains the illusions that the world is fundamentally a tolerable place. Yet it is almost certain
that, as you read this sentence, in some places people are being killed and in others people are
being tortured. Bystanders know enough to see that knowing more will be uncomfortable. Looking away, there is little sense of an enormous evil it is urgent to stop. The first step is
not to look away. As Norman Geras has written in his fine book on this topic, ‘Under the sign of a different moral reality, the duty would be to take the pain of thinking about these things. It would be to take it
these thigns which people have done has a central place. It is necessary to see the size and urgency of the problem
enough to feel obliged to act against them.’

Jonathan Glover [PROF. ETHICS, KING’S COLLEGE, LONDON], Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, New
Haven: Yale University Press (2000), p. 406.
C3B:
Poverty abroad is much worse then domestic in wealthy societies
Singer 09’
In wealthy societies, most poverty is relative. People feel poor because many of the good things they see advertised on television are beyond their budget – but they do have a television. In the United States, 97 percent of those
classified by the Census Bureau as poor own a color TV. Three quarters of them own a car. Three quarters of them have air-conditioning. Three quarters of them have a VCR or DVD player. All have access to health care. 5 I am not
quoting these figures in order to deny that the poor in the United States face genuine difficulties. Nevertheless, for most, these difficulties are of a different order than those of the world’s poorest people. The
1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty are poor by an absolute standard tied to the most
basic human needs. They are likely to be hungry for at least part of each year. Even if they can get enough food to fill their
stomachs, they will probably be malnourished because their diet lacks essential nutrients. In children, malnutrition stunts growth and can cause
permanent brain damage. The poor may not be able to afford to send their children to school.
Even minimal health care services are usually beyond their means. This kind of poverty kills.
Life expectancy in rich nations averages seventy-eight years; in the poorest nations, those officially classified as “least
developed,” it is below fifty. 6 In rich countries, fewer than one in a hundred children die before the age
of five; in the poorest countries, one in five does. And to the UNICEF figure of nearly 10 million
young children dying every year from avoidable, poverty-related causes, we must add at least
another 8 million older children and adults.

Peter Singer [Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University], The Life You Can Save, New York: Random House (2009), p. 8-9
C3C:
We live in a unique moment where it is possible to eradicate crippling poverty
Singer 09’
We live in a unique moment. The proportion of people unable to meet their basic physical needs is smaller today than it has been at any time in recent history, and perhaps at any time since humans first came into existence. At the
same time, when we take a long-term perspective that sees beyond the fluctuations of the economic cycle, the proportion of people with far more than they need is also unprecedented. Most important, rich and poor are now linked in
ways they never were before. Moving images, in real time, of people on the edge of survival are beamed into our living rooms. Not only do we know a lot about the desperately poor, but we also have much more to offer them in terms
of better health care, improved seeds and agricultural techniques, and new technologies for generating electricity. More amazing, through instant communications and open access to wealth of information that surpasses the greatest
Economist Jeffrey Sachs
has argued convincingly that extreme poverty can be virtually eliminated by the middle of this
century. We are already making progress. In 1960, according to UNICEF, the United Nations
International children’s Emergency Fund, 20 million children died before their fifth birthday
because of poverty. In 2007, UNICEF announced that, for the first time since record keeping
began, the number of deaths of young children has fallen below 10 million a year. 2 Public
health campaigns against smallpox, measles, and malaria have contributed to the drop in child
mortality, as has economic progress in several countries. The drop is even more impressive
because the world’s population has more than doubled since 1960. Yet we can’t become
complacent: 9.7 million children under five still die annually; this is an immense tragedy, not to
mention a moral stain on a world as rich as this one. And the combination of economic uncertainty and volatile food prices that marked 2008 could still reverse the downward trend in
libraries of the pre-Internet age, we can enable them to join the worldwide community – if only we can help them get far enough out of poverty to seize the opportunity.
poverty-related deaths.

Peter Singer [Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University], The Life You Can Save, New York: Random House (2009), p. xii
Under the value of societal welfare and the standard of utilitarianism I affirm. I am now open for
cross examination.