Global Poverty and the Duties of the Affluent: Singer's Argument

Peter Singer's 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," published in Philosophy & Public Affairs in direct response to the humanitarian catastrophe of the 1971 Bangladesh famine and the mass displacement of refugees during the Bangladesh Liberation War, remains the single most influential and widely anthologized text in contemporary global-justice ethics. Singer's central argument proceeds from what he presents as an uncontroversial moral principle — that "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" — combined with the empirical claim that citizens of affluent countries can, through donations to organizations providing food, shelter, and medical care, prevent suffering and death from lack of these things at a relatively modest cost to themselves, a cost far smaller in moral significance than the death or suffering it prevents.