Asher Sisneros

Peter Singer makes a good point: even though most people think that it is wrong for you to sacrifice another person’s life for your benefit, they still prefer to spend their own money on unnecessary luxuries rather than donate it to charity to save lives. In his exact words, “[W]hatever money you’re spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away” (Singer 1999, p. 236). 

To an extent, I think Singer is right. As a society, we should definitely be more charitable. As an individual, I should be more proactive in looking for ways to help other people, and I should be more willing to give to those in need. I should also waste my money less. 

I’m not a utilitarian, but even from a utilitarian perspective, I’m not sure that giving almost all of your money away to charity is necessarily the best way to create human flourishing. Sometimes, thrift enables entrepreneurship, and sometimes that entrepreneurship creates greater prosperity. That is what happened during the Industrial Revolution. Even with its many faults and its pervasive corruption, as Bentley, Zielger, and Streets-Salter point out, “The populations of European and Euro-American peoples rose sharply during the Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reflecting the rising prosperity and standards of living that came with industrialization” (2016, p. 500). That industrialization would’ve been impossible without investment, and it would’ve been impossible without savings. You can’t have any savings or any investment if you donate almost all of your money to charity. 

While I agree with the intent behind Singer’s point, I would alter it slightly. Instead of saying that we should donate all of our money to charity except for the bare minimum that we need to survive, I would say that we should donate more to charity, and that we should stop spending money frivolously. Singer has a noble intention, but without realizing that you can sometimes decrease poverty by not donating to poverty charities, his “solution” to poverty just misses the mark.

References

Bentley, J.H., Ziegler, H.F., & Streets-Salter, H.E. (2016). Traditions and encounters: A brief global history, vol. 2: From 1500 to the present. McGraw Hill Education. 

Singer, P. (Sep. 5, 1999). The Singer solution to world poverty. The New York Times.In Russ Schafer-Landau (Ed.), The ethical life: Fundamental readings in ethics and moral problems, 4th Ed. Oxford University Press.