Peter Singer's Moral Obligation

Life isn’t always simple for those in third world countries. Because of this, Peter Singer has said that we as a society have a moral obligation to help them by donating to charities. However, not everyone agrees with this point. Personally, I believe that you never have a moral obligation to do anything, unless you personally believe that you must. Some people may not feel obligated to help the citizens of poor countries. More often than not, this is because they believe that their charity will lead to the less fortunate becoming more reliant on wealthier people. Others may say that donating to charities is important. These people claim that by not donating you are accepting the fact that you could have saved someone’s life, and decided against it. Whatever your reasoning is for choosing one way or another, the decision is ultimately yours to make, and nobody else's morals should change what you think about it. Anyone who watches TV has seen the advertisements for charities of all kinds. Many of these ads claim to be helping starving children, people with cancer, and even
They will also tell you that if you chose not to help, then you are effectively making the problem worse. Peter Singer makes this point in his paper, The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle. He says that as a society we have a moral obligation to help those in need, and by doing so we can change the world for the better. Singer relates the issue to a scenario where you are passing a drowning child in a pond on your way to work. Almost everybody he has talked with has said that they have a moral obligation to help them. These people have also told him that they would be just as obligated to help if the child was in another part of the world, but they could save them just as easily. Because of this, Singer says that donating to charities is not much of a different