Philosopher Peter Singer sets forth in his article, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," the premise that the existence of famine and mass starvation in the world is morally intolerable. He proceeds from that premise to argue that individuals in the developed countries are morally obligated to give of their own resources to help the starving, if necessary to the point of reducing themselves to a subsistance level. At the very least, they should give a substantial part of their material wealth, vastly larger than what most people give in practice. Moreover, he argues that such giving should be regarded not as a specifically praiseworthy standard of moral excellence, but as a basic standard of moral decency (p. 840).
The fundamental defect of Singer's argument is that, given our experience of human nature, he sets the moral bar at an impossibly high level. Very few of us readily would or could live up to the standard he asks of us. If society attempted to set its moral standards at Singer's level, we can predict one of three consequences. If his standard were to be supported by sanctions, these sanctions would have to be so strict and pervasive as to produce either an intensely warlike society or one founded on social (and probably political) totalitarianism. If his standard were not supported by social sanctions, most people would have to regard themselves as hopelessly amoral, and would thus be left to live in a moral vacuum, with no attainable standards to set for themselves. In each of these cases, we will suggest that Singer's overall argument is self-nullifying, since it requires moral sacrifices far greater than the mere reduction of material wealth.
In the following discussion, we will first consider his conclusion, and expand upon our basis for (tentatively) rejecting it. But if our rejection is to be more than tentative, we must also address his arguments, and reject either his premises or the logical conclus...