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The Singer Solution To World Poverty Summary

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Analysis: The Singer Solution to World Poverty

In Peter Singer’s The Singer Solution to World Poverty he discusses the merits of giving up our luxuries in order to help save someone’s life. He has a situation (hypothetical) of Bob who has saved his entire life to buy a Bugatti. He has not insured the car and is taking it for a drive, he parks the car by the end of a rail way track and gets out for a walk. While walking he can see a train coming down the track straight for his car. Now he can throw a switch in order to divert the train away from his car (his pride and joy) but there is a child playing on the train tracks. Now he comes the moral dilemma he can either save his car or possibly kill the child. In the end he decides to throw the …show more content…

It’s extraordinary how much money we spend on things that are completely unnecessary to our survival. Not every house needs a TV in every room and not all students need a personal computer. However we as people are greedy by nature and therefor do end up spending tons of money on things like that. This is promoted more and more through social media, TV, magazines, newspapers, etc… Yet we could be spending more (if not all) of our extra money of helping others who have nothing. Peter Unger a New York University Philosopher calculated the cost to save a child’s life “By his calculation, $200 in donations would help a sickly two-year-old child transform into a healthy six-year-old” (Singer). However, there are certain problems with his argument.
Many Americans may not be able to afford to give all of their extra money towards charity. What if an emergency happened and they had no extra money to deal with the problem? What if the $30,000 quite a bit lower than the cost of surviving in the area that you live? These raise some serious questions on my part on how realistic his argument is. Also that cost of living will change with inflation over the years meaning the cost could be lower or higher in the future depending on the circumstances. There are still many arguments that Singer is wrong on his opinion of

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