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Articles

How Good Do We Have To Be?

With so many serious problems in the world, Jean Kazez asks whether there’s any excuse to buy ourselves new toys, or even take up more worthy pastimes like playing the violin. Her reflections take in Paul Farmer, Peter Singer, Susan Wolf and Nietzsche.

In a recent shopping trip to Circuit City electronics store, a thought kept running through my head: how could it be right to spend money on a television when I already have one that works, and there are millions of people around the world with urgent problems?

It sounds like a cliché, but questions like this have bothered me since I began reading Princeton philosopher Peter Singer some fifteen years ago. When I’m about to go out for an expensive meal or buy new clothes, I often feel like I’m wearing an invisible WWSD (What Would Singer Do?) bracelet.

Singer’s argument is disarmingly simple. A choice to buy a $2000 television set is a choice not to buy the food and medical care that would save scores of lives. How then could the TV purchase be justifiable? Applied to every situation, Singer’s argument would change my life in a thousand ways.

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