Peter Singer's Drowning Child Argument

Peter Singer’s drowning child experiment focuses on this concept if a child was drowning in a shallow puddle, would you save the baby or would you leave the baby to die in the puddle? The experiment tells people to look at saving the baby based on the fact that saving this child would leave your clothes muddy or in terms of the lecture, your expensive boots ruined. Some may believe that the risk of getting their clothes dirty or ruining their boots would not make them save the baby, but most would say that the small cost of saving a baby’s life is worth more than the boots or the clothes. These material objects are not as worthy compared to a human life. After analyzing the baby in the puddle, Singer brings up the idea that if you had ten dollars and you could donate it to save a life anywhere in the world, in the video he explains donating it to Unicef, could save a baby’s life just like the one in the puddle. It would be wrong to not help the other child in need no matter the distance. …show more content…
“Cosmopolitans would say there’s nothing about distance that could possibly explain that baby somehow has less of an entitlement of help from others then the baby that’s right in front of you or you have less of an obligation to help that baby simply because it’s geographically far away”(Lecture three). That is a correct statement because a baby’s suffering does not depend on how far away from them you are, but instead by the amount of suffering they endure. In the lecture and Peter Singer’s video the idea comes up that a simple antibiotic could save a child’s life and all it would take is that money to do so. Each person who is has been gifted with wealth should donate their money to the less fortunate to create less suffering in the word. There are different divisions of wealth in the world though. Wealth could be being able to afford food on the table for your family or it could mean living in a mansion as a