Poverty

The Singer Solution to World Poverty
In “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” written by Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher, outlines the problem with people (mostly Americans) giving a portion of their wealth to poverty stricken people overseas. He uses a fictional story about a man named Bob to relate to his readers in order to get them to understand the meaning or seriousness of the choices they make. He as a utilitarian says that people who don’t help the poverty of the world are immoral, because they are not contributing to the good of mankind and are helping to make more suffering in the world. He gives very convincing insight to why the choices you don’t make effect people you don’t know in very drastic ways.
Peter Singer starts off this article by telling a part of a movie were a retired school teacher, Dora, barley making ends meat is offered one thousand dollars to deliver a homeless boy to a house. She does this by lying to the boy telling him he will be adopted. In that situation right there he is showing how most people are so selfish that they will choose themselves over others in almost any situation, but especially when money is concerned. Once Dora delivers the boy and is paid she buys a television and goes home to enjoy her new luxury. When she gets home she is nuisance by her neighbor who tells her the boy was too old for adoption that they will cut out his organs to sell to others. This is the part of the story were people would ask “why doesn’t Dora ask what they wanted with the boy before she agreed?” the answer that Singer leads us too is simple. She wanted the money and didn’t care what would happen to the boy until confronted with the hard truth, she had taken the boy to die. After this story he lets you know what he’s really getting at. Singer states that Americans spend more than one third of their income on things no more valuable than Dora’s new television, that people who would condemn Dora go home to far nicer places than her...