Radical Redistribution?

In my this week‘s post, I would like to talk about something that has actually nothing to do with our syllabus at first sight, but needs to be mentioned if we want to talk about contemporary ethical problems and applied ethical theories.

Once, Dr J. mentioned in class that in her opinion, the most striking problem the world community is and will be facing is the issue of slavery and the fact that there are more slaves on this planet than have ever been there before. What is the reason for that? Surely, the reasons are very complex and diverse, but one of them is the unequal distribution of goods and wealth between the so called developed countries and the countries that we consider as “third world”.

The contemporary Utilitarian Peter Singer, “DeCamp Professor of Bioethics” at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, claimed that applying Utilitarianism to the problem of unequal wealth distribution would necessarily mean that everybody who has more than he or she needs to survive and to ensure the survival of his/her dependent, needs to donate the rest to other people who really need it (original source: Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no.1 (1972): 229-43). In his argumentation, Singer is pretty radical, but also very persuasive by giving an example of a man walking along a river or a lake and seeing somebody drowning. The man wears pretty nice and expensive clothes but of course, his moral duty is to rescue that person, not caring about his clothes, because they don‘t have a moral value. That analogy shows that our - sometimes very wasteful - lifestyle also contains a lot of things without any moral value, but rather prevents moral actions. As said above, his conclusion is that there needs to be a radical redistribution of wealth on earth.

Of course, we can have a discussion about how realistic it is to demand such a big change, but Ethics deals with normative claims and therefore, I want to think about this statement from another perspective: The question that came to my mind when I read this article was, if it is really morally acceptable to demand that people who sometimes worked hard for their wealth should give away everything except what satisfies their very basic needs? Personally, it depends on how we define our society and the amount of people, we want to care for, that is to say, who we take into consideration of the moral judgements of our actions. The question is, if humans are able to care for the whole rest of humanity or if their capability is naturally limited so that they can only provide the “greatest amount of happiness“ for a limited amount of people. Personally, I believe that it is the case, that our capability is limited and it does not make people in developed countries bad or immoral actors if they do not donate all of their wealth. It is natural and therefore not immoral for humans to care for their own “herd” rather than for people, they don‘t know. Of course, that is not to say that people should not donate, it just justifies people donating not all of their wealth, as Singer demands them to do.

Think about it for a second and give me your answers tot my questions!

Click to learn more about Peter Singer‘s effort to make the world a better place