What Is Peter Singer's Famine, Affluence And Morality?

Peter Singer in his famous paper “Famine, Affluence and Morality” begins with assumptions “The suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad” also he gives his second assumption 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 gives an application of his principle, by ”the drowning child in the pond” case. Imagine you are walking past a pond and you see a little toddler drowning in the shallow pond, you have 2 options now: first- you can pull out he child and save him, however you will ruin your favorite expensive shoes. Or you have a second option of just ignoring the child, but you will not ruin your shoes. We can agree that whoever choses the second option would be considered as a moral monster.

He then provides us his maxim: “It requires us only to prevent what is bad, and not to promote what is good, and it requires this from of us only when we can do it without sacrificing anything that is from the moral point of view, comparably

One way of looking at this pond case is the self-referential altruism, on this view; your moral obligation to help a person varies directly with the degree of closeness of your social relationship or social connections to that person. You only feel moral obligations to close people, e.g. family members, friends, neighbors… We have different levels of moral responsibility to different people. Among humans, we owe least of all to distant needy strangers, with whom that person has no social relationship at all. Therefore you don’t have a significant amount of moral obligations to the staving children in the other parts of the world; there is no social relationship between you and that child. Therefore whether we prevent starvation in other parts of the world, or not, is not a serious moral