@Jacob | Created: October 27, 2024 | Last edited: January 9, 2025
In his enduringly provocative Famine, Affluence, and Morality (FAM), Peter Singer encourages us to reflect upon our behaviour towards those in need, and ask ourselves whether we can really do so little to help whilst maintaining a clear conscience. The extent to which we keep things for ourselves, Singer argues, is unjustifiable, and we ought to be doing much more than we are to help those suffering and dying from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care. I take this to be the thesis of FAM.
But is this right? Can’t we keep things for ourselves, even though others are suffering? After all, we might think, we are not responsible for the plight of others; although we might be praiseworthy for helping them, surely we cannot be blameworthy for failing to! Such, it might be said, is the ‘common-sense morality’: so long as I am not responsible for the relevant undesirable circumstances of another, I am under no obligation to help them.[1]
But this ‘common-sense morality’ (insofar as it exists) is flawed, and its falsity can be demonstrated with the following thought experiment (Drowning Child):
On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for him, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. (Singer, 2010: 3; based on Singer, 1972: 231; cited in Timmerman, 2015: 206)
In Drowning Child, you ought to help the child, despite the fact that it is not your fault that they find themselves in need of it. So it is not the case that you are under an obligation to help someone only when you are responsible for their relevant undesirable circumstances, and ‘common-sense morality’ is incorrect.
What are the implications of this? According to Singer, the implications of this finding are stark: we ought to be doing much more than we are to help those suffering and dying from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care. This, again, I take to be the thesis of FAM. As in Drowning Child, we are in a position to help at relatively minimal cost to ourselves. So, as in Drowning Child, we ought to take on this cost so that those in need can be provided with this help.
In response to Singer’s argument, people often have one of two types of strong objection. What I call ‘objections from disanalogy’ claim that Drowning Child is disanalogous to the situation in which we find ourselves as people in a position to help. There are morally-relevant differences between the former and the latter which make for a likely difference in obligation between them, and we cannot conclude that we ought to be doing more than we are, because the analogy on which this claim relies fails. ‘Objections from ignorance,’ on the other hand, deny that there is clearly anything more that we can be doing to help those in need at all. On this picture, for all we know, what we are doing is just as good for those in need as what we might do.
I will begin (in section 1) by outlining in more detail and justifying my interpretation of Singer’s argument in FAM, before going on (in the remaining sections) to defend it against some of the strongest objections. In (2), I outline and respond to the strongest and most common objections from disanalogy. Specifically, I respond to Timmerman’s disanalogy from anomaly and Murphy’s disanalogy from compliance.[2] Whereas the first of these disanalogies is significant, I argue, the other is not, and in any case neither succeed in undermining Singer’s argument at least whilst allowing for modification. Finally, in (3), I discuss the objections from ignorance in the form they often come, and in particular I respond to what I call Brennan’s ‘ignorance from economic uncertainty objection.’
By the end of this essay, I hope to have shown that neither of these sets of objections succeed in undermining the thesis that we ought to be doing more than we are, as argued for by Singer.
As it turns out, it might be that every philosopher mentioned in this essay in fact agrees with the claim that we ought to be doing more than we are. Nevertheless, the arguments of theirs which can serve as objections to Singer have and will continue to be used to try to absolve us of responsibility to do so.
I begin by presenting my interpretation of Singer’s argument in FAM alongside the reasons for adopting it. This will set up the groundwork for defending it against the objections I would like to address in this essay.
What is Singer trying to argue in FAM? Well, he begins by stating that he will argue that ‘the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society’ ‘needs to be altered’ (Singer, 1972: 230), and he clarifies what he is referring to with this ‘way of life’ later in the paper: ‘we… have to give away enough to ensure that the consumer society, dependent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than giving to famine relief, would slow down and perhaps disappear entirely.’ (241) As a result, we might take the thesis of FAM to be that we ought to donate (more) to aid agencies. Indeed, the first chapter of Singer’s The Life You Can Save – which is essentially an expansion on the ideas presented in FAM – presents an argument with this as its conclusion (Singer, 2010: 15-16; used by Timmerman, 2015: 204).
However, these passages are consistent with another interpretation of Singer’s thesis, and, in light of what is written elsewhere in the paper, I believe that the latter is more accurate: that we ‘[spend] on trivia rather than [give] to famine relief’ is demonstrative of our ‘way of life’ that ‘needs to be altered,’ but the main point is not that we should be giving (more) to famine relief; doing so will not necessarily always be the best/required use of our time/money. The point to be taken is that we ought to be doing more than we are. That is, we ought to be taking on far greater sacrifices in order to help those suffering and dying from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care. This, I believe, is a more accurate interpretation of the thesis of FAM (hereafter ‘Singer’s thesis’), as it is compatible both with the passages just cited as well as others throughout the paper, such as the following:
[L]ooking at the matter purely from the point of view of overseas aid, there must be a limit to the extent to which we should deliberately slow down our economy; for it might be the case that if we gave away, say, forty percent of the Gross National Product, we would slow down the economy so much that in absolute terms we would be giving less than if we gave twenty-five percent of the much larger GNP that we would have if we limited our contribution to this smaller percentage. (Singer, 1972: 241-242)
In this passage, Singer suggests that there might be cases where donating to aid agencies isn’t the best/required thing to do with our time/money. Even in such scenarios, however, we will likely be able to effectively ‘[demonstrate] in the streets, [hold] symbolic fasts, or [do] anything else directed toward providing the [needy] with the means to satisfy their essential needs’ – which is something Singer clearly thinks we ought to do (229). In light of this, then, I argue we should take Singer’s thesis to be, as aforementioned, that we ought to be doing more than we are.
By ‘we ought to be doing more than we are,’ I mean to say that (i) we should be doing more than we are, (ii) we would be ‘doing something wrong’ not to be doing more than we currently are (Singer, 2010: 16; 1972: 235), and (iii) we are morally required to do more than we currently are (that is, it is morally impermissible for us not to do more than we currently are) (233).[3] Likewise, this essay can be seen as a defence of the argument that we ought to be doing more than we are in this sense expounded.