ryanvergel
New Member
This is completely worthless. I have no idea why people even bother to think up stuff like this. You can't draw up these hypothetical situations. Its like people pointing to one place in a pokemon tournament. Say I won a battle in the 3rd round on a coin flip. I was undefeated at the time, but I didn't make top cut that day. If I had lost that battle I might've made top cut. I would've played different opponents and EVERYTHING would've been different. It works the same way with your example. You can't look at past events and just "plug and play" with them. You can't assume that if you did just ONE thing differently that things would be better (or worse). If you do one thing differently, then every subsequent event also would be different. If everyone gave away that much money, then the economy could collapse (more than it already has). Or maybe we would run out of food. Or maybe Africa wouldn't be in so much trouble. The point is we don't know what would happen, and you can NEVER just say that everyone keeping $30,000 for themselves and giving the rest away would solve all of our problems. It is a blind and backwards way of thinking.
I was hoping you would pay attention to this paragraph more:
Now, evolutionary psychologists tell us that human nature just isn't sufficiently altruistic to make it plausible that many people will sacrifice so much for strangers. On the facts of human nature, they might be right, but they would be wrong to draw a moral conclusion from those facts. If it is the case that we ought to do things that, predictably, most of us won't do, then let's face that fact head-on. Then, if we value the life of a child more than going to fancy restaurants, the next time we dine out we will know that we could have done something better with our money. If that makes living a morally decent life extremely arduous, well, then that is the way things are. If we don't do it, then we should at least know that we are failing to live a morally decent life — not because it is good to wallow in guilt but because knowing where we should be going is the first step toward heading in that direction.
is it unrealistic to expect households to give up 30,000 a year? Yes. Peter Singer is a crazy Utilitarian guy who is a giant hypocrite. However, he makes very valid points- he analyzes the problems very well and realizes that we should indeed feed and help these people, but he has a poor way of actually SOLVING the problem. It is his solution that you disagree with- not the assessment that we could help these people and that these people are indeed deserving of our care as much as people in closer proximity to us are.
If we are going to be greedy and careless, shouldn't we at least KNOW of our greed and carelessness?