Today in class we discussed “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” this time not trying to fit together slivers of the entire essay, but rather establishing what kind of thoughts Singer was trying to convey to the reader, and how he went about that. After having a class discussion, we were instructed to jot down a couple questions which we thought were raised in this essay. The questions which I thought the essay was imploring were: 1. Is it okay to remain silent while others are suffering? 2. Is it an obligation to help others? 3. Is allowing something to occur the same as doing it yourself?
Our homework was to watch the video, “4 Generations- The Water Buffalo Movie.” The similarities between this movie and “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” were very apparent: The cost of a water buffalo is $250, and it helps farmers to unsettle the dirt in their farms, making the soil more fertile. Additionally it can serve as a family’s food supply for a full half year. As mentioned in “TSSTWP,” the cost of saving a child’s life and sustaining them for 4 years is $200. Both donations help support children and adults alike, when they themselves cannot make a living. Both donations give hope to those who forgot the humanity of those who are much more fortunate than they are. And, both donations remind us of how fortunate we ourselves are, to remember those necessities we take for granted that much of the rest of the world doesn’t have.
Integrating the questions I believe that Singer tried to explore can be related to “4 Generations.” “Is it an obligations to help others?” Certainly if I or the director of this movie, Thompson, were oblivious to all of this, we would not be able to take action to address the poverty problem in China, and how a mere gift of a water buffalo, costing just shy of a 5th generation iPod could support a family in so many ways. More specifically, we would not even know what the problem was. If we are oblivious to what we could do, and then say, a Chinese family died just because they did not have a water buffalo to supply food for those 6 months, are we still at fault?
Let me pose a hypothetical situation: Suppose I possessed only $250 dollars to donate. Would I donate $200 to help a sickly 2 year old grow to a healthy 6 year old, or would I buy a water buffalo for a poor farming family in rural China? Since Singer claimed that we are all in the situation of choosing between the life of an innocent child, and our own luxury, or in the hypothetical situation I posed, since we are all in the situation of having to choose between an innocent child’s life, or an innocent, poor family in rural China, choosing one over the other would detrimentally affect the other. That is, if I chose to donate my money to the Chinese family, the child I did not choose to donate to would probably die, and if I chose to donate the money to the child, the Chinese family would keep having to fend for themselves; even when family members passed away or when family members committed suicide. In other words, no matter what I did, I’d still have to kill someone, since Singer states that allowing something to happen is the same as doing it. “(Bob) must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation.” (Singer, 4). From what Singer said, allowing a child to die because you weren’t willing to make that $200 donation, is the same as letting that child get run over by a train: only you would benefit. Therefore, is Singer not killing someone as well, if he could not donate to both the child AND the Chinese family?
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