In his lecture at Conn on October 23, Peter Singer, Professor of Ethics at Princeton University, claimed that ‘there is something wrong with not helping those in need’.
First, this claim begs a simple question: Who is to define ‘need’? Should each individual define what he ‘needs’, and thus, according to Professor Singer, what others owe him? Would this not lead to a world in which it were each person’s duty to serve others, and his right to be served by them?
Or should ‘need’ be defined by the people who wish to help those they consider to be in need? In other words, should Peter Singer define the common needs of all human beings?
Politicians throughout the twentieth century have defined the ‘needs’ of their countrymen and proceeded to attempt to meet them — through welfare programs, pension programs, medical insurance programs, public housing programs and other numerous arrangements.
What distinguishes Peter Singer from the politicians that spend other peoples’ money to satisfy other peoples’ alleged ‘needs’?
What distinguishes Peter Singer is that he is advocating for the fulfilment of every human’s basic needs for survival — food, water, shelter and medical care. These, he argues, are the true needs of every human being.
But what does ‘medical care’ mean? The hunter-gatherers of pre-history had no doctors to turn to when they got sick — did they have a right to what today is considered ‘basic medical care’? Of course not — an individual can’t have a right to something that doesn’t exist. Then are there rights that are born with the advent of new creations? Does any being have any right to any thing that is created by individual beings?
Suppose that there is a group of humans inhabiting a forest in which the only thing they consider fit for eating is honey. Since there exists no other source of nutrition for these people, by Professor Singer’s logic they each have a right to a minimal share of honey. Suppose that one of the forest-dwellers goes on a journey to the arctic tundra, bringing along with him ten jars of honey to sustain him through the trip. A group of humans lives in the tundra — but there is no source of honey.
Does each of the tundra-dwellers have a right to a share of the forest-dweller’s honey? They don’t even know what it is, and they don’t need it for the satisfaction of their need for bodily sustenance — they hunt wolves for food, and eat nothing else. They could not have considered a share of honey as their right before the forest-dweller arrived — and yet the forest-dwellers established access to honey as a basic human right.
Shouldn’t this right apply to all people in all places? Or do rights depend on the context of one’s present situation?
One might reply that the forest-dwellers were mistaken in establishing honey as a right when it is food they truly regard as a right. But to them, food means honey — they know of nothing else, or have experienced nothing else, that can be eaten and digested for nutrition, and therefore cannot conceive of a general category of objects that share this fundamental characteristic (or perhaps they denounce all other examples of what we would call food as ‘primitive’ sources of sustenance). Therefore, for them, access to an established minimum quantity of honey is a right, given that access to that which gives them nutrition is a right.
This example (abstract and silly though it may be) has many parallels to the claim by advocates, such as Peter Singer, that all people have the right to basic medical care. Can a person who has used only modern Western medical care his whole life distinguish between ‘medical care’ and the medical care he is accustomed to receiving? Professor Singer does not make this distinction when he asks people of affluence to donate money to fund surgical operations for poor children with health defects — it is modern Western surgical operations that he wants donors to pay for. But every culture that survives today has a medical tradition, and the fact that many of them have survived millennia of human history suggests that the practices of these traditions work to a large degree.
If individuals in ‘developing’ countries believe that the benefits of modern Western medicine are greater than the costs of obtaining it, they will use their own resources to buy access to it — but they should not be forced to abdicate their responsibility to pay for that choice, just as Peter Singer should not use moral blackmail to pressure the billionaires of the world into paying the difference between the cost of a nutritious meal of organically-grown vegetables and the cost of a lunchables meal for my benefit.
One might reply that the forest-dwellers were mistaken in establishing honey as a right when it is food they truly regard as a right. But to them, food means honey—they know of nothing else, or have experienced nothing else, that can be eaten and digested for nutrition, and therefore cannot conceive of a general category of objects that share this fundamental characteristic (or perhaps they denounce all other examples of what we would call food as ‘primitive’ sources of sustenance). Therefore, for them, access to an established minimum quantity of honey is a right, given that access to that which gives them nutrition is a right.
This example (abstract and silly though it may be) has many parallels to the claim by advocates, such as Peter Singer, that all people have the right to basic medical care. Can a person who has used only modern Western medical care his whole life distinguish between ‘medical care’ and the medical care he is accustomed to receiving? Professor Singer does not make this distinction when he asks people of affluence to donate money to fund surgical operations for poor children with health defects—it is modern Western surgical operations that he wants donors to pay for. But every culture that survives today has a medical tradition, and the fact that many of them have survived millennia of human history suggests that the practices of these traditions work to a large degree.
If individuals in ‘developing’ countries believe that the benefits of modern Western medicine are greater than the costs of obtaining it, they will use their own resources to buy access to it—but they should not be forced to abdicate their responsibility to pay for that choice, just as Peter Singer should not use moral blackmail to pressure the billionaires of the world into paying the difference between the cost of a nutritious meal of organically-grown vegetables and the cost of a lunchables meal for my benefit.
Photo by Karam Sethi
that was a pretty awful attempt at trying to take down singer. it really shows how uncomfortable you are with the fact that singer is calling people out on their greed. if you are like most conncoll students(and lord knows i am), you hit the jackpot by being born into this world with an incredible amount of both wealth and privilege. trying (and failing) to make singer’s arguments seem irrational doesn’t invalidate his point that there is indeed something wrong with not helping those in need. and here’s a hint for the semantics game you play with the idea of “need,” people starving in the third world need food, people dying because they have curable diseases need medical care, american families do not need their big suburban homes, they do not need cars, they do not need fashionable wardrobes. anyway you slice it, the lives that most of us in the western world live (myself included) are terribly immoral when you consider the state of the world and the number of people living in abject poverty.