Peter Singer on Famine,
Affluence, and Morality
Thomas Nadelhoffer
Dept. of Philosophy
Elie Wiesel:
Nobel Peace Laureate, Holocaust Survivor
• “Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are
endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy,
national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.
Whenever men or women are persecuted because of
their race, religion, or political views, that place mustat that moment- become the center of the universe."
• “There may be times when we are powerless to
prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when
we fail to protest."
Moral Malaise & Misguided Priorities
• Steelers’ Heinz Field: $281 Million
• Eagles’ Lincoln Financial Field: $512 Million
The Toys of the Mega-Rich
• World’s Most Expensive Private
Jet: Airbus A380
• The “Flying Palace”
• Cost: $300 Million
• World’s Most Expensive
“Gigayacht”: Wally Island
• 325 ft. long and 70 ft. wide
• Cost: $200 Million
The Face of Famine
Facts About Hunger & Poverty
• Nearly one in four people live
on less than $1 per day.
• 3 billion people in the world
today struggle to survive on
$2 per day.
• To satisfy the world's
sanitation and food
requirements would cost
only US $13 billion--what the
people of the United States
and the European Union
spend on perfume each year.
The Key Moral Question
• Every 3.6 seconds
someone dies of
hunger.
• The question is: What,
if anything, do we owe
them?
Peter Singer’s Challenge
Two Fundamental Moral Assumptions:
1. Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter,
and medical care are bad.
2. If it is in your power to prevent something bad
from happening, without thereby sacrificing
anything of comparable moral importance, we
ought, morally, to do it.
The Shallow Pond
Singer’s Response
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The Proximity Thesis
Does Distance Make a Difference?
Singer and the Sorties Paradox
The Descriptive vs. the Normative
Do Numbers Make a Difference?
Singer and the Reductio ad Absurdum
“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 further away than I am, who have also noticed the child but
are doing nothing?”
Charity vs. Duty
• Charity as an ideal excuse for moral inactivity.
• Upsetting the moral categories.
• Helping as obligatory rather than
supererogatory.
• “The moral point of view requires us to look
beyond the interests of our own society.”
Objections:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Too drastic
Over-demanding
Counter-intuitive
Population Control*
Helping at Home First
“What is the point of relating philosophy to
public affairs if we do not take our
conclusions seriously?”
--Peter Singer
Psychological Barriers
“The statistics of mass murder or genocide—no matter how
large the numbers—do not convey the true meaning of such
atrocities. The numbers fail to trigger the affective emotion or
feeling required to motivate action. In other words, we know
that genocide in Darfur is real, but we do not “feel” that
reality. In fact, not only do we fail to grasp the gravity of the
statistics, but the numbers themselves may actually hinder the
psychological processes required to capture attention and
create emotion.”
--Samantha Power
Compassion Fatigue
• “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I
look at the one, I will.” –Mother Theresa
• “At what number do other individuals blur for
me?” –Annie Dillard
• Compassion Fatigue: New Studies
• Numbers and Psychological Numbing
• Evolution, Genocide, and Moral Obligation
• Innate but not Immutable!
We Owe Them…