Dissimilar Peter Singer's The Singer Solution To World Poverty

Madison is a successful businesswoman who has become convinced that she ought to give a substantial amount of her earnings to help those in extreme poverty in the developing world. Her brother, Thomas, a local college student, is not persuaded that such donations are a good idea. “It just makes people ask for more handouts later,” he says. “And besides,” he adds, “there are a lot of poor people here in our city: homeless people living on the streets. And I’m not doing too well myself. You ought to give me some of your charity so I can pay for college. I’m going to be swamped with student loan debt.” (MacKinnon & Fiala, 2015). When comparing my ideas of what Madison should do with her extra earnings I find that my ideas are not that dissimilar …show more content…
Bob has invested heavily in a very valuable vintage car for which he is unable to insure, a Bugatti. One day he parks alongside a set of railroad tracks and goes on a walk up the tracks. While on his walk Bob notices that a child is playing on the railroad tracks in the path of an unmanned runaway train, the child will likely be killed unless Bob acts. Rather than throwing a nearby switch to divert the train onto the siding where his Bugatti is parked Bob chooses to allow the train to collide with child resulting in the child’s death. There was no other way to save the child other then Bob throwing the switch. In Singer’s view as well as many others, Bob was wrong in allowing the child to die when he had an opportunity to save that child. Singer goes on to say, that similar to Bob we have an opportunity to save children everyday by donating to charities like UNICEF that assist children in poverty stricken countries. However, like Bob many of us choose to not give up our luxuries to save children’s lives, therefore like Bob we are not living up to our moral responsibilities (MacKinnon & Fiala,