Sunday, January 31, 2016
Singer's Solution: Change Society
In Peter Singer's article on how to solve world poverty, he suggests that everyone donate their excess money to charity. He says that anyone who doesn't is essentially killing a small child. While I think this is a nice idea, in reality it seems completely unrealistic. Firstly, it is completely unrealistic to expect everyone to willingly donate any money they don't need. We live in a materialistic society and that isn't going to change overnight. Secondly, if everyone donates all their excess won't everyone be near poverty? Presumably Singer only intends for people to spend money on food and shelter. What happens if one person in the family loses their job or gets sick or the house burns down? The family would have no funds to rebuild or pay for medical care. For his idea to be feasible we would need a complete societal overhaul. For these reasons I believe that Singer's solution is completely unrealistic.
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Yes! So true! I agree that it is very imporbable. I didn;t realize that SInger wanted compete existenttialism before reading your post. Nice post.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with what you are saying. Singer is essentially asking that we change human nature in deterring a materialistic society. It just seems too optimistic and too unrealistic to be probable.
ReplyDeleteI think most people who read the article would agree that Singer's "solution" is based purely on his optimism for the subject and has no chance of being a legitimate strategy for putting an end to world poverty. Not taking into account how materialistic society is was what really made his plan a bust.
ReplyDeleteI also think that ideologically speaking the solution is sound. However, there are no real world applications to this solution because it poses far too radical of a utilitarian perspective.
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