What is the responsibility of the individual to saving people dying of famine? What is the responsibility of governments in regard to the same question? Does the Western moral code facilitate moral behavior? These are the questions that Peter Singer addressed in his seminal 1971 essay, "Famine, Affluence and Morality," and nearly 40 years after its publication, the essay continues to be provocative. This research considers the major points of Singer's argument followed by an analysis of the work.
Singer begins his essay with the simple proposition that suffering and death from lack of food is bad (Singer, 1972). He does not argue for this proposition but instead asserts that anyone who disagrees with it would not be swayed by any arguments to the contrary. He does present arguments for his second proposition, which is that if one can prevent suffering and death due to lack of food without sacrificing anything of comparable moral worth, one should. He then allows that one can modify the second proposition to include anything morally significant rather than of comparable moral worth (Singer, 1972).
Taken to its extreme, Singer argues that morality demands that people should support famine relief even to the point of making real sacrifices, such as not buying new clothes for themselves, and even to the point of marginal utility. He uses as an example that of a drowning child; if one comes upon a drowning child in a shallow pond, one should save the child regardless of damage to one's clothes or how many people are also in the area. With advances in technology and transportation, Singer argues that distance is no longer relevant, and we thus have a moral obligation to help those both in our immediate area, but also those around the world of whose suffering we are now aware (Singer, 1972).
Singer wrote about the famine in Bangladesh and the
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