Question

In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Peter Singer presents both a strong and a moderate version of his proposed principle. What is the difference between these two principles? How would somebody who accepted the strong principle act differently from someone who accepted only the moderate principle? Why do you think Singer introduces both versions of the principle?

Answer 1

In the article,“Famine, Affluence and Morality” Peter Singer gives a seemingly devastating critique of our ordinary ways of thinking about famine relief, charity, and morality in general.He argues that people who live in rich countries must thoroughly change their way of life and their conception of morality so that they will become committed to helping those in need.He begins by asking us to consider cases of famine, such as the one in Bengal in 1971, where people were suffering severely and neither governments nor individuals did anything near what would be required to relieve it. He gave two principles-

1. The Strong Singer Principle:“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.”

2. The Weak Singer Principle: “If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.”

From the first principle it can be said that whether one should help those who are suffering or dying doesn’t depend on how one is close to them, unless that makes helping them more difficult, because their distance from one does nothing to lessen their suffering. From both principles together, it follows that one’s obligation to help those who are suffering or dying doesn’t go away if other people who are also in a position to help them aren’t doing anything, because the presence of other people who do nothing is, in moral terms, no different from the absence of people who do something.

Singer comments on this argument by adding that he could get by with a weaker version of the second principle, which would have “something of moral significance” in place of “something of roughly equal moral importance”. He also gives a hypothetical example of the second principle in action: If one is in a position to save a child drowning in a pond, one should rescue the child even though that means dirtying one’s clothes, because that is not a morally significant cost and the child’s death would be an extremely morally bad state of affairs.