Peter Singer Rich And Poor Analysis

Millions of people are currently living in absolute poverty, while there are those who have the financial capacity to use their assets to acquire not essential items. Peter Singer believes that those who can afford to donate a sum of their money to poverty relief are morally required to do so. This paper will summarize Singer 's Rich and Poor and demonstrate how failing to save a drowning kid is not the same as failing to donate to poverty relief. Peter Singer argues that those who are affluent buy meals not so that they can relief their hunger, but for the pleasure of eating that meal (Quote). To be clear, Singer does not condemn such actions as wasteful or wrong. What he is trying to prove is that there are people who have enough capital …show more content…
People are willing to donate their time and money to private organizations to help those caught in the disaster. The problem with this is that majority of people donate because they see all the gruesome and horrifying images through the media. These events are newsworthy and will likely attract a large amount of media coverage. The question Singer would like to pose is that why are we only helping people who are caught in these disasters. Singer applauds those who donate to disaster relief but if we are willing to donate to them, why not to countries who are suffering daily from starvation and malnutrition. Just because their means of death is not as sudden or in the large quantities, does not absolve our responsibility to help them. People are constantly dying and just because the media is not reminding us about it like they do with disasters, Singer believes that as humans, we should be morally obligated to help those in impoverish conditions. (128) Peter Singer takes his argument a step further by equating the failure to donate to poverty relief to the failure to save a drowning child. In both situations, the individual is capable of helping without any negative consequences. He is saying in both situations that we should feel obligate to save the starving child in the same way as saving the drowning child. This statement has several issues …show more content…
Failing to save a child from drowning is immoral because of the difficulty of the task. If it poses no harm and you have the ability to save the child, then it is relatively easy task. Trying to relief poverty is a hard task. Furthermore, attempting to save people from absolute poverty should be a team effort. No one man should be burden with stopping world hunger. Here lies the fundamental difference. Saving a child is an individual task whereas saving millions who are starving is the responsibility of multiple parties. Therefore, in the first scenario it would be acceptable if you criticize the person for failing to save the child, but you would not be able to criticize the person who fails the donate aid to poverty relief, because the responsibility does not solely fall on