Peter Singer and Moral Decisions

Singer explains the reasoning beg=hind his thesis by offering the reader a thought experiment from Unger’s book called “Living high and letting die”. In the experiment a scenario is presented where a child is on a train track and a train is headed towards him and is surely going to kill shim. Now, a man named Bob has the opportunity to save the child. In order to do so he would have to divert the train by throwing a switch. But by doing so he would also wreck his prized and expensive Bugatti. The car is also an investment for his future. Singer correctly assumes that most of the people would condemn Bob for not sacrificing a material object in order to save a life. Singer claims that though Bob is not responsible for putting the child in harms ways. He is nonetheless responsible for the child's death if he refuses to act. Being a utilitarian philosopher he tends to see the consequence of the actions as the criteria by which to judge an act as moral or not. Here the action, or rather the non-action, of Bob leads to the death of the child. In Singer's book, there is no intrinsic difference between being directly responsible for a situation and failing to prevent the situation from happening. However, Singer only uses this thought experiment to draw parallels between the Bob case and the spending habits of a modern consumer in an affluent country. He claims that "Bob's situation resembles that of people able but unwilling to donate....” Furthermore, he argues that there is no moral difference between the two scenarios. Hence, by Singer's argument, splurging on luxuries and not donating to charities is an immoral act. Having already condemned Bob's decision to not save the child's life the reader is left with no option but to accept P...

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...n how much confidence the people have in the company’s financial capabilities. Additionally, implementing this solution may have detrimental effect on the economic structure of the society. Creation of money is a process of sale and purchase. If we take away peoples power to purchase the economy would surely suffer. It would eventually create a circle of hardship: if large companies suffer because of lack of sale, then their employee would suffer which would decrease their financial wellbeing and they would have lesser resources with which to buy product from the market; and this process would continue. Now, Singer might argue that this circle may eventually benefit all of humanity as poverty as a whole might be decreased. But the question remains; whether or not this Singer's solution is practical in today’s world, keeping in mind the human need for material gain?