Thursday, February 1, 2018

You Can't Always Guilt What You Want

In a 1999 New York Times article, Peter Singer details a bold solution to world poverty: every person with surplus must give to charity or else risk moral turmoil. In an ideal world, this system would work. Everyone would be generous and selfless, and soon poverty would be abolished and people could co-exist peacefully in a Socialist-type environment of equality. However, this world is far from perfect, meaning Singer's solution is too. The main issue with his approach is that Singer attempts to guilt trip the reader. While they may feel moved in the moment of reading, humans tend to respond to feelings of guilt with defensiveness.

"Oh, so I'm expected to give until I starve to death?"

"He doesn't know what my life is like!"

"He's purposefully trying to make me feel bad, I'm not buying into that."

"I can be a perfectly nice person without giving anything to charity, thank you very much!"

We feel it in ourselves, we see it on this blog, we hear it on the news: nobody wants to be a bad person, and people will do anything to remove blame from themselves. That's why Singer's plan will never work: it relies on people responding to guilt in the way he wants them to. In actuality, many people will respond the exact opposite way out of pure spite. We see the same phenomenon in King Lear - the more Lear attempts to guilt Goneril and Regan into loving him, the more they disrespect him. Guilt breeds anger as much as it breeds compassion.

I'm not trying to say people will never feel guilty about not giving to charity, it's perfectly reasonable to experience remorse at one's prospering when another is not. But Singer expects everyone to feel the way he does, and to react in the same vein. Not a lot of people will. Perhaps he knew this when he wrote the article, hoping to be more provocative than to actually affect mass change. Perhaps he did not. No matter his intent, Singer's hopes for a more charitable planet contains one fatal flaw: you cannot reliably guilt your way into getting what you want.

2 comments:

  1. I think this is a very interesting take on Singer's article, and honestly I agree with your point of view. I think your connection to Lear is brilliant and backs up your argument. You're right, people can definitely feel guilty, but that does not mean they will change their behavior.

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  2. Alex, I said something very similar in my blog post regarding how Singer´s controversial choice to guilt the reader into ¨giving more¨, and certainly agree that it is his article´s biggest flaw. The best method to get someone to do something good is not by making one hate themselves more then they already do. Singer seems to completely gloss over the very foundation which charity and generosity is built upon; the concept of humanity and spirit of giving. What seems to result is a blunt, emotionless berating of the reader which turns his piece into more of a what´s-what of hypothetical money shaming, rather then something that highlights the appreciation of giving back.

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