Peter Singer - “Famine, Affluence, and Morality

[}Peter Singer - “Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Discussion Analysis

The article Famine, Affluence and Morality is penned down Peter Singer. The goal of Singer is to argue on the common ways of thinking about charity, famine relief and morality (Singer, 2007). He presents his criticism that being a part of developed world, we can do something more for improving poverty in the developing nations. Singer presented his key arguments which can be simplified as:

People sufferings are the reason of lack of providing shelter, food and healthcare protection.

We can stop something bad in our society, though without giving up something comparable moral significance that we should do it.

We should donate as much as we can for the suppression of poverty, though it will do so harm us but more than it benefits them

We have the power to stop those bad things in the society.

Thus Singer debates that people who belong to affluent countries should completely change their concepts of morality and way of life so that they can commit their selves to help people in need. Singer begins his argument by asking us to consider the issue of food crisis, such as the one in 1971 in Bengal (Singer, 2007). People were severely suffering from this issue and neither individuals nor government were doing anything to relieve them.

It has been observed that Singer considers different objection such as everyone should donate what they can for famine relief, every single individual will only need to donate a minor amount, and eventually there will be no need for one to contribute high amount (David, 1999). The response of Singer is that it's not the true fact that everyone donates just for the food crisis, therefore, this objection is not relevant with the actual situation. Moreover, since not ...