Demandingness Objection - Singer's Response

Singer's Response

Peter Singer famously made the case for his demanding form of consequentialism in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972). Here is the thrust of Singer's argument:

• "Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad".
• "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought, morally, to do it".
• "It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away".
• "The principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position".

Since it is in our power to prevent suffering without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, and because the third and fourth premises reject two commonly-held intuitions about our moral obligations, we are morally required to prevent suffering in any form. Morality as Singer understands it (that is, from a consequentialist perspective) really is (and should be) this demanding.