Summary Of The Singer Solution To World Poverty

“The Singer Solution to World Poverty”

Singer begins his essay by describing two scenarios. The first scenario is about Dora. She was told she could make $1,000 if she brought a homeless boy to an address. With the money she made she bought herself a television. Later on she was told the boy would be killed and his organs sold. Dora knows that what will happen to the boy is wrong and goes to get the boy back. The next scenario is about Bob. Bob is going to retire soon and invested the majority of his life savings into a Bugatti. The car will be worth more money in the future, so he would sell it and have a good retirement. Bob takes the car out for a drive and parks it near the railway. In the distance he sees a runaway train and a small child, likely to be killed by said train. He is given the option of saving the child, or letting the child die and save his Bugatti. Bob chooses to save his car instead of the child. Singer is trying to prove the point that you can’t judge someone on something they do. People let children die every day and there are no repercussions for it. When given this situation with Bob, it just makes him look bad because
The first scenario is that there are fifty people in a lifeboat and there is room for ten more. Instead of choosing ten people to allow in the lifeboat, all one hundred go in and the boat sinks. The second scenario, ten out of the one hundred people are let in. Letting these ten people creates two problem. The first being choosing the people to save. The second is that it gets rid of the lifeboats “safety factor,” and if anything bad happens there is no way to solve the problem. The third scenario is that nobody gets in the boat, the “safety factor” remains, and all fifty people in the boat live. The only problem with the last scenario is that all one hundred people in the water