Summary: Do Individual Australians Have To The World's Poorest Populations

The question that was posed for this essay was “What moral obligations do individual Australians have to the world’s poorest population?” However I want to change this from just individual Australians and make it “What moral obligations do individuals across the world have to the poorest populations?” My reason for this is because it is well-known that Australia is very multi-cultured so why focus on one country with so much diversity when we can focus on the entire world which has just the same amount of diversity. With diversity comes a lot of different beliefs and religions and because most of our morals are based on the religion that we follow there can never be one definite answer. As the philosopher Louis P. Pojman states in his book,
Nobody can say that they wouldn’t help someone who is close to them; well I hope so otherwise I really need to rethink my faith in humanity; I wouldn’t go and say that every single person in the world would jump into a lake to save someone but they would try their hardest to save someone in trouble. But like the analogy that Singer uses in his essay we are more likely to give money to charities that are helping people in our own country rather than some random people halfway across the world. That’s probably because we can actually see the effect of our donations and the disasters that the people have to face. Guilt consumes us until we give into the pressures of donating, whereas if we see an ad for a charity that is helping people in third world countries we have less of an emotional connection to them because it has no effect on our lives. Peter Singer states “Moral attitudes are shaped by the needs of society, no doubt society needs people who will observe the rules that make social existence tolerable…It is quite inessential, however to, help people outside one’s own society”(Singer, pg. 469). For example some disasters that are affecting countries at the moment and where the citizens would be more likely to be donating are: Australia the farmers have been are affected by drought and cannot make and food and France which was attacked by ISIS. These are just some problems that countries who could afford to donate are having to deal with so therefore people would be more inclined to help them before helping people in poverty in India or Kenya. I’m not saying that places like India and Kenya don’t need our help but how do people expect to help others when