Quiz 2 - Singer & the Poor

Question 1

thomas malthus

Answer 1

he thought food supplies increase linearly, population exponentially, thus always will be social inequality

Question 2

ehrlich v simon

Answer 2

ehrlich icky v simon smiley. doomsday v don’t worry about it. bet on money decreasing in value, smiley won.

Question 3

Hardin’s arguments against helping poor & problems

Answer 3

1. we should adopt policies that lead to best long term good for everyone.
2. giving up food/aid will hurt future generations and world.
   C: we shouldnt adopt helping poor/food bank/liberal immigration policies

P1. okay
P2. (aside: being our brothers keeper wouldnt work, too many people, marx wouldnt work, not enough space on boat for everyone to fit)

Hardin offers 3 main reasons to support P2:

• Reproduction. if we feed poor, they wont die, they’ll proliferate and make more poor. poor pops grow faster than rich pops. we can’t feed them. let them die now, less ruin later.
• Tragedy of Commons: if we make food bank, poor countries won’t have incentive to make their own, get competitive.
• Teaching them to Fish: the population grows, too many of us fishing in ocean.

Question 4

Singer argument for famine relief & problems

Answer 4

with help from rich nations, poor ones will control their populations - attacking reproduction & teaching to fish premises of hardin’s.

further, IMPORTANT arg: allowing someone to die is not diff from murdering someone, we are morally obligated to give as much as we can until it gets to the point where we are losing so much as to be immoral for us.

(args saying allowing someone to die IS ACTUALLY DIFF from murder:

1. no intention,
2. rule against killing easy but rule for saving hard (negative vs positive duty),
3. certainty of outcome - helping them does not nec mean they’ll be saved but killing is,
4. no determinate person to say is being harmed unlike killing,
5. plight of poor is not my doing so im not responsible)

Singer reply to stuff in parentheses:

1. lack of intention doesnt rule out moral blameworthiness. neglect.
2. moral obligations can be hard, doesnt make them any less right/moral/obligatory
3. uncertainty insufficient. to say we shouldn’t do x because it might not help at all is stupid. driving with seatbelt - u may never get in accident - you should still do it.
4. irrelevant-just cuz u dont know who’s been harmed doesnt mean youre not obligated to fellow human
5. responsibility for acts rather than ommissions is puzzling. not pulling the lever on train is still doing something! not doing something = still doing something.

further, Hardin’s argument doesn’t address Singer’s point that we have duty to give aid, it just says the aid we’ve currently been giving wouldn’t help.

PROBLEMS:

• Population (rebuttal: again, Singer’s already addressed this)
• Property rights: we have RIGHT to use property however we’d like. giving more than that is supererogatory. (rebuttal: even private prop rights ppl have said its right to be charitable, altruism may still be obligatory)
• John Arthur: attacks premise that if we’re not losing something of comparable moral value, we ought to give as much as we can. says, what about kidney, lung? (rebuttal: we can keep enough for security. enough money, enough body parts. perhaps everyone should give blood at least once a year.) Now, Arthur also brings up desert and entitlement - hard workers deserve more than non-hardworkers.