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A Critique of Peter Singer’s Solution to Poverty
By Ryan Deschain
In “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” philosopher Peter Singer argues that the morally correct action is to donate any extraneous income that you receive to children dying in Africa due to poverty. However, is it truly moral to sacrifice your income that could be used to benefit your family, to save others? Is it ethical to surrender the future of loved ones for strangers that you will likely never meet? Singer argues that this is not only true, but also the only solution to ending poverty.
Children from Africa are used in this argument instead of children here in America because the poorest child here has a much higher chance to survive than the average child in Africa. Also, Singer uses children here to prevent any refutations involving meritocracy: children are incapable of causing their own poverty and cannot work their way out of the destitution.
Donating money to an organization to save impoverished children in Africa is the closest many of us will ever reach to saving lives. According to Singer, two hundred dollars is all that is needed to save one child’s life. If two hundred dollars is all that is needed to save a life, why wouldn’t you? This is a small sacrifice if the median income of an American household is $52,000 according the 1999 U.S census.
However, Singer acknowledges that there are many more than just one impoverished child to save. He admits that to be a truly ethical creature, you must attempt to save as many children’s lives as possible, which means you must donate much more than two hundred dollars. The ideal amount to donate is enough so that all the money that you spend is only on basic necessities, which Singer estimated to be approximately $30,000 for yourself with anything above that going to away to Africa. So, if you are the median household in the United States, you should be donating more than twenty thousand a year.
However, according to Singer it is unethical to not make every attempt to send as much money as possible. So to decrease the $30,000 that you get to keep for living expenses, you could live in a hovel and decide not to pay for power because isn’t a necessity in most parts of the U.S., avoid showers to save on water utilities (again, not really a necessity), and only eat off of fast food dollar menus. Why? Because what is your happiness compared to a child’s life? By not willing to take every attempt to send as much money that you could possibly send, then you are a cold, pitiless person who values your own happiness instead of the hundreds of children’s lives you would be saving.
This is Singer’s solution to poverty, to simply give away all “extraneous” income that is not truly necessary. Therefore, it’s best not to have any children, either. Children are the biggest cost to a family, with no benefit besides the love (and stress) from that child, which does little on the bills. But, let’s say that you realized the errors of your ways too late and already have a cozy house full of children. Obviously, your instinct is to care for them. However, to care for children, it is difficult, if not impossible, to live with the scenario described before. Also, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, the average cost of a child per year for the median family is approximately $9,000 or about 45 African lives. To follow Singer’s solution would mean to ignore the children and send the money to Africa instead, because no one can really decide if a life is worth more than another, so the best choice is to assume they are equal and go with the largest amount of lives saved. The children you are now ignoring will lead a life of starvation, poverty, and most likely death because everyone is following Singer’s solution to poverty and they are saving more lives by also ignoring the children.
Now, there are starving children in America. On the bright side, so many donations were sent to Africa, that the amount of starving children in Africa is at an all time low. Singer’s Solution to Poverty is actually a giant nationwide “Lifeboat Ethic,” which is a scenario where a cruise ship sinks, and you are floating in a lifeboat that can only fit ten more people without sinking. However, there are many more than ten swimming that are going to drown without help. How would you decide which swimmers to help into the boat? Would you ignore the limit and try to let everyone in and have everyone drown? This is exactly what Singer says is the most ethical thing to do is: donate enough money so that we too are/were in the same situation as the Africans or, following the metaphor, drown all the survivors.
Following Singer’s Solution leads to many complications that do not seem ethical to willingly create. Purposefully rejecting our family, starving our children, and killing them seems almost worse than ignoring the faraway children in a distant land. It also seems that his solution only moves the starving children from one place to another and creates a self-induced poverty in the United States. Obviously a solution that is filled with this many problems and does not solve the issue must be a faulty solution and must be replaced with another.
In solving poverty, the old Chinese proverb comes to mind: give a starving man a fish to eat, and you feed him for a day, but teach a starving man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. What if the donations were redirected from donating the food, the fish, to giving them the same abilities that has made most modern nations wealthy: skilled labor, or how to fish. This is the O’Toole’s Solution to Poverty: donate to charities that act as a boarding school for children that can give them skills, instead of simply a daycare that will only give them the basics of education.
Works Cited
1. Consulting Services. “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor by Garrett Hardin – The Garrett Hardin Society – Articles.” The Garrett Hardin Society. Web. 01 Dec. 2010.
2. “Cost of Raising Kids Table: Family & College – MSN Money.” Personal Finance and Investing – MSN Money. Web. 01 Dec. 2010.
3. United States Census Bureau. “USA QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau.” State and County QuickFacts. Web. 01 Dec. 2010.
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