In 1972, Peter Singer published 'Famine, Affluence & Morality' which was nothing but a cascade of 'bandwagon fallacies' meretriciously or mischievously strung together.
As I write this, in November I97I,
it wasn't clear that India would win & Bangladesh would be liberated. Nor was it obvious that the transition to democracy in East Bengal would cause a big famine- just as happened in 1943.
people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care.
Many were being killed by soldiers or 'razakars'.
The suffering and death that are occurring there now are not inevitable, not unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees;
No. It was the Pakistan Army's genocidal policies which caused people to flee.
nevertheless, it is not beyond the capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to very small proportions.
It was beyond Nixon's capacity to save Yahya Khan & his troops from defeat.
The decisions and actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering.
Indira Gandhi decided to put an end to East Bengal's suffering. Also, she hoped the refugees would go home once the Pak army had surrendered.
Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions.
Indira had. Singer was and is an ignorant shithead.
At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any significant way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to relief funds;
Stupid fucker didn't get that guns and soldiers were needed to defeat the genocidal Pak army.
they have not written to their parliamentary representatives demanding increased government assistance;
because they weren't as stupid as Singer.
they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing the refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs.
Sadly, Singer didn't fast to death on this issue. But he did express puzzlement that Britain spent 30 times more money on Concorde- an investment it believed would be profitable- than on famine relief to Bangladesh (a country whose main problem was that it was occupied by genocidal Pakistani soldiers who wanted to change the DNA of the Bengalis by systematically raping their women.)
The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as highly as it values the lives of the nine million refugees.
No. The implication is that it thought Concorde was a profitable investment. Over the course of its lifetime, the Government expected to get much more money out of it than it put into it. Nobody thinks feeding the starving is an investment. It is charity and nothing more.
.... India will be forced to choose between letting the refugees starve or diverting funds from her own development program, which will mean that more of her own people will starve in the future.'
Which is why Indira sent in the Indian Army.
These are the essential facts about the present situation in Bengal.
There was only one essential fact- viz. Pak Army was raping and killing Bengalis. Many ran away. Some stayed to fight. But only the Indian Army could force the surrender of the Pakistanis.
So far as it concerns usi here, there is nothing unique about this situation except its magnitude. The Bengal emergency is just the latest and most acute of a series of major emergencies in various parts of the world, arising both from natural and from man-made causes.
I suppose Singer was thinking of the Biafra famine which was War related. But the Bangladesh campaign was short and did not affect food supply.
There are also many parts of the world in which people die from malnutrition and lack of food independent of any special emergency.
American food aid did save millions of lives till the Green Revolution worked its magic. Speaking generally, only Communist countries- which refused food aid and denied they had a famine- were not getting adequate help from US and UN bodies.
There also were some charitable foundations which did good work. However, dumping food on agricultural countries harms indigenous farmers and creates dependency. By the Seventies, some charitable organisations were being subject to infiltration and takeover by Leftist nutters. The joke was that it was Communist famines which had killed the largest number of people in the Twentieth Century.
I take Bengal as my example only because
Singer assumed his audience was as ignorant of it as he was himself. To be fair, India only officially entered the war on the third of December.
it is the present concern, and because the size of the problem has ensured that it has been given adequate publicity. Neither individuals nor governments can claim to be unaware of what is happening there. What are the moral implications of a situation like this?
Support Indira when she sends in Indian troops. Screw the Baghdad pact. Tell Yahya he is on his own.
In what follows, I shall argue that the way people in relatively affluent countries react to a situation like that in Bengal cannot be justified;
Singer's reaction can't be justified. Sending money and food to Bangladesh would have enriched the Pakistan army and enabled the Razakars to buy support.
People in affluent countries should get on with their own jobs. They shouldn't do stupid shit. Diplomats are paid out of the money raised by taxes. Let them figure out what to do about emergencies in far away places.
The word 'ultracrepidarian' has to do with talking about things of which you have little knowledge or experience. Singer's ultracrepidarian essay was published some months after Indira had solved the Bangladesh problem with military force. After that aid did flood in but the incompetence and corruption of the new regime meant that when a big famine hit in 1974, there was compassion fatigue. Also, the global food market was very tight. It was obvious that food was not a 'distributional' issue. It was agronomic- i.e. a scientific matter of raising yields and economising on inputs.
indeed, the whole way we look at moral issues-our moral conceptual scheme -needs to be altered, and with it, the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society.
If we did stupid shit- of the sort Singer recommends- we would almost immediately become as poor as those we seek to help. Thus the determination to do stupid shit itself reduces the ability to do stupid shit.
In a footnote, Singer says ' There was also a third possibility: that India would go to war to enable the refugees to return to their lands. Since I wrote this paper, India has taken this way out. The situation is no longer that described above, but this does not affect my argument, as the next paragraph indicates.'
It was always known that war-time famines can seldom be alleviated save by one side winning. This is because food aid given to an occupied country could be diverted to the occupying power. Indeed, it may be sold so as to buy weapons.
In arguing for this conclusion I will not, of course, claim to be morally neutral. I shall, however, try to argue for the moral position that I take, so that anyone who accepts certain assumptions, to be made explicit, will, I hope, accept my conclusion.
They would have to be mad or stupid to accept Singer's assumptions. In technical terms, he is committing a fallacy of relevance or 'ignoratio elenchi'
I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.
For whom? My suffering is bad for me but is entertaining for my enemies. Still, I suppose one could say that savants who discover more efficient or efficacious methods of providing food, shelter & medical treatment are considered to have done a good thing. But this doesn't mean that such actions are always good. Suppose resources required for defence are diverted to welfare spending and the Nation suffers conquest and enslavement, then tolerating hunger and disease was the right course of action.
More generally, we understand that it would be bad if Mummy died but we also understand that it would be worse if nobody ever died.
What Singer can't do is to show that the world would be a better place if his policy prescriptions were followed. I suppose, not being an economist, he doesn't have the tools to do it. But, the thing can't be done.
I think most people will agree about this, although one may reach the same view by different routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad.
Sadly, agricultural workers who survive a famine gain higher real wages precisely because the supply of labour fell.
The fact is significant starvation deaths can cause even the most evil of tyrants to change their policies- or fail to enforce them.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those who disagree need read no further.
Nobody needs to read ignorant shite.
My next point is this: 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.
In this case, Indira had to sacrifice 'Ahimsa' (non-violence) to save the lives of millions. One risk she took was that Nixon might 'nuke Calcutta'.
By "without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance" I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing that we can prevent.
In economic terms, Singer is saying 'do good provided there is no opportunity cost'. Sadly, the only thing which isn't scarce is worthless virtue signalling verbiage.
This principle seems almost as uncontroversial as the last one.
It is meaningless. One can ascribe any moral value one likes to an 'opportunity cost'. Suppose Indira hadn't got a defence pact with the Soviet Union. Then she could have said 'I grieve for the people of Bangladesh but won't send in the Army because we Indians are so greatly attached to Ahimsa.' As a matter of fact, Pakistan let the US off the hook by attacking India first.
It requires us only to prevent what is bad, and not to promote what is good, and it requires this of us only when we can do it without sacrificing anything that is, from the moral point of view, comparably important.
Anybody can say anything at all is morally more important than anything else.
I could even, as far as the application of my argument to the Bengal emergency is concerned, qualify the point so as to make it: if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.
Indira sent in the army. But Pakistan attacked first. She had her cake and could eat it too.
An application of this principle would be as follows: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out.
Unless you believe God wants the kid to drown and to defy His Will is impious.
This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.
Or it may be a blessed deliverance because Joseph Kony is about to enter the village. He will rape the kid and get him acddicted to drugs and then turn him loose as a child soldier.
The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is deceptive.
It isn't a principle at all. It's just the assertion that saving a kid from drowning is worthwhile even if your clothes get muddy. The assumption is that you live in an affluent society of a certain sort.
Suppose you are the ADC to the Dictator. You arrive late and with a muddy uniform and you are sent to the Gulag. Your whole family is ruined. Let the kid drown. He'd have starved in any case.
If it were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed.
No. If stupid ideas are acted upon bad shit happens till, at the margin, those stupid ideas are more honoured in the breach.
For the principle takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.
Which is why people can be fooled into thinking that for the low low price of $ 9. 99 you can save the lives of ten trillion African kids & bring them to Jesus.
Secondly, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position.
In other words, the principle ignores 'uncorrelated asymmetries' (e.g. who has the power & responsibility to assist and who is merely a virtue signalling nutter) and thus can't create eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'.
I do not think I need to say much in defense of the refusal to take proximity and distance into account.
Verifiable information is available to the person in proximity. The person at distance may or may not get 'hear-say' information
The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away.
Nothing shows what anybody ought to do though they may speak as though this were not the case- e.g. saying 'the Bible shows me what to do' rather than 'my decision to become a Christian causes me to read the Bible and to alter my behaviour in accordance with what I read there.'
If we accept any principle of impartiality, universalizability, equality, or whatever,
absolutely nothing is entailed.
we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us (or we are far away from him).
Very true. When I serve dinner to my guests I also travel around the world serving dinner to everybody. This is because I accepted some silly principle and thus gained super-powers.
Admittedly, it is possible that we are in a better position to judge what needs to be done to help a person near to us than one far away, and perhaps also to provide the assistance we judge to be necessary.
However, by accepting some stupid principle, you will gain the powers of Superman & Santa Claus combined!
If this were the case, it would be a reason for helping those near to us first. This may once have been a justification for being more concerned with the poor in one's own town than with famine victims in India.
It is the justification for giving much higher Social Security benefits to one's own people than one does to people in other countries.
Unfortunately for those who like to keep their moral responsibilities limited, instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation.
By accepting Singer's principles, you turn into Superman. You can hear anything said in distant galaxies. You can travel faster thant the speed of light so as to go back in time to provide food for the merely peckish.
From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a "global village" has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation.
It made large scale famines possible in countries which hadn't had the thing for centuries. Why? World Wars & Cold Wars & the possibility of exogenous supply shocks created greater vulnerability among populations dependent on food imports from distant continents.
Expert observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed in famine-prone areas, can direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block.
No. It turned out that the Bengali public distribution system was as shitty in 1974 as in 1943. It simply wasn't the case that there was an Oxbridge philosophy professor supervising things in every single Bengali village.
There would seem, therefore, to be no possible justification for discriminating on geographical grounds.
Which is why Peter Singer personally flies around the world wiping the bums of everybody rather than content himself with just wiping his own bum.
There is a legal justification for helping those to whom one has a legal obligation- e.g. the Government of Bangladesh's responsibility to feed East Bengalis under the provisions of the 1913 Act. There is a legal obstacle (to do with fiduciary duty) to using public funds or that of some corporate entity for a purpose not justified by law.
Is there a philosophical justification for accepting legal justifications? Sure. It is called Utilitarianism.
There may be a greater need to defend the second implication of my principle- that the fact that there are millions of other people in the same position, in respect to the Bengali refugees, as I am, does not make the situation significantly different from a situation in which I am the only person who can prevent something very bad from occurring.
Sure it does. Suppose I am the last man left on earth. I feel I have a duty to have sex with any surviving woman who wishes to have a baby. Indeed, I may even feel justified in raping the young and nubile nun whose sacred vows prevent her from consenting to what she herself sees as a necessary act. However, if there are millions of men, I have no duty or justification for having sex with any particular woman. Someone else has a stronger claim with respect to each of them- unless there actually is some girl undiscriminating enough to want me to slip her the sausage.
Again, of course, I admit that there is a psychological difference between the cases; one feels less guilty about doing nothing if one can point to others, similarly placed, who have also done nothing.
The opposite is more likely. You feel your guilt is greater because, unlike everybody else, you are a lovely bloke.
I may mention, I feel more and more guilt that I didn't prove the Reimann hypothesis by creating a 'field of one' because I was too busy fucking super-models. No. They weren't male super-models. They were young human females- albeit imaginary ones.
In this case, my 'guilt' is actually a claim to being a gifted mathematician rather than a fucking moron.
Yet this can make no real difference to our moral obligations.2 Should I consider that I am less obliged to pull the drowning child out of the pond if on looking around I see other people, no further away than I am, who have also noticed the child but are doing nothing?
If you see the life-guard is doing nothing, chances are the child isn't drowning. Also, it isn't a child. It is a walrus. Should of gone to Specsavers- innit?
One has only to ask this question to see the absurdity of the view that numbers lessen obligation.
Numbers create 'collective action problems' whose solutions are studied by Political Economy. Philosophy can only add noise to signal.
It is a view that is an ideal excuse for inactivity; unfortunately most of the major evils-poverty, overpopulation, pollution-are problems in which everyone is almost equally involved.
These are collective action problems whose solutions have existed for thousands of years. Poverty is tackled by raising total factor productivity. Overpopulation is tackled through contraception. Pollution is tackled through Pigouvian taxes, Coasian 'internalization' on the basis of property rights & tort law, as well as legislation. The problem of famine was tackled through buffer stocks & (for rain fed agriculture) water management through check dams, ponds, canals etc.
The view that numbers do make a difference can be made plausible if stated in this way: if everyone in circumstances like mine gave to the Bengal Relief Fund, there would be enough to provide food, shelter, and medical care for the refugees; there is no reason why I should give more than anyone else in the same circumstances as I am; therefore I have no obligation to give more.
It is true that there can be a 'free rider problem'. But mechanism design is the 'reverse game theory' which tackles the problem such that robust solutions to collective action problems become available. England hasn't had a famine since 1623. But it has had periods of quite severe rationing.
Each premise in this argument is true, and the argument looks sound. It may convince us, unless we notice that it is based on a hypothetical premise, although the conclusion is not stated hypothetically. The argument would be sound if the conclusion were: if everyone in circumstances like mine were to give, I would have no obligation to give more than.
The solution to ollective action problems generally involve legal obligations- e.g. for those earning more than a certain amount to pay taxes or for those who are able bodied getting conscripted. A particular philosopher may feel he or she has a supererogatory obligation. But rapists too may think it is up to them to supply sperm to attractive women- or goats.
If the conclusion were so stated, however, it would be obvious that the argument has no bearing on a situation in which it is not the case that everyone else gives .
It had no bearing in a situation where some governments were indeed spending tax money on overseas aid. Moreover, there were international organizations as well as NGOs coordinating aid.
The Bangladesh case was peculiar because
1) Pakistan was an American ally and Pakistan didn't want Bangladesh to get aid. Moreover, Sheikh Mujib was a Socialist allied to Moscow. The US were particuarly angry with his decision to tade with Cuba
2) There was a global food crisis in 1974. Thus though there was enough aid in 1972, there wasn't in 1974. No doubt, corruption in Bangladesh exacerbated the situation.
This, of course, is the actual situation. It is more or less certain that not everyone in circumstances like mine will give. So there will not be enough to provide the needed food, shelter, and medical care. Therefore by giving more I will prevent more suffering than I would if I gave just the same amount.
Sadly, the amount would not be 'material' from the accountancy point of view unless you are very rich indeed. Even then, the logistical problems may be insurmountable.
In a footnote, Singer writes
2. In view of the special sense philosophers often give to the term, I should say that I use "obligation" simply as the abstract noun derived from "ought," so that "I have an obligation to" means no more, and no less, than "I ought to." This usage is in accordance with the definition of "ought" given by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: "the general verb to express duty or obligation." I do not think any issue of substance hangs on the way the term is used; sentences in which I use "obligation" could all be rewritten, although somewhat clumsily, as sentences in which a clause containing "ought" replaces the term "obligation."
Singer ignores the fact that obligation started off as meaning a legal or ritual obligation.
It stems from the Latin verb obligare, meaning "to bind, tie up, or bandage" (ob- meaning "around" or "against" plus ligare meaning "to tie"). Figuratively, it meant to put someone under a legal or moral constraint. [1, 2, 3]Old French: The term passed into early 13th-century Old French as obligacion, meaning duty or responsibility. [1]
Middle English: It entered the English language around 1300 as obligacioun, referring to a binding pledge or a commitment to fulfill a promise. [1]
Modern Meanings: By roughly 1600, the definition expanded to mean a moral duty or a state of indebtedness caused by gratitude
It might be thought that this argument has an absurd consequence. Since the situation appears to be that very few people are likely to give substantial amounts, it follows that I and everyone else in similar circumstances ought to give as much as possible,
Since very few people are chopping off their heads and shoving them up their arses, it follows that we must show greater alacrity in doing so.
that is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one would begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and one's dependents-perhaps even beyond this point to the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more one would cause oneself and one's dependents as much suffering as one would prevent in Bengal.
This is the sort of delusion Simone Weil suffered. She starved herself to death in the belief that people in France were on similar short rations. The coroner decided that she was mad at the time.
The plain fact was that stupid Professors of worthless subjects couldn't alter the condition of people living in far away places. What they could do was alleviate suffering in their own neighborhoods by giving beejays to hobos.
If everyone does this, however, there will be more than can be used for the benefit of the refugees, and some of the sacrifice will have been unnecessary. Thus, if everyone does what he ought to do, the result will not be as good as it would be if everyone did a little less than he ought to do, or if only some do all that they ought to do. The paradox here arises only if
people don't have Rational Expectations- i.e. expect the prediction of the correct economic theory (which has to do with collective action problems). Econ had closed a question to which Philosophy had contributed nothing since the time of Gossen & 'diminishing marginal utility'.
we assume that the actions in question-sending money to the relief funds-are performed more or less simultaneously, and are also unexpected. For if it is to be expected that everyone is going to contribute something, then clearly each is not obliged to give as much as he would have been obliged to had others not been giving too. And if everyone is not acting more or less simultaneously, then those giving later will know how much more is needed, and will have no obligation to give more than is necessary to reach this amount.
This is crazy shite. Everybody reading Singer's paper in 1972 knew that collective action problems re. famine were being tackled in ways pioneered by Hoover and later codified by civil servants like B.R. Sen.
It must be said, prior to the complete break-down of Bretton Woods, there was some sense to campaigning to raise the proportion of GNP devoted to overseas aid because capital markets weren't free to do the job. But, already, people like Myint & Bauer had shown how and why this was counter-productive. It must be said, the Rockerfeller & Ford Foundation did a good job in helping finance the Green Revolution. Oxfam, too, was once quite useful. Sadly, it became the target of anti-apartheid activists because of its association with Barclays Bank. The lunatics were taking over the asylum. Thus, in the Eighties, the World Bank did a great job in Communist China but were hamstrung by 'activists' when they tried to replicate their success in the Nineties in India.
To say this is not to deny the principle that people in the same circumstances have the same obligations,
which is certainly true of tax-payers. This is called 'horizontal equity'.
but to point out that the fact that others have given, or may be expected to give, is a relevant circumstance: those giving after it has become known that many others are giving and those giving before are not in the same circumstances.
Yes they are provided they have Rational Expectations. If they don't, they are irrational and should mend their ways.
Under Singer's assumption you would have a 'cobweb' which would be destabilizing if elasticity of supply (i.e. food aid) is greater than than demand (i.e. food required by the starving). Here you could get a perverse outcome such that indigenous farmers are priced out and thus local supply falls and immeserization increases.
The problem with dependency of this type is that charity can suddenly disappear.
So the seemingly absurd consequence of the principle I have put forward can occur only if people are in error about the actual circumstances- that is, if they think they are giving when others are not, but in fact they are giving when others are.
No. This is merely a failure of coordination. Sadly, these things do happen. There are many places which refuse to accept aid when a disaster strikes because 'too many cooks spoil the broth'- i.e. there are diseconomies.
The result of everyone doing what he really ought to do cannot be worse than the result of everyone doing less than he ought to do, although the result of everyone doing what he reasonably believes he ought to do could be.
Governments exist because collective action problems arise where 'externalities' arise. Philosophers may not know this but, if you really care about famines you need to study the economic conditions under which they arise or are nipped in the bud.
If my argument so far has been sound,
it is ignorant nonsense
neither our distance from a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil.
There is no obligation to do stupid shit- e.g. respond to an economic problem by talking philosophical bollocks.
I shall therefore take as established the principle I asserted earlier.
viz. that individuals acting independently can solve collective action problems. That is why, in 1939, many British people bought guns and uniforms and went off to fight the Nazis. It isn't the case that they left it to their Government to recruit soldiers and to train and arm them and then send them into battle under experienced commanders.
As I have already said, I need to assert it only in its qualified form: if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening,
as individuals, it isn't, if the thing has the hallmarks of a 'collective action problem'- i.e. large group size, externalities, non-convexities, preference revelation problems, concurrency problems, high coordinations costs etc.
without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.
If there is an opportunity cost, this will be case. The problem is that there is no objective way to say what is or isn't morally significant.
The outcome of this argument is that our traditional moral categories are upset.
Our common sense is outraged. This nutter thinks collective action problems can be solved by individual actions of a morally motivated type.
I suppose there were people who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War because of their moral beliefs. But they achieved nothing whatsoever. That is why they accepted immoral alliances (e.g. with Stalin) so as to avoid defeat.
The traditional distinction between duty and charity cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place we normally draw it. Giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund
doesn't actually give any relief to a Bengali unless some Government- e.g. that of Indira or that of Mujib- permits and facillitates it.
is regarded as an act of charity in our society. The bodies which collect money are known as "charities."
Which, at one time, they were. Then, many of them were taken over by lefty gobshites.
These organizations see themselves in this way-if you send them a check, you will be thanked for your "generosity." Because giving money is regarded as an act of charity, it is not thought that there is anything wrong with not giving. The charitable man may be praised, but the man who is not charitable is not condemned.
In a free society anyone can condemn anybody for anything
People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief.
They don't even weep bitter tears over their own selfish refusal to suck off hobos.
(Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.)
Whereas Singer always remembers that the alternative to giving a lecture is to spend that time sucking off hobos. He weeps bitterlay at his moral failure.
This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need.
Singer is not providing for the important needs of horny hobos. Shame on him!
We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief.
We wouldn't be achieving anything 'material'- i.e. impactful enough to be registered by Accounants.
By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving.
This is the delusion fostered by the Charity sector. Still, they pay their employees which is why they aren't hobos whom Peter Singer ought to be sucking off.
It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm.
If everybody did so, the economy would collapse. If a few do so, nothing changes. Some boring shitheads get to go around puffed up with pride. But are they sucking off hobos? No? If so they are selfish cunts.
To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called "supererogatory"-an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.
This is an ipese dixit assertion of no greater or lesser worth than my claim that Singer should suck off hobos.
(it might)..be interesting to consider why our society, and most other societies, do judge differently from the way I have suggested they should.
The answer is that all societies understand the difference between collective action problems and those where no coordination between individuals is required (other than which spontaneously appears- e.g. the price vector in the market)
In a well-known article, J. 0. Urmson suggests that the imperatives of duty, which tell us what we must do, as distinct from what it would be good to do but not wrong not to do, function so as to prohibit behavior that is intolerable if men are to live together in society.
Where a collective action problem arises a person is entrusted with a particular duty in return for remuneration or as part of a liturgical duty enforced by the State.
This may explain the origin and continued existence of the present division between acts of duty and acts of charity.
A person who helps the poor because he is paid to do so by a Charity is said to be doing his duty. However, if there is a supererogatory aspect to this, or his 'transfer earnings' are very high, we may say that he acts not out of duty but as a matter of charity or profound altruism.
Moral attitudes are shaped by the needs of society, and no doubt society needs people who will observe the rules that make social existence tolerable.
It needs policemen who will arrest those who make social existence intolerable. Singer writes as though he was unaware that Governments exist everywhere. The police get paid to catch & lock up bad hombres.
From the point of view of a particular society, it is essential to prevent violations of norms against killing, stealing, and so on. It is quite inessential, however, to help people outside one's own society.
But it could be helpful in a Cold War context. The Bangladesh famine was America's way of telling the Muslims in OPEC that Uncle Sam had a 'food weapon' more powerful than the 'oil weapon'. One result was that Saudi Arabia subsdized agriculture to an extent ruinous of its acquifers. Thus, forty years ago, Saudi Arabia was exporting water melons!
If this is an explanation of our common distinction between duty and supererogation, however, it is not a justification of it.
Anything can be the justification of anything else in the eyes of some person. My fart is my justification for having proved the Reimann hypothesis while making love to Arsulla Undress. Sadly, I failed to write it down but my justification for that is my having shat myself.
The moral point of view requires us to look beyond the interests of our own society.
We don't know what is beyond the interests of anyone or anything.
Previously, as I have already mentioned, this may hardly have been feasible, but it is quite feasible now.
Could Singer acquire enough food to ship to Bangladesh in 1974 so as to avert famine deaths? No. The US government could have decided to draw down strategic reserves and requisition or otherwise arrange shipping. They may even have been able to 'put boots on the ground' to ensure the distribution of food. But the Americans were in no mood to repeat the mistakes they had made in Vietnam.
From the moral point of view, the prevention of the starvation of millions of people outside our society must be considered at least as pressing as the upholding of property norms within our society.
This is sheer fantasy. The American Government did have the food reserves & the military might to intervene. Nixon did send the fleet to the Bay of Bengal on December 10. A 'humanitarian mission' would not have been opposed but the American voter was war weary.
It has been argued by some writers, among them Sidgwick and Urmson, that we need to have a basic moral code which is not too far beyond the capacities of the ordinary man, for otherwise there will be a general breakdown of compliance with the moral code.
Something like this has always obtained which is why courts have faced no great difficulty in adjudicating 'moral clauses' or detecting and punishing moral lapses of a justiciable type.
Crudely stated, this argument suggests that if we tell people that they ought to refrain from murder and give everything they do not really need to famine relief, they will do neither, whereas if we tell them that they ought to refrain from murder and that it is good to give to famine relief but not wrong not to do, so, they will at least refrain from murder.
More crudely stated, this argument is that a fucking cretin will be listened to if he says 'please don't eat your own shit'. The fact is nobody gives a toss about what professors of worthless shite are saying.
The issue here is: Where should we drawn the line between conduct that is required and conduct that is good although not required, so as to get the best possible result? This would seem to be an empirical question, although a very difficult one.
Yet courts decide such questions all the time.
One objection to the Sidgwick-Urmson line of argument is that it takes insufficient account of the effect that moral standards can have on the decisions we make.
This is like saying eating your own shit takes insufficient account of piss.
Given a society in which a wealthy man who gives five percent of his income to famine relief is regarded as most generous,
He isn't if he keeps banging on about it. We think Bill Gates is a narcissistic self-promoter, not Mother fucking Theresa.
it is not surprising that a proposal that we all ought to give away half our incomes will be thought to be absurdly unrealistic.
It is like the proposal that all Utilitarians should suck off hobos.
In a society which held that no man should have more than enough while others have less than they need,
there was no such society. Marx said 'to each according to his contribution'. Also it turned out that living in poverty- like Mahatma Gandhi or the Pope- cost much more than living like a Rothschild.
such a proposal might seem narrow-minded.
As might my proposal than Singer suck off hobos when, the truth is, he should also let Nazis shit on his tits.
In order to show that my conclusions, while certainly contrary to contemporary Western moral standards, would not have seemed so extraordinary at other times and in other places, I would like to quote a passage from a writer not normally thought of as a way-out radical, Thomas Aquinas.
He believed that he would get to Heaven for all eternity. If you believe the same you might even chop off your own bollocks- like Origen.
Now, according to the natural order instituted by divine providence, material goods are provided for the satisfaction of human needs. Therefore the division and appropriation of property, which proceeds from human law, must not hinder the satisfaction of man's necessity from such goods. Equally, whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. So Ambrosius says, and it is also to be found in the Decretum Gratiani: "The bread which you withhold belongs to the hungry; the clothing you shut away, to the naked; and the money you bury in the earth is the redemption and freedom of the penniless."
Also if you don't hand over lots of money to the Church- while letting the Vicar sodomize your son- you will BURN IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY!
Still, you can't say the Vatican wasn't broad-minded. The Pope was prepared to let Henry VIII marry off his bastard son to his legitimate daughter.
I now want to consider a number of points, more practical than philosophical, which are relevant to the application of the moral conclusion we have reached. These points challenge not the idea that we ought to be doing all we can to prevent starvation, but the idea that giving away a great deal of money is the best means to this end. It is sometimes said that overseas aid should be a government responsibility, and that therefore one ought not to give to privately run charities.
What's wrong with creating jobs in the voluntary sector? There are worse things you can do with your money more particularly if coke whores are involved.
Giving privately, it is said, allows the government and the noncontributing members of society to escape their responsibilities.
If you suck off a hobo, Donald Trump escapes his responsibility for doing so.
This argument seems to assume that the more people there are who give to privately organized famine relief funds, the less likely it is that the government will take over full responsibility for such aid.
In a free society, the Government can't prevent such voluntary action. Speaking generally, Exchange Control under Bretton Woods made an exemption for charitable outflows.
his assumption is unsupported, and does not strike me as at all plausible. The opposite view-that if no one gives voluntarily, a government will assume that its citizens are uninterested in famine relief and would not wish to be forced into giving aid-seems more plausible. In any case, unless there were a definite probability that by refusing to give one would be helping to bring about massive government assistance, people who do refuse to make voluntary contributions are refusing to prevent a certain amount of suffering without being able to point to any tangible beneficial consequence of their refusal.
Sadly, there is no way of knowing if a voluntary contribution will definitely reduce suffering by some measurable amoung.
So the onus of showing how their refusal will bring about government action is on those who refuse to give.
Only in the sense that the onus is on Singer to suck off hobos. In other words this is an arbitrary ipse dixit assertion of a foolish type.
I do not, of course, want to dispute the contention that governments of affluent nations should be giving many times the amount of genuine, no-strings-attached aid that they are giving now.
Bauer & Myint, who were economists (the latter was Burmese) thought Aid could be very harmful indeed. On balance, they were right.
I agree, too, that giving privately is not enough, and that we ought to be campaigning actively for entirely new standards for both public and private contributions to famine relief. Indeed, I would sympathize with someone who thought that campaigning was more important than giving oneself, although I doubt whether preaching what one does not practice would be very effective.
This is like Amartya Sen who believes there are 'second order' public goods- i.e. campaigning for more public goods is itself a public good. But such second order work can crowd out first order provision. Like the Bengali students who burnt buses to protest agains the lack of buses, the underlying problem was exacerbated.
Singer, however, views this as a desirable outcome!
..., it should be clear that we would have to give away enough to ensure that the consumer society, dependent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than giving to famine relief, would slow down and perhaps disappear entirely.
In which case we could never again give money away. Rather, we would have to beg.
There are several reasons why this would be desirable in itself.
Begging is good. Having money is bad.
The value and necessity of economic growth are now being questioned not only by conservationists, but by economists as well.
Back then Schumacher was respected. The fucker thought Burma had chosen the right path to rise!
It is sometimes said, though less often now than it used to be,
because the thing was blindingly obvious
that philosophers have no special role to play in public affairs,
Stalin was a philosopher.
since most public issues depend primarily on an assessment of facts. On questions of fact, it is said, philosophers as such have no special expertise, and so it has been possible to engage in philosophy without committing oneself to any position on major public issues. No doubt there are some issues of social policy and foreign policy
and policy regarding famine & structural volatility in agriculture
about which it can truly be said that a really expert assessment of the facts is required before taking sides or acting, but the issue of famine is surely not one of these.
No. It has always been a purely positive, ideographic, matter. Fine words butter no parsnips. Good intentions pave the path to hell. You need high level local knowledge to establish a structural causal model and thus identify those parameters amenable to improvement.
The facts about the existence of suffering are beyond dispute.
Cancer causes suffering. I don't dispute that. But I don't want Singer involved in diagnosing or treating cancer or any other type of disease.
I wouldn't even want him to raise money for Cancer Research. Why? He has shit for brains. He'd probably waste the money on some charlatan who would mislead the public.
Nor, I think, is it disputed that we can do something about it, either through orthodox methods of famine relief
known only to experts in that field.
or through population control
see above.
or both. This is therefore an issue on which philosophers are competent to take a position.
Philosophers, who know no Mathematics and no Physics, can take a position on String Theory. But so can a drunken hobo. What they can't do is make any useful contribution to it because they can't understand it in the first place.
The issue is one which faces everyone who has more money than he needs to support himself and his dependents,
i.e. has some 'discretionary income'. The problem here is that how you use discretionary income impacts what you will earn in the future. Spend a lot on booze & hookers & you may become unemployable. On the other hand, you may be promoted more speedily if you spend on smart suits, an expensive watch or car, and cultivate a taste for fine wine.
Interestingly, a reputation for charitable giving boosts credit-worthiness especially in 'high-trust' in-groups. You are sending a signal that you have money to spare. True you could have spent it on cocaine, but cocaine is addictive. It is easy to go cold turkey on charity.
or who is in a position to take some sort of political action. These categories must include practically every teacher and student of philosophy in the universities of the Western world.
Were teachers of philosophy well paid in 1972? Not really. What political action were they capable of? The French philosophers who came out onto the streets in '68, had gone back to the class-room. De Gaulle had triumphed. The future of the Left lay with Mitterand not some maître à penser
If philosophy is to deal with matters that are relevant to both teachers and students,
famine? That's a big problem in the Philosophy faculty?
this is an issue that philosophers should discuss.
so as to exhibit their own stupidity to those who might not have been aware that the subject had become adversely selective of imbecility.
Discussion, though, is not enough. What is the point of relating philosophy to public (and personal) affairs if we do not take our conclusions seriously?
Philosophy is like Literature- i.e. part of Paideia. Acquiring the rudiments of such disciplines signals breeding.
In this instance, taking our conclusion seriously means acting upon it.
By quitting Academica & taking a job with Oxfam?
The philos-opher will not find it any easier than anyone else to alter his attitudes and way of life to the extent that, if I am right, is involved in doing everything that we ought to be doing.
A French philosopher- Bernard Henri Levi- went to Bangladesh and got a post with the new government. Singer is a couple of years older than BHL.
At the very least, though, one can make a start.
Singer did start giving away 20 to 40 percent of his income. I suppose, Leftists mocked him for being a 'bourgeois idealist'.
The philosopher who does so will have to sacrifice some of the benefits of the consumer society, but he can find compensation in the satisfaction of a way of life in which theory and practice, if not yet in harmony, are at least coming together.
Singer wasn't intimidated by the Maoists in the economy. He had lost family members to Hitler &, being Australian, was in no mood to truckle to hatemongering lunatics.
One may say he was stupid but he was a man of character. Sadly, the same can't be said for some of the 'effective altruist' fraudsters.
