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Famine On Famine

Decent Essays

John Linares Engineering Ethics 9/19/2017
Singer on famine affluence and morality.
The decisions and actions of human beings can prevent any kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level people, have not responded to disasters in any significant way. And at the government level, there has been no sort of massive aid that would help refugees survive for more than a couple of days.
Assistance on great scales will not be forthcoming, forcing to let the refugees starve or help the refugees and more people will starve in the future. There is nothing unique about this situation it is just but a series of major emergencies in various parts of the world, arising both from natural and from man-made causes. And Neither individuals nor governments can claim to be unaware of what is happening.
People can hold all sorts of eccentric positions, but 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. It requires us only to prevent what is bad, and not to promote what is good, and it requires this of us only when we can do it without sacrificing anything that is, from the moral point of view, comparably important. The principle takes no account of proximity or distance. As well it makes no distinctions between cases where I am the only person who could possibly do anything about it.
From the moral point of view,

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