Analysis Of Singer's Obligation To Assist Argument

Singer’s obligation to assist argument is based on three premises. The first premise is one that Singers believes could be almost universally accepted. It is that if we can prevent something harmful or bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, then it is our obligation to do so (Singer, 2010, p.135). Singer believes that a variety of people’s ethical views can accept this premise because the condition “without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” is fulfilled so long as the act in question does not result in anything else comparably bad happening, doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good comparable in significance to the bad event prevented (Singer,

People who believe we are not morally obligated to save the drowning child typically argue that the dichotomy of right and wrong eliminates non-moral acts. It would be noble if someone saved the child of their own volition. If someone did not do so because they thought they had better things to do, no one could compel them to save the child; it wouldn 't be wrong, but morally neutral, like not getting out of your car to move a bag of trash off the highway. If this “morally neutral” category didn 't exist, we would treat the ignorance and inaction of every single individual at all possible moments to not prevent suffering as the same as malicious action. Would we really want to penalize someone because they could have saved the life of a child halfway across the world from them if they gave them some money, but chose instead to spend money on tickets to a movie theater? Say a mother stops feeding her child and lets this child starve to death. Is this an immoral act or a morally neutral act? Both in this case and the drowning child case, the child is in a position where they are helpless to avoid death on their own, and so they are reliant on someone else to save them. In this case, the mother is not specifically undertaking an act of murdering her child. She is not metaphorically "throwing her child into the pond," but rather she is just being purposefully negligent in a way that will result in her child 's death, just as a person is when avoiding saving a drowning child. The only way out of calling this a morally neutral act is to say that the mother has an obligation as a mother to save her child. This is precisely the point of Singer’s argument: we have an obligation as a global society to assist the people who are helpless to save themselves. Is a parent obligated to save a child from downing? Is a child obligated to save a parent? Is a sibling