Obligations and Morality

People who are privileged do have some obligation to help those in need, but not as big of an obligation as Singer believes. Singer's ideas about donating the majority of one's income to charities that help save lives are very sweet, but very unrealistic. He forms his beliefs around utilitarianism, which seems like a very reasonable philosophy on the surface, but in actuality holds humanity to insanely high standards. For example, why should parents pay for their children's college education when the money could be spent saving lives? Why should we even go to college? And consider this scenario: two people you do not know are tied to some train tracks, with a train speeding toward them. You stand next to a switch that can shift the train to a different set of tracks; only one person is tied to these tracks, but she is your mother. According to utilitarianism, you would be morally obligated to kill your mother and save the two strangers.

The only people who are morally obligated to give almost all of their money to charities are those who believe in utilitarianism. However, people who are fairly wealthy should certainly consider donating money whenever they can. When people earn more than around 70,000-75,000 dollars per year, their happiness typically no longer rises based on earning more money. After this point, people should have a stronger obligation to donate money to charities, and would probably be far more likely to donate more money anyway. The higher a person's income, the higher their obligation to donate should be. For someone earning one million dollars a year, donating upwards of 250,000 dollars would not hurt them at all, and serve to help a great many people. Someone earning 50,000 dollars a year with two kids, however, might not be obligated to donate anything at all.