Last week’s op-ed ‘The Cost of Inaction’, a reaction to the panel discussion of Peter Singer’s ideas that took place on the 23rd of October, contained numerous fallacies.
First, the writer agrees with Professor Singer’s ‘idealistic solution to eradicate poverty through sustainable development aid’. ‘Sustainable development aid’ is a contradiction of terms—aid rewards need, not productivity, and thus encourages need, and not productivity. Thus, aid cannot lead to development, as true development for both living beings and economies requires independence from aid; and aid is not sustainable, because it is doomed to being an unending investment in something that does not have the means to develop.
Second, she states off-hand that ‘“our” affluence is founded on the natural resources and labor of the South’, referring to the developing nations of the world. But, while slavery did play a role in the industrialisation of the United States, it achieved the opposite effect of what the writer claims: it was the southern states that exploited the labour of human beings, and it was they that comprised, until the last few decades, the least-industrialised region in the nation. Perhaps she is instead referring to private trade between the U.S. and the developing world. But private trade is founded on agreements between two consenting parties—and because both parties must consent to an agreement before any exchange can be made, private trade does not exploit anyone, and in fact usually benefits every party involved. If the people of this nation are so wealthy because we have used the labour and resources of the peoples of other nations, doesn’t it follow that those peoples have benefited from this exchange?
The writer goes on to say that ‘in a post-colonial, globalized world, we directly benefit from and perpetuate the world’s established inequalities’. But how do we benefit from inequality? Is she stating that we gain wealth from the fact that we are wealthier than others? Such a statement confuses cause and effect. And to equate ‘having’ with ‘having more’ is to assume that one’s possession of a good comes at the expense of another’s possession of that good, which is to assume that the total of all goods currently in existence has never been different and can never be added to. If this were the case, how is it possible that the average quantity of goods consumed by each of the billions of people alive now is many hundreds of times greater than the average consumed by each of the few millions of people that inhabited the earth ten thousand years ago?
One might claim that this reality is possible because humanity is currently consuming more natural resources than can be replenished by nature—and to a certain extent this is true. But to claim that that is the sole reason for this phenomenon is to assume that the natural resources required for the production of a given good can never change—and this assumption does not hold against the weight of historical evidence.
Food was once cooked over wood-burning fires; then it was cooked over gas-burning stoves; now most people use electric stoves to cook their food, and in a few decades electricity will be produced using primarily renewable resources, such as sunlight, the wind, and ocean waves. Computers were once owned and operated only by government agencies because they were the size of warehouses and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build — now hundreds of millions of people own a computer because they cost a few hundred dollars each and can easily fit on the top of a desk. How did this happen? Advances in technology reduced the amount of resources needed to make a computer, which reduced the cost of making one. And it was not Peter Singer who made this so, but engineers working for their own profit. For all of Peter Singer’s good intentions, he cannot impose his wishes upon reality and expect them to magically come true—the only aspects of reality that he has the power to change are those that relate to him individually. Wishes and aid will not ‘eradicate’ poverty—but freedom and independence will empower individuals to overcome it.
Sincerely,
Daniel Hartsoe
