Why Singer’s ideas might work against the goal: A critique
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Special thanks to Michael Vazquez for an insightful discussion on my blog topic.
In discussing with Dr. Michael Vazquez of the Parr Center my original topic idea about distributing contributions between my local community and other scales, we came to Peter Singer’s arguments regarding obligations to help others. It became clear that though I did not fully agree with Singer’s ideas around helping people, my disagreements did not actually lie in major disagreements with Singer’s fundamental principles in his work as I currently understand them to be; essentially, I am apparently a utilitarian of sorts in that I strongly believe in the (very) long-term goal of building a better world for all people, and an important part of this is creating good outcomes for as many people as possible using the limited resources and time I have. This goal of a better world for all includes Singer’s goal of stopping preventable suffering, as illustrated by the example of the moral obligation to help a child drowning in a pond near you (Singer, 2002). My critique of Singer’s ideas lies not with the consequentialist approach he takes but instead in three major points plus one rather more hypothetical point, all of which provide examples for why what he has proposed will actually undermine the goal of preventing and relieving suffering.
Many readers will be familiar with Singer’s ideas that I am referencing, but in brief, Singer argued that it is the duty of everyone to give so much to help others that the givers themselves are nearly no better off than the people they were giving to (Singer, 1972). Many philosophers have criticized this view for a variety of reasons, and I would encourage anyone who is interested to read into this debate. Other ideas on the same topic that Singer has argued for include the idea of giving to organizations that have a high impact per dollar (“Peter Singer…,” 2022) and of not having special obligations to our fellow nationals in our country over those of people in other countries (though we do have special obligations to people who have helped us in some way or another) (Singer, 2002). I want to be clear that in this blog I am not agreeing with Singer on anything beyond the narrow scope I present here; I am woefully unversed in the vast majority of his arguments and the criticisms of and arguments against those and I do not promote any ideas outside of the need to help people.
Having established what the ideas are that I am critiquing, I now turn to the actual critiques. First, if everyone were to give only to organizations with a high impact per dollar, many important issues would be neglected; second, on the whole, people in our own country or subregion have generally done more to help us than people in other countries and so we do owe them somewhat more; and third, if the stringent form of helping people that Singer proposes is broadly told to people, folks may be put off from helping altogether. Finally, if what Singer proposes was in fact fully implemented, it would create a cycle of impoverishment and no one would in fact end up being helped.
The first of these criticisms can be illustrated in the fight to cure cancer. Efforts have been ongoing for many years, but no definitive cure has yet been found—there is currently no easy, cost-effective solution to cancer. Does this mean that we shouldn’t donate to help fund cancer research, in hopes of one day finding cure and perhaps helping some people in the process as well? I would argue no, as I’m sure many others would. I do not imagine that most proponents of effective giving argue that we should donate only to effective organizations (nor would most argue that we shouldn’t help try to cure cancer); however, if we were to overly promote effective giving at the detriment of funding other important issues for which more research is still needed or there are no quick, effective solutions, we would certainly leave behind many important issues.
The second criticism, regarding obligations to those in our subregions or countries, can be illustrated in two ideas: one is that people within the same country generally support their community in various ways, from providing services through volunteering and working to being a good friend and neighbor; the other is that citizens of nations, and subnational and local levels, often pay taxes that contribute to the benefit of all society, such as through roads and fire departments. This makes my somewhat informed view be that, on the whole, in the sense of having helped the person doing the donating, the people within a country or subregion have done more to help and so the donor has some special obligation to them. I do wonder how this conclusion may change if the value provided by overseas manufacturing is included; however, much built before the boom in globalization is probably anchored more on the communities in which they were created. It is important to note here, however, that my disagreement is not with the idea that we have, at base level, equal obligation to help people both at home and abroad. Rather, I dispute that the level of obligation one owes to others is the exact same no matter where the potential recipient of help lives in relation to oneself, once the lived experience of the majority of people is taken into account, because people in one’s own country may have done more to help one than those outside of it.
The third criticism comes from a more down-to-earth perspective: if those who are especially committed to contributing to helping others were to espouse Singer’s theory that it is everyone’s moral obligation to give up nearly everything in order to help other people, we would surely put-off many people and make them thus less likely to help at all, and we may reduce our own credibility so much that we ourselves are less able to help others. Thus, we would in multiple ways be reducing the actual contributions made to help people.
Finally, there is the issue that if we were to follow Singer’s recommendation that we ought to make ourselves nearly as poorly-off as those we are trying to help, we would enter a cycle of world poverty in which nothing would ever really get better. The well-off in one generation would make themselves poor in order to help those in their generation who are poor, and then the newly well-off thanks to the aid of the previously well-off would make themselves poor in an effort to help the newly poor, and so on and so forth in perpetuity. This would be bad for all involved, and it would be a terrible use of money, as the money used in this large-scale cycle of poverty could’ve been used to create permanently better lives for people.
As outlined in the preceding paragraphs, my disagreements with Singer lie in that part of what he proposes will in fact undermine the goal of relieving and preventing suffering. By taking an approach that avoids the issues I have laid out here, we would be better able to help others and contribute to a better world. In future work I hope to explore further why I wish to help others and create a better world.
References
Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265052
Singer, P. (2002). One World: The Ethics of Globalization. Yale University Press.
Peter Singer: how the concept of effective giving could revolutionise global generosity; Peter Singer's book The Life You Can Save lays out an uncompromising case for effective giving by affluent countries ... and his organisation of the same name is here to show you how. (2022, June 3). Guardian. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A705928293/BIC?u=unc_main&sid=summon&xid=c83ffcea