1. Introduction

To give a man a fish, you will only feed him for a day, but to teach a man how to fish you could feed him for a lifetime. This is a simple concept that can lead to a self-sufficient life. The argument that Peter Singer makes for giving away money seems to me to be oversimplified and sometimes to miss the point of how to get people out of poverty, monetary aid is only one aspect thereof. Kekes (2002:516), a critic of Singer, states the following: “The hard fact is that the aid that may be given will only be window-dressing that produces, at best, short-term relief and perpetuates the conditions that produce absolute poverty.” Giving money to people at the robot does not ensure that they get out of poverty. It may give them food for a day or a week, but it won’t make them self-sufficient. Giving without teaching to get out of the circle of poverty leads to learned helplessness. It is easier to make money at a street corner than to be self-sufficient once one fell in that circle. In the following essay, I will look at Singer’s argument why we need to give away that what we don’t necessarily need and then at three criticisms against Singer’s argument. I will also look at some practical issues if we try and implement Singer’s argument in practice and the problem of learned helplessness. I will conclude with Singer that we need to give to charity, but adding that we need to do more than just give blindly. Following the thinking of Andrew Kuper, we should encourage “sustainable infrastructures” to help get rid of structures that keep poverty in place. This will ultimately be in the interest of most people.

2. Singer’s Argument

In Singer’s (1972:231) article Famine, Affluence, and Morality and in his book Practical Ethics, he tells us about a child drowning in a pool of water, and with minor sacrifices like getting our clothes dirty and missing a lecture or meeting, we ought to save the child’s life. The sacrifice I need to make is not comparable to that of a child dying. This is the grounds for the first premise of his argument: “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.” In Practical Ethics, a revised form of the argument follows (Singer 2011:200):

• First premise: If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.
• Second premise: Extreme poverty is bad.
• Third premise: There is some extreme poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance.
• Conclusion: We ought to prevent some extreme poverty.

The ultimate claim that Singer tries to make is that we ought to give if we can. We should not discriminate between poor people in our area and those we do not know about. In other words, we should still give to charity even if it is for the poor in another country than our own. After a couple of articles in conversation with Kuper, who I will discuss below, Singer states again after all the criticisms that it is still better to give than not to give anything.

3. Critique

The first argument in the article On the Supposed Obligation to Relieve Famine, John Kekes criticises Singer’s supposed “moralism”. “The supposed obligation to relieve famine is based on a rationally indefensible rampant moralism. Moralism is to morality what scientism is to science. Both aberrations involve the illegitimate inflation of reasonable claims either by exaggerating their importance or by extending them to inappropriate contexts. As monetary inflation weakens the currency, so moralistic and scientistic inflation weaken morality and science. Those who value morality and science will oppose moralism and scientism (Kekes 2002:503).” Kekes (2002:506) goes further and attacks the story of the drowning child: “Singer’s putative analogy is a rhetorical stratagem that misleads the uncritical and infuriates the critical.” The moral obligation to help others whom we do not even know is then challenged by asking questions like how did they get into that situation in the first place? What is the chance of achieving success?

The solution for Kekes (2002:507) is rather to help those near you because you can have answers to the last-mentioned questions, but this is not an obligation. “Singer’s dogmatic assertion about the obligations commitment to ethics […] systematically ignores these serious difficulties (Kekes 2002:510).” The serious difficulties that he talks about are that impartiality does not always ask one to view things from the universal perspective, treating all people equally is highly problematic (like murderers and terrorists), that it is really hard to know what people’s preferences are without your own influences clouding your judgements, and that treating everyone with equal consideration, presupposes that interests are commensurable. Kekes (2002:511) concludes as follows: “Singer’s answer to reasonable people who are considering whether they should radically change their lives is that he cannot offer a rational argument to persuade them to do so. What he offers instead is rampant moralism that tries to achieve by bullying what it cannot achieve by reasoning.” The article boils down to the demandingness objection. It doesn’t look like it does any damage to Singer’s argument. If we can give, even if it is very little, we still should.

The second critique comes from John Arthur (2009) in his response World hunger and moral obligation: The Case Against Singer. Arthur (2009:846) starts by questioning the assumption that we ought to give to charity if we were going to use it on luxuries we can do without. Arthur states that according to Singer’s argument if you can save someone’s life by giving your kidney you should, because it is the same as the money you own (Arthur 2009:849). It is your property, you have rights to it. But Arthur (2009:849) states to give your kidney or money is more heroic than an actual obligation. You are thus not obligated to give a kidney to a stranger, it is your body and you have certain rights to it, and the same with your money. He further distinguishes between negative and positive rights. Negative rights are for example the right to life, it is private, and positive rights are more public, it is for example a promise you make to someone, if you break it you are in a way breaking someone’s right to you keeping that promise. The difference can be seen in the case of Singer’s drowning child. The child does not have right to be saved by a total stranger in a random pool of water, but if the child is drowning in a swimming pool with life guards present, there is a certain right to be saved. In other words, the random person not helping the child does not infringe someone’s right to life by abstaining from help, but the lifeguard has a certain responsibility to help the child in the pool where he works.

Arthur (2009:849) makes the claim that: “Normally, then, a duty to help a stranger in need is not the result of a right he has. Such a right would be positive, and since no contract or promise was made, no such right exists.” Arthur (2009:851-852) gives three “practical” problems that Singer neglects of the basic human nature: firstly, humans are more selfish than made out by Singer, secondly, we are not always objective, and lastly, we are not always aware of the consequences of our actions, we don’t have perfect knowledge of what will happen when we do something, like donating money. The conclusion Arthur then makes is that there are no oughts to give away the money we earned. The argument can easily be knocked down: my money is not the same as my kidney, money can be replaced, my kidney not. The critique does not hold.

The last argument comes from a friend of Singer, Andrew Kuper, a South African who started the company LeapFrog Investments. His main argument against Singer in his article More Than Charity is that giving to the poor can in effect do more damage than not giving but supporting local macroeconomics (Kuper 2002:110). The reason he gives for this is that Singer’s argument suffers from a cause of political acontextualism (Kuper 2002:110). Singer does not consider the whole outcome of his own argument in the complex system we find ourselves in. Kuper’s (2002:111) example of this is that if people should not go on vacation and give away all their extra money, a country like South Africa that depends in some way on tourism, is being disadvantaged and may even help poverty surge even more. Kuper (2002:112) asks us to think differently about the problem: “Where we do not share our everyday lives with people, we interact with them through a complex and differentiated web of political and economic relations.” Kuper (2002:114) states further that we need “good government and better markets” because we are looking for sustainability and not just a short term quick fix.

4. Practical Problems and Learned Helplessness

There are countless examples where a quick fix was applied but with no results. The largest ever international funded aid was in 2010 when an earthquake struck Haiti. Billions of dollars where given by people to various charities but instead people still live in poverty. Between 2010 and 2013 almost 10 000 people died of cholera due to the lack of sanitation, basic needs that the donated money did not tend to. In the same time the Olympics Committee built an 18 million dollars sports complex near a camp in Haiti where people still did not have permanent homes. Some of the headlines still read: where did all the money go? Until recently, Haiti was the poorest country in the Americas. A similar situation in Afghanistan happened where the US built a power station of around 400 million dollars. Studies in 2015 found that the station did not function as should, providing almost no electricity to the grid. The amount of money needed to keep the plant functioning was too much for a country that was already struggling to keep its own people out of poverty. The point of the examples is that money cannot always solve the problem if there are existing problems. Giving money to charities that don’t know how to use it correctly can lead to opposite results.

Other problems, that are more local and that we can see, can cause something called learned helplessness. Christopher Stones (2013:160) did a study on understanding begging in a South African context. He explains learned helplessness in beggars: “it tends to become increasingly difficult for someone engaged in street begging […] to view themselves as being capable of doing anything different from their current activities, or to imagine alternative ways of being and earning a living.” If we are confronted with the situation where a beggar asks for money to buy food, should we give? Ought we to give to the beggar if we know that this will possibly encourage learned helplessness? This to me seems problematic in two ways. Firstly, if I give money to the beggar, I am encouraging the beggar to stay in this circle of begging. Secondly, if I give to charity that gives food to the beggar, but don’t enforce some kind of rehabilitation back into society, am I not doing the same thing?

Before returning to the above, it will also help to look at another type of problem, one Kuper also mentions. Coffee is one of the most traded commodities, second only to oil. A lot of small scale farmers supply the worlds coffee, depending on the little they get. Fair Trade, a movement that tries to help producers in developing countries achieve better trading conditions and to promote sustainable farming states the following: “Around 125 million people worldwide depend on coffee for their livelihoods. Coffee is the most valuable and widely traded tropical agricultural product and 25 million smallholder farmers produce 80% of the world’s coffee. But many of them fail to earn a reliable living from coffee.” If you look at the selling price of coffee over the last 20 plus years, the average price per kilogram stayed roughly the same. But in the last five years coffee prices in the supermarket or at coffee shops sometimes doubled. If you give money to charity that helps for example coffee farmers and their families, but you buy coffee, without even thinking about where the coffee came from, is this not going against the point of trying to help coffee farmers escape poverty? But if we opt for the solution of buying say ethically produced coffee, sometimes paying double the price, are we not then robbing the farmers of their jobs we wanted to help?

Kuper gives two examples, that of clothing and food dumping. Firstly, if we stop buying clothes from places we think are unethical (for example Asian produced clothes) and opt to buy clothes from locally produced shops, we are in a way potentially robbing people of jobs. Secondly, that of food dumping in poorer areas, people will stop buying from local farmers, ensuring that they will probably lose their farms. These are examples of “vicious circles” where if you sometimes think you are doing good, you may end up hurting someone.

5. My Own Argument

I will now try and synthesise all that has been said. Helping those in need is something we ought to do, I agree with Singer. If we are in the position to help financially without sacrificing anything of equal significance, we should do it. I think, in line with Singer, we should accept this premise without questioning it. If we use Heideggerian terms, we are thrown into existence. I have no initial say in what position I am born into society. This does not entail that if I am in a fortunate position I ought to give back, but it seems the right thing to do. It seems like it will bring about the greater amount of good. But the third premise of Singer, following the critique above, is hard to accept as is. This premise is oversimplified and can lead to disasters, as mentioned above, in the case of Haiti and Afghanistan (imagine if the money was invested in the right ways, actually helping the people). The conclusion Singer draws from the argument is also oversimplified. Giving money to a beggar won’t make him not poor and self-sufficient. Giving money to a poor country without assessing why that country is poor, won’t create a self-sufficient country. Giving money to an organisation in a poor country won’t solve poverty if the charity does not work on self-reliability towards self-sufficiency. I think the problem with Singer’s argument is that it is too vague. Singer’s argument also takes some of the responsibility away from the giver or donor, it is the responsibility of the charity to do the work. The argument I propose will place responsibility back on the shoulders of the givers. The argument is also one for self-sufficiency, to try and avoid outcomes like learned helplessness. Before the revised argument, I want in fashion of Singer and other utilitarian thinkers, sketch a hypothetical story that will hopefully explain my argument.

Suppose a fictional person Q. Q lives in extreme poverty, but one day a generous person gives a R100 to Q. Q can go and buy bread for R10 at the store that does not care about the welfare of Q, leaving Q with only R90 left. Suppose Q walks past a baking class in the poor community given by a charity that promotes self-reliance. There Q learns how bread is made. Q comes to the conclusion that the self-made bread is only a fraction of the price the shop is asking. By some generous aid, Q starts to bake bread with the R100, using a kind stranger’s oven. With the R100 Q can buy a 12-kilogram bag of flour. Now that Q knows how to bake bread, Q sells it to the extreme poor in Q’s community, thus Q’s friends, for R8 and not the usual R10. The community sees this and by chance three other people also start to bake with Q and within no time there are a couple of bakers baking bread and selling it, making some money to support themselves, but also eliminating the idea that bread only comes from a shop that overcharges people. With no time in that poor community people are participating in helping create things. The bread is so good that people outside the poor community buy it as well, creating a more self-sufficient livelihood for Q.

This story is over simplified, hypothetical and probably not workable, but it has a more sustainable outcome than just giving money. The quote I started with, to give a man a fish, you will only feed him for a day, but to teach a man how to fish you could feed him for a lifetime, is plausible in the above story. With some education, for example how to bake bread, you can help someone be more self-reliant, or on the road towards self-sufficiency. Once again, it is not just about giving money, but a combination of aid and education and trying to prevent dependency on the aid given. By just giving money and looking away you won’t know if it will help towards the end you want it to. If we go back to Singer’s story about the drowning child, we can say that yes, we would help the child, we ought to do it. But is it not possible to add that we need to tell the child not to play near dangerous water, otherwise he or she might fall in the water again with the next time no one near to help? By saving the child from drowning and not telling him or her to not swim in the dangerous water, the child may fall in again. Are we not then responsible? We can try and teach the child how to swim or not to play near the water, and this will help towards future possibilities of falling in again or not being able to swim. Is it then not possible to give to charity in such a way that they encourage people to be self-sufficient? If we change Singer’s argument only a bit to incorporate this, we can state it as follow:

• First premise: If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it, but in a responsible way.
• Second premise: Extreme poverty is bad.
• Third premise: There is some extreme poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, for example donating money to charity that promotes self-sufficiency.
• Conclusion: We ought to prevent some extreme poverty with a solution that does not only have the immediate future in mind.

Extreme poverty is really bad. A lot of people are in the position to help. The people trapped in extreme poverty can also have the potential to disrupt the current system keeping them there. The above is only one possible solution to supplement the already countless solutions, and one that may have better consequences than the Singer version. The Kuper argument is, at least to me, a reasonable one to add to Singer’s argument. We need to help the poor, but simply throwing money onto the situation won’t necessarily help in the way we intend it to. Is it not reasonable to think that the preference of those caught in extreme poverty is to escape it by being self-sufficient? The claim is then that throwing money onto the situation blindly will not have the best overall preference. Creating a system where self-sufficiency is preferred, or where the outcome of charity is people being self-sufficient, appears to be more preferable. Small things can start a change, and disrupting the system. Buying bread from a charity-based-bakery rather than from a supermarket. Drinking beer at small breweries started by those coming out if charity, rather than buying cheap mass-produced beer. Encouraging charities to rather educate people in growing their own food on borrowed property.

To conclude, I looked at some charities that are already doing what I proposed. The Hunger Project promotes self-reliance and goals set by the communities themselves. A participant from one of the Focus Group Participants from Malawi said: “If The Hunger Project were to leave tomorrow, we would be OK.” Another charity that I find interesting, Nuru International, states the following: “A bunch of Westerners with good ideas can’t end extreme poverty – only gifted, equipped and envisioned local leaders can. We identify and train local leaders to design and implement solutions to their community’s needs.” And the last one is a local Charity, CAFDA, who also promotes self-reliance: “CAFDA is governed by members of its community and one of the key objectives is to educate, empower and uplift the communities we serve – and promote self-reliance through Community Development Programmes.”

Sources

Arthur, J. 2009. World hunger and moral obligation, in S.M. Cahn (red.). Exploring Philosophy An Introductory Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kekes, J. 2002. On the Supposed Obligation to Relieve Famine. Philosophy, 77(302):503-517.

Kuper, A. 2002. More Than Charity: Cosmopolitan Alternatives to the “Singer Solution”. Ethics & International Affairs, 16(2):107-120.

Singer, P. 1972. Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3):229-243.

Singer, P. 2011. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stones, C.R. 2013. A psycho-social exploration of street begging: A qualitative study. South African Journal of Psychology, 43(2):157–166.