The Issue of Impersonality

Singer’s paper presents a solid view on moral obligation to charitable acts, and charitable giving in particular, and it seems that if everyone were held to the principles he presents, getting significant aid to people  in need all the way across the globe would be a nearly trivial task with minimal negative consequences to the people involved. There are things preventing such a simple implementation of any plan similar to Singer’s, though. He acknowledges and addresses one (among others he wrote on) when he talks about the impossibility of full participation, but there is, in my opinion, another shortcoming which needs to be addressed. Singer puts forward that there is no inherent moral difference between helping someone that is near versus someone miles away, which I agree with, but I would contend that there is a personal difference. It is very hard to deeply care about something far away that one cannot see or fully conceptualize, making the participation problem even larger, which makes Singer’s paper seem somewhat idealist in my mind. My proposed solution is thus: move a portion of our government’s current military budget into a fund exclusively for relief aid. I won’t claim expertise on our current budget or the amount of money required to make a significant impact when put towards aid, so I won’t deal in concrete numbers, but I will say that a relatively small portion should be required. This creates an impersonal solution to what to so many people is an inherently impersonal problem, reducing personal responsibility while still utilizing the potential of “crowdfunding” aid money from the financially fortunate, through taxes in this case. This would significantly increase the amount of monetary aid that could be delivered to areas in need around the world, and does it in keeping with the spirit of Singer’s original paper, in my mind.

 

 

 

(This section is over the word count, but I feel that I should include it anyway for completion’s sake.)

 

One may claim that reducing our defense budget puts us at too much risk and that my solution is then untenable under Singer’s principle of not sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, but I see two ways in which that objection can be addressed. The first is simply ignoring the concern under the premise that our current defense budget is easily more than sufficient for defense, which is evidenced by the comparatively small amount other world superpowers allocate for defense. The second is a governmental solution. If a significant portion of other world governmental organizations could be convinced to proportionally shift their budgets in the same fashion I’ve proposed here, the theoretical defense risk would be greatly lessened while any natural disaster or similar occurrence requiring international aid would be able to receive much more of it.