Sacrificing For Strangers

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“The Singer Solution To World Poverty” Critique Sacrificing For Strangers Have you ever stopped to think before buying those pricy new shoes, that new designer handbag or the latest gadget in the technology world that the money you are spending could be used to save children’s lives? That is the seed that Peter Singer, the author of the essay The Singer Solution To World Poverty plants in your mind. Singer, born in Australia, is a popular author of philosophy books on ethics and bioethics. In this essay, Singer addresses the issues of human selfishness, and how it affects the ability to “ignore an appeal for money to help children you will never meet”. Singer considers himself a utilitarian philosopher, or someone who uses the end result to judge whether things or right or wrong. In the essay, he states that selling a child to organ peddlers is equal to failing to donate money to children. I do not agree with his statement, because I believe certain factors in a person’s personal background can affect how they make decisions to help others. In the essay, Singer includes many scenarios to help get his point across. He opens the essay with the plot of the Brazilian film Central Station. In the film, a woman named Dora has an easy opportunity to make money. All she has to do is find a young boy and convince him to follow her to a place where he will be adopted by “wealthy foreigners”. After she accomplishes this task and gets her money, she spends some of the money on a luxury, a new television set. She later finds out that the “wealthy foreigners” were actually organ peddlers who will be killing the boy and selling his organs. The movie becomes a race against time as she does everything in her power to get the boy back safely. Singer states that Dora only redeemed herself by going out to find the boy because if she hadn’t, she would have been seen as a monster

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