Individual Moral Obligation Analysis

This question focuses on how other peoples’ action and inaction affects one’s obligation.
In this essay I will explore the consequences of both inconveniencing yourself with picking up the litter along with the leaving it on the beach. This scenario postulates over collective responsibility and whether one person’s individual actions make a difference to the overall outcome. I will argue from the stance that one is obliged to pick up the litter, regardless of others’ inactions as each of us have an individual moral responsibility, and in not picking up the litter you are causing greater harm to the planet than one would by taking the time to take the litter home with you.
Singer, in his article, ’Famine affluence and morality,’ proposed that if we can prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought to do so. Relating back to the scenario in the question, Singer would argue that you are morally obliged to take the litter home because although it may inconvenience you to do so, if you …show more content…
In doing this action, the sacrifice would also be very minimal, for example the burden of carrying your litter home with you is a personal burden whereas littering a public …show more content…
This principle looked at making actions universal in order to decide their moral value. If one were to make the action of refraining from picking up litter universal, the impact would be much greater than that of a single individual. If the outcome of the generalized act has undesirable consequences, for example in this scenario, littering a public beach causes harm to the environment and wildlife, then this determines the moral wrongness of the act, and therefore you should not do it. If the action cannot be universalized to create a good outcome, then one should not do the action in the first place (Gewirth,