Singer’s Moral Obligation Critique

In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” Peter Singer argues that we have a moral obligation to help people who are in desperate need of food, medical supplies, shelter or the like. He reasons as follows. Firstly, it’s very bad for people to die of malnutrition, or from lack of shelter, or from an illness that basic medical supplies would have treated. Secondly, if we have it in our power to prevent something very bad from happening with-out incurring any moral cost in doing so, we have a moral obligation to do it. It follows from these two premises that we have a moral obligation to prevent people from dying of malnutrition, etc., so long as it’s in our power to do so. And it surely is. What, then, does this obligation amount to? At the very minimum, it means that we are morally obligated to donate our discretionary income toward famine relief and similar projects. The premise to attack, then, is the second one. Admittedly, it seems prima facie true, and yet, it leads to verdicts that most of us think are false. For example, most of us don’t think I’ve done something morally wrong by buying the new video game Grand Theft Auto V rather than donating that money to Partners in Health. The fact that this premise leads directly to an unintuitive consequence is some reason to hold it suspect. But more needs to be said. Why is it that this apparently true moral principle—hereafter, I’ll call it “Singer’s Principle,” —is, upon closer examination, actually false?

The focus of this paper will be on criticizing this argument. To its credit, it is quite straightforward, with only two crucial premises, the first of which—that dying from starvation, lack of shelter, etc., is very bad—is unimpeachable. It is agreeable that a society built on moral principles is a society that is poised to succeed in every way possible; for instance better relationship between the members and better living standards. Most sociologists assert that a society in which the members care for each other and respect personal space is a typical one with harmony, peace and success. To this end, Singer might be correct up to some point, however,. one might push Singer on whether it’s really in our power to keep people alive in the situations imagined, but that doesn’t seem like a very promising avenue to pursue. Surely we can donate money easily, via online services, and there are plenty of respectable charities for which skepticism about their effectiveness is misplaced. Even raising concerns about the reach of Singer’s reasoning—must we really provide aid to persons in far off countries as though they were our neighbors?—won’t get very far, since it’s very hard to see how distance makes a moral difference in the global community in which we now live.

The problem is that it admits of no qualifier. It doesn’t say that sometimes, if it’s in our power to prevent something very bad from happening at no moral cost, then we are obligated to do it. That may indeed be how we interpret Singer’s principle, and if so, that would explain why it seems prima facie true even though it isn’t. But the addition of “sometimes” makes an important difference. Without it, Singer’s principle reflects a vision of ourselves as moral agents that’s incompatible with certain deep views we have of what it is to lead a morally good life. It reflects a kind of consequentialist line of thought, one that sees us as moral agents who are tasked with using our extra resources to constantly and exclusively stop bad things from happening in the world, at least until doing so comes at some sort of moral cost.. Even though Singer may be right that we are obligated to help, it should be ‘when’ we can, ‘if’ we can and if we are ‘willing to’. Thus options of time, ability, and willingness have been included. This is better since it gives them an opportunity for ‘choice’ rather than forceful. At least if the argument is presented like this, then it seems better and understandable. That if we see people suffering, and we have the ability to then we are advised to act accordingly by trying to picture ourselves within such situations and if we can be helped by others who are strangers.

Even he might be right to a point, Singer’s perspective might not be as much of a persuasive vision of the morally good life as it should be. Certainly we should sometimes devote our extra resources to stopping bad things from happening, but on Singer’s view, there’s no place in a morally good life for a person to indulge herself once in a while on a treat, or to ever waste time for the sake of just relaxing a few more hours doing nothing in particular. A famine relief worker who takes an extra nap every three months—something she could forego at no moral cost—has not, on any plausible view of wrongdoing, done something wrong, even if we acknowledge that someone might have died as a result. And a woman who devotes large portions of her disposable income to Partners in Health has not done something wrong if she treats herself to a hot chocolate, even if, as might be the case, someone dies as a result. These are tragic results, to be sure. But to suggest that these persons have involved themselves in wrongdoing suggests a conception of the morally good life at odds with common sense. Singer doesn’t disagree; he is happy to consider his view a deeply revisionary one. But to the extent that we want morality to be guided by deep-seated moral intuitions—and if we don’t, then it’s difficult to imagine exactly how to proceed with serious moral reflection—his principle does not withstand a careful consideration of the kind of moral life it reflects. We are not slaves to the horrors in the world, constantly tasked with stopping pervasive badness at all but moral costs to ourselves. Endorsement of Singer’s principle forces us to collapse the supererogatory into the obligatory. That’s a superhero’s vision of the morally good life, which is fine, but it is not ours, nor should it be.