Letting People In Absolute Poverty Die Analysis

Moller’s argument in letting people in absolute poverty die is akin to a large scale, real-life optimization problem. He believes we should covet our resources and let them grow to help the largest amount of people possible instead of using it to help presently suffering people. The main argument against his thesis revolves around the psychology of letting people die whom you know you can help. Moller believes that future people, those “statistical lives,” are just as important as presently existing people. However, most will not allow presently existing people to die even if they know their actions will be justified through future aid. There will always be future possible people in developing countries who need aid, therefore the supposed …show more content…
The simplest principle believes that when you have two or more options that can result in saving some people, you must perform the option with the higher probability of saving someone. The application of this principle lies in increasing your funds for future donating ability. The Sure-Thing Rescue Principle would rather save a certain number of people now, (because the probability of helping them is near one hundred percent) than wait for money to build up and help an uncertain number of people in the future. The probability of helping people goes down when you are waiting for money to build. Even if you are the top Wall Street stock broker, you could still make a mistake. The risk when investing in stocks or bonds is always present, and instead of gaining money to help more people, you could end up losing it. Thus, waiting to donate was useless and you merely wasted your time. The Sure-Thing Rescue Principles are more concerned with the probability of saving people rather than the time it takes to do the saving. Moral Urgency Principles are concerned with time, and they prefer you save people sooner. Considering that the Rescue Principles are flawed, using them to comprehensively counter-argue the Letting Die Thesis would be very difficult. The Rescue Principles do not care how many people are saved or the time involved in the act of saving, if the probability is high then you should perform …show more content…
If this were not the case and the poverty trend was growing, Moller’s argument would be defeated. This is shown in the Ever-More Rescue Paradox, where the amount of people in need would steadily increase instead of decrease over time. Instead of saving more people to lessen the reach of poverty, you would be helping the same ratio of people in the initial amount of money and after waiting for your funds to increase. Waiting in this case is futile, because there would still be the same number of people in poverty if you donated at the beginning versus if you donated in fifty years. This also calls up the difficulty of when to remove your money from the stocks. There is no point of equilibrium available to know when to stop investing. If you graphed the lines of people absolute poverty and the value of your investment they would be very nearly parallel, meaning they would never cross. Thus, you would be stuck continually waiting for your money to increase while more people fall into absolute poverty. The demand for aid is much greater than the supply of aid, and nothing will balance out because they are both increasing at nearly the same