Dualta Roughneen, European Conservative. (Photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons)
‘A preferential option for the poor’ is a pithy phrase that hides the complexity of the Church’s social teaching and also the considerations that lead to better outcomes.
Peter Singer’s most famous paper is “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” which was published in 1972. In this influential essay, he argues that affluent people have a moral obligation to donate a significant portion of their wealth to prevent suffering and death from poverty and famine around the world. He uses the famous “drowning child” analogy to illustrate this point, suggesting that if we would save a drowning child even at the cost of our expensive shoes, we should also be obligated to help the world’s poor with our money.
The paper asserts that if we can prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we are obligated to do so. Some have argued that Singer’s argument leads to a reductio ad absurdum. In essence, if Singer were to be followed, the argument would be that every time you spend money on non-essential items, that money could instead prevent suffering or death (e.g., through famine relief). To act morally, you must give away nearly all your disposable income until you are just above subsistence level. You should also devote most of your time and resources to helping others, even at the cost of personal projects, hobbies, or relationships. Ergo, you must live an extremely austere life, abandoning almost all personal pursuits, and possibly undermining your own well-being. Even Singer realised that this conclusion is impractical and conflicts with widely accepted moral intuitions about reasonable obligations. It would make ordinary life morally impermissible. Structurally, for everyone to follow this route, it would mean abandoning life as we know it and reverting, unintentionally, to something akin to Pol Pot’s Year Zero.