The Singer Solution To World Poverty Summary

To give or not to give? This is the central question brought up in “The Singer Solution To World Poverty,” an article written by utilitarian philosopher, Peter Singer. Singer’s “solution” is that Americans need to take all of their money that is not devoted to the basic requirements for life and give it to organizations that are working on saving impoverished children across the globe. In his piece, he uses two imaginary situations to draw a conclusion about the moral position of Americans who do not donate their surplus money to save the poor. In the first, a woman nearly trades a boy’s life for a material possession, and in the second, a man allows a child to be hit by a train in order to save his car. Singer compares these two concocted characters to the unwilling, selfish Americans. He uses these horrific situations to influence his audience’s emotions and make them feel guilty for not donating their extra money; Singer’s accusations make his audience question their ethics and morals by equating them to child murderers. He even goes as far as to say that in order to live a “morally decent” life, we
Singer calculates that “$200 in donations would help a sickly 2-year-old transform into a healthy 6-year-old” (Singer 2). No one would say that spending money to help a child in need is wasteful; however, preserving the child’s life would not save it from poverty. The child would be alive, but it would still grow up poor and uneducated, and, in all likelihood, its children would be the same. Singer’s solution for poverty is, in all actuality, not a solution at all. His ideas would be great for lowering the fatality rate due to malnourishment or diseases, but he gives no solution to adequately deliver the world from poverty. Donating to children-saving charities, while honorable, does not do much in fixing the problem at hand, worldwide