Author and ethicist Peter Singer gave a presentation on “Global Poverty: What Are Our Obligations?” in an event co-sponsored by the Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Committee on Global Thought to a crowd overflowing into the aisles of the Davis Auditorium, in the Shapiro Center, last night.
Singer approached the issue not from the economic standpoint that notable
Columbians such as Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz are known for, but from a moral standpoint, asking to what extent affluent humans are morally obligated to help one billion people who are trying to survive on less than one U.S. dollar per day.
He spoke of the irrational gap between the urges one feels to act when the life of someone physically near is in danger versus one geographically far away, contrasting a child drowning in a lake as an adult passes by compared with a child dying of an easily curable disease in a developing country.
“We had a day of mourning for 3,000 people earlier this week. ... There’s no doubt that those were tragic events,” Singer said, referring to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. “But it’s also true that on that day 27,000 children died totally preventable deaths, as they have done every day since.”
The poverty-stricken abroad “continue to die while we live our comfortable lives,” he said.
Singer essentially calls on the wealthy to give at the highest level which they can afford. During the event, he addressed two arguments which call for lower, potentially more realistic levels of donations.
The first—presented by Bill Clinton in his recent book, Giving—says that more realistic sums should be considered as fulfilling moral obligations to help because this would lead to a larger total amount of donations.
The second was that the moral responsibility to give is fulfilled when a person has given what would be their fair share if everyone else donated as well. Using statistics from the U.N., Singer calculated that fulfilling this obligation requires giving only 60 cents out of every $100 earned. “Fairness doesn’t override the pressing obligation to save someone’s life,” he said, dismissing this proposal.
Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University and, most famously, the author of Animal Liberation, a touchstone in the modern animal rights movement that has been translated into 23 languages since its publication in 1975.
He has recently written articles for, among other publications, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and in 2005 was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the world’s hundred most influential people.
Rebecca Estes can be reached at rebecca.estes@columbiaspectator.com.