famine essays

famine essays In this article, Peter Singer considers the question of whether it is morally ok for affluent people to spend their money on luxuries for themselves while less fortunate people are starving. For demonstrating his point of view, he used the state of East Bengal, where many people were suffering from constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war. He believed that the decisions and actions of human beings can prevent this incident. With his example, Bengal incident, he throws a considerable argument. Which is the reactions from the people in rich nation towards the Bengal incident can not be justified. To begin his argument he makes some assumptions. First, suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. Second, 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. However, the principal is being deceptive because it takes no account of proximity or distance. Meaning that there is no moral difference whether the person I am capable of helping is someone, I knew for long time, ten yards away from me, or someone, I never met, thousand miles away from me. And, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one amound millions in the same position. By using this statement, he also says that this could be the reason why people in rich nation would not give their supports to Bengal, in other words, if a person is physically near to us, it makes it more likely that we shall help him, but, yet it is still not justified because even if the people in rich nation is far away from Bengal, they still can help the people in Bengal by using instant communications and swift transportation. No possible justification is given to the discriminating on geographical grounds. ...