The Guilt of Affluence
Section I
The argument of Peter Singer
T. West
In this section of the paper I do a critical review of Peter Singer’s argument found in his paper “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. In Part 1 and Part 2 I lightly go over the sections of his paper where he states the main premises for his position. Part 3 is the standardized form of the argument. In Part 4 I outline and deconstruct his analogy of the baby in the pond. Following this deconstruction I lay out four main problems with the analogy and give a conclusion in regards to the analogy.
In part 5, I evaluate the premises of the argument and I end this section of the paper concluding that Singer’s position is unsound. It is my intent to show the flaws found within Singer’s argument and his assumptions in regards to his position. I also hope to raise a few questions in the mind of the reader to be explored in later sections.
Part I: Bengal
In the first section of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” Singer sets the tone of his paper by pointing at the plight of refugees during the East Bengal crisis in November of 1971. Singer states that people are dying from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care and that it is in the ‘capacity of richer nations to give enough to reduce any further suffering to very small proportions’, yet they refuse to do so [Singer 1]. Singer states that on a general populace level, people have not given large sums to relief funds [Singer 1]. Meanwhile, on the governmental level Singer says that, not only do the governments of richer nations not give enough in overseas aid, but that the governments in question value public works projects, such as the Sydney opera house or the Anglo-French Concorde project more than they do human life [Singer 1].
As we can see Singer has opened his paper with a few key points that he will use later in his final argument.
1) People are suffering and dying from lack of food, shelter, and medical care [Singer 1].
2) It is not beyond the capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any suffering to very small proportions [Singer 1].
3) The people of rich nations have not given large sums to relief funds and the governments of these nations view public works as more valuable than the suffering and death of refugees [Singer 1].
Part II: Suffering is Bad
Singer opens the next section of the paper by stating the empirical claim that ‘suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad’ [Singer 2].
Feeling no need to support this claim, Singer makes the next claim, that, ‘if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it’ [Singer 2].
To support this, Singer uses the following analogy: ‘if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing’ [Singer 2].
Part III: The argument
From these two pages we can now construct Singer’s basic argument:
1) People are suffering and dying from lack of food, shelter, and medical care [Singer 1].
2) ‘Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad’ [Singer 2].
3) ‘If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it’ [Singer 2].
4) It is not beyond the capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any suffering to very small proportions [Singer 1].
TF
5) We ought to prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care.
6) The people of rich nations have not given large sums to relief funds and the governments of these nations view public works as more valuable than the suffering and death of refugees [Singer 1].
TF
7) The way people and governments of affluent nations react to the suffering and death of people due to lack of food, shelter, and medical care is unjustified [Singer 1].
Part IV: Babies and Ponds
As stated previously, Singer uses the ‘baby in a pond’ analogy to support premise three. To properly analyze the analogy, we will approach it line by line.
Line 1) ‘If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out’ [Singer 2].
In this line we can deconstruct the following phrases as such: By ‘shallow pond’ Singer seems to want to relate this to abject poverty and the suffering and death associated with it. ‘Child drowning’ seems to refer to the people who are living in this abject poverty and dying from the suffering it entails, the refugees in the East Bengal crisis for example. Finally for this line, ‘wade in and pull the child out’ seems correlated with the giving of massive levels of financial aid.
Line 2) ‘This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the
death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing’ [Singer 2].
Following the same model of deconstruction, we have the following: ‘Getting my clothes muddy’ is the large monetary sacrifice the people of affluent nations would be giving to the point of those people in the affluent nations living at marginal utility [Singer 7]. The phrase ‘but this is insignificant’ is Singer giving a moral value on the sacrifice made. The line finishes with a rephrasing and reassertion of the empirical claim that ‘suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad’ [Singer 2].
So, if we take our new phrases and plug them into the analogy we arrive with the following:
If I [am aware of the suffering and death caused by abject poverty] and I see [people in abject poverty], I ought to [give massive levels of financial aid]. This will mean [my living at marginal utility], but this is [of no moral consequence], while [suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad].
After the plugging in of the new phrases, we find that the analogy Singer uses says exactly what he wants it to say. Unfortunately, the analogy doesn’t work during the deconstruction phase.
Analogy Problem I
His relation that abject poverty is nothing more than a shallow pond shows a clear non-understanding of what abject poverty entails. A shallow pond is nothing more than a small body of water, whereas abject poverty is something much more complex. Abject poverty has push and pull, governmental, cultural, geographic, and economic factors. Depending on the area, poverty can stem from one or all of these issues and this is only scratching at the surface of possible reasons. The sheer reality is that abject poverty and all it entails could very easily be the subject of a doctoral thesis and we could still not arrive at the heart of the matter.
A better analogy for Singer would be an ocean, as an ocean can an extremely complex entity. Where a pond is dependent upon rain and perhaps algae, an ocean varies widely in temperature, dangers, currents and more.
Analogy Problem II
Singer uses the ‘child drowning’ phrase to obviously get an emotional response from the reader, but one must ask if Singer had ever considered just how condescending he sounds by relating the people who are struggling in abject poverty as ‘drowning children’. By calling these people children, Singer implies that they are helpless and unable to make decisions for themselves regarding their lives or their own future. To go further with this, this phrase implies that the people in question have no control over their own destinies.
In all actuality, Singer should have used ‘a person drowning’ as opposed to ‘a child drowning’. Granted, this would not have given the same emotional response, but it would have been more accurate as well as keeping Singer from looking like a bigot.
Analogy Problem III
When Singer uses the phrase ‘wade in and pull the child out’ to represent the giving of massive quantities of financial aid, he seems to be trying to treat the symptoms of the disease as opposed to curing the illness.
To give an analogy of my own, abject poverty in its many forms is much like having a racking cough. Its root could be a cold, or it could be tuberculosis, but guzzling cough syrup won’t cure the actual illness in either case.
Of course I acknowledge that my counter analogy is a bit on the rough side as it doesn’t quite cover the nuances involved in the act of giving large sums of money to groups of people in abject poverty. For example, it is quite possible that the source of the abject poverty in question could very well be the financial aid itself. Flooding local markets with currency and goods has a tendency to destroy the economies they are entering.
This effect is something that I’m dubbing ‘accidental imperialism’. Imperialism is defined as ‘the way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control’ [Kohn]. ‘Accidental imperialism’ is when these ‘exercises of power’ or ‘indirect mechanisms of control’ are established without the intent for them. Basically, by flooding the economies of the areas stricken by ‘abject poverty’ we create a dependency over a certain amount of time of those people to the nation giving the aid. Analogy Problem IV:
When Peter Singer draws a line between the idea of ‘getting one’s clothes muddy’ [Singer 2] and ‘living at minimal utility’ [Singer 7] he misses the mark of the likeness of the two situations. More specifically, there really isn’t any comparison between the two. On one hand we have a person with muddy clothes, which only affects their standard of living in the sense that they need to run home and change clothes. On the other hand, we skip right past the clothing and focus on the standard of living itself, lowering it until it is only just above being intolerable.
Aside from that, the inclusion of a moral rating of muddy clothes, while important for the analogy itself, is only important in that sense. The truth is that, no one actually considers the moral weight of having muddy clothes on.
Analogy Conclusion:
In Singer’s analogy we are dealing with a simple problem; a person sees a baby drowning in a shallow pond. This problem has a simple solution; the person carries the baby out of the pond. In addition the solution has a simple consequence; the person’s clothes get muddy.
In truth we are dealing with a problem that includes millions of people dying from abject poverty. The solutions are vague and unclear and the proposed solutions are potentially exasperating the problem, or causing the problem to develop in other areas. The consequences from the proposed solutions are at best that the problem is solved for the immediate and at worst, that by giving aid a person is guaranteeing the people in abject poverty are locked into a cycle of dependence on the people of the affluent nations.
Part V: Evaluating the argument:
With the deconstruction of the analogy in mind, we can now turn our attention back upon the main argument.
Premises one and two, People are suffering and dying from lack of food, shelter, and medical cares [Singer 1], and ‘Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad’ [Singer 2], are fairly uncontroversial, at least from the viewpoint of general preference of a given agent. Regardless of a person’s moral conventions, I would find it hard to believe that any person would willingly agree to live a life in where they were suffering and/or dying from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care.
Premise three, however, is considerably more problematic. If Singer were to leave the premise on its own, it would probably be fine. But, as he is supporting the premise with both premise four and with the ‘baby in a pond’ analogy, he runs into serious problems.
If we were to examine the spirit of premise three, in and of itself, even someone who was a moral error theorist could look at it and conclude that, yes, if we can stop bad things, we should probably do so. This could be due to a moral error theorists views on society or any number of reasons. The point isn’t to necessarily argue for moral error theory, but to state that the spirit of the rule sounds plausible.
Singer gets into trouble for a few reasons in regards to the stated premise. The first, Singer isn’t referring to any random ‘something bad,’ he is specifically referring to the symptoms of abject poverty. Once again, using deconstruction and replacing terms, we now have ‘If it is in our power to prevent [abject poverty] or [the things associated with abject poverty]…’ Now we can see the issue more clearly. We don’t know if we can solve or prevent abject poverty and once again referring to the deconstruction of the analogy, abject poverty and all it entails is a vast and complex issue worthy of a paper of its own.
But if we accepted that there may be a way to solve the issue of abject poverty, of which I personally think there is, his solution is still problematic for two reasons. The first is my previous mention of ‘imperialism’ and the means of control exerted by peoples and their governments. Had Singer simply stayed with the plight of refugees from things such as natural disaster, he would have completely stayed away from this issue, but he did not. Singer uses the plight of refugees and those suffering from abject poverty interchangeably.
I feel it necessary to give a little bit of room for Singer’s position, as it is a very wide held belief that such measure would work. For various reasons, be it education or media sources, people seem to think that the solution for poverty is to give the person money or basic goods and services. This of course is a flaw in logic as it does nothing to solve the underlying issues, though admittedly it makes people feel as if they are doing something.
I do not intend to suggest that we should not give any aid or support various NGO’s or the like. What I do suggest, is that, if we are serious about solving the case of abject poverty, we must start looking at root causes and make decisions based upon those rather than a feeling of guilt due to ‘affluence’.
The second problem is his suggesting that not only could the ‘consumer society […] slow down and perhaps disappear entirely,’ but that this ‘would be desirable in itself’ [Singer 7]. Holding aside some of the more colorful language I could use here, I feel it necessary to ask Singer what it is that he thinks our economy is based upon? What I mean here is that, if the ‘consumer society’ were to disappear, it seems that our own economy would likely collapse.
Granted, I am no economist, so I may be entirely mistaken, but upon simple reflection I would ask, where would the people that worked in most of the fields related to retail work once this collapse takes place? From people who deal with the raw materials, to the various stages of transportation of those materials, to the production of the goods, to the shipping of the goods, it seems that these people will no longer have jobs.
What’s more disturbing is that, if Singer had thought through the statement and feels that such an outcome is ‘good,’ then I must ask the obvious question of why. Why is this good? Why does he feel that the people that are a part of the economy in a given affluent nation no longer having an income is a good thing? Not to sound snide, but, not everyone can be a philosophy professor at a major university.
From this point I feel comfortable with moving on to premise four in and of itself. The problem with premise four, ‘it is not beyond the capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any suffering to very small proportions’ [Singer 1], has been dealt with in our assessment of premise three. His assumption in the premise is that affluent nations can give proper assistance to reduce said suffering.
I still assert that, while he refers to monetary assistance, that this is a flawed position. As stated previously, we don’t actually know of a proper solution. To bring even more complications into the mix, it is highly unlikely that any one solution will fit more than a few of the cases of nations or groups of peoples in abject poverty.
From this stance, I feel confident in stating that the conclusion, premise five, falls short. It is no longer a case of ‘we ought to prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care’. It is now more complicated: If we have the knowledge and ability, we should prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care by dealing with their root causes.
Remember that Singer’s position is meant to include those living in abject poverty for reasons other than simple natural disasters. Had he stayed with the narrow scope, his argument would be considerably more sound.
After his first conclusion, Singer goes forward with premise six: The people of rich nations have not given large sums to relief funds and the governments of these nations view public works as more valuable than the suffering and death of refugees [Singer 1].
I agree that, it is more than likely that the people of affluent nations have not given large sums to relief funds. Of course I must temper my agreement with a basic question: In reference to the majority of the peoples of these affluent nations, what percentage of that nation’s wealth do these people have or are in control of?
The second half of the premise is based off of a sub argument in the first paragraph of his paper. Singer outlines the amounts of fiscal aid that a few affluent governments have given versus the amount spent on a public works projects. Using Britain for an example, he states that, at the time of the writing, Britain had given about 15 million in aid and had spent in excess of 275 million on a rapid rail system. He then asserts that the implication is that the government of Britain holds a rapid rail system to be of more worth than the plight of refugees living in abject poverty.
I find Singer’s view on the purpose of a government to be puzzling to say the least. Once again, admitting that I am no economist, I think that upon simple reflection Singer would realize that the money that he proposes the government spends on foreign aid doesn’t actually come from the government itself. People are taxed for that money. Ideally, the government is put into and held in place by the people to represent their needs as a community. If the community is in need of a rapid rail system, which many communities are in need of for various reasons, it is the government’s responsibility to address that issue.
Without getting into too much political philosophy, at least in this section, I assert that a government’s only responsibility is to the safety and welfare of its peoples. It is ethically required to only stand by those principles in which will best benefit its peoples and moreover it would be unethical for a government to forcibly take money intended for the betterment of its own people to benefit the people of another government. Such an act could easily be called theft, but this will also be addressed later.
Section I conclusion:
Upon reviewing the standardized version of Singer’s argument and the analogy that he makes regarding drowning babies, I think it is clear that his argument is at the very least unsound. He, as well as many who agree with him, seems dis-informed at best as to the basics of abject poverty, standard economics and the roles of governments.
The looming question is ‘why?’ I think aside from his assessment on those issues, Singer’s major fault was the assertion that the problem he presents has a moral value. This attitude toward moral obligations is common and often causes both knee-jerk reactions and unethical decision making, which makes us ask ‘what is the separation between morality and ethics?’
Section I Bibliography
Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”; Philosophy and public affairs vol. 1, no. 1
Spring 1972.
Margaret Kohn, “Colonialism”; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy May 9, 2006
