Saturday, February 18, 2012

Question: What would be the consequences of enacting Peter Singer's "solution" to world poverty?

Enacting Singer's solution to world poverty would actually, I think, make the problem worse. Firstly, as a weak note, many people don't appreciate being treated like children - being 'babied' by other nations. I doubt that it applies to every country, but I'm sure that it makes us some small portion of people in these impoverished nations. More seriously, however, enacting Singer's plan would actually perpetuate the problem and make it worse.

Imagine this scenario; there is a community of two men and two women, the land that they live on can support only four people well. These men and women couple up and one has a male child and the other a female. There are now three couples, and two people that the land cannot support; either two people (one-third of the population) will be starving or the whole group will suffer with eating two-thirds of their needs. Imagine now that a nation sends enough money to feed all six of these people. They now no longer have to worry about food and can adjust there priorities on furthering the population. These three couples then have two female children and two male twins, making five couples or ten people on land that can only support four; either six people (three-fifths of the population) will be starving or each member in the group will have to eat forty percent what they require. The nation sending them food then has to sent three times as much food to feed the six people, whom will then create more children. They will continue to grow dependent on the supplying nations, and the supplying nation will be bound to continue giving a growing portion of it's food, or else watch the larger population, which the helped create, starve. In the above example, the supplying nation could either let two starve or let six starve. Additionally, the quality of life in the supplying nation is also decreasing because they will have less food to distribute.

I think it would be best to let them to their own devices, meaning not stealing their resources and not helping them with food or money. Educating them is a good idea too; if you could teach them how to live off of their land it would prevent all that non-sense; unless, of course, the land cannot actually support more than it's original quota.

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