PHIL448 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Swift Transportation
22 Dec 2016
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Human suffering and poverty are occurring people lack food, shelter, medical care. People have not made necessary decisions to end human suffering and poverty (i. e. , humanitarian aid, demanding increased government assistance, demonstrating, etc. ) No government has given the sort of massive aid that would enable refugees to survive more than a few days. Argument: when people are dying from preventable deaths, and wealthier nations have the means to save their lives with little cost there is a moral obligation to do so: done by reconfiguring the moral conceptual scheme. Singer"s main assumption (premise 1): assuming suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. So he comes up with a moderate one. Without causing anything else comparably bad to happen. Without failing to promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad thing we can prevent. No account of proximity or distance cannot discriminate against because someone is far away from us.
