Do rich people owe poor people anything?

Interview: Peter Singer ponders the question, what do wealthy people owe poor people?

Peter Singer said, "Human lives are being lost, some estimates are 30,000 deaths a day of children under five, and we could prevent that by giving up things that are not essential to us." (Denise Applewhite/Office of Communications, Princeton University)

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
Dr. Singer spoke with Earth & Sky's Marc Airhart in March 2006.

Airhart: Do you think we're headed for one global human society?

Singer: Yes, I think that's the direction that we're heading in. I think it's partly driven by technology via instant communications. It's partly driven by greater mobility of people. And it's partly driven by greater knowledge of the way we're linked together by climate change. So I think we're headed that way and it's going to be a tricky road, there are lots of bumps. But I think in general it's a good direction.

Airhart: What kinds of changes do you think will have to happen to make that possible, and what ethical considerations should be put into place to help us all get along with each other and be healthy and prosper?

Singer: People's values have to change. And the values clearly include a greater concern for others, irrespective of where they are in the world. That's the most fundamental thing that we really take seriously - the idea of all humans being equal and translate that into things like the obligation to assist. We shouldn't just have an island mentality that, as long as I don't actively go out and harm them, I've done nothing wrong. I think to stand by and allow 30 thousand children to die each day from poverty-related causes is to do a great wrong.

[Dr. Singer is referring to a United Nations report that evaluated the progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. Download the Millennium Development Goals Report 2005 .]

And we need to take a greater responsibility for what we're doing to other people through our contribution to climate change. That is a huge moral issue that we haven't faced up to. I think the attitude of the United States is incredibly selfish in saying we're going to continue to have our high-energy lifestyle, and never mind what it might do to tens of millions of you, including having sea levels wash over your land or having the rains on which you rely to grow your crops fail. I think there's a woeful lack of ethics in that that needs to be addressed.

Airhart: : What do we -- especially those of us living in wealthier nations -- owe our fellow human beings in poorer countries?

Singer: There's the abstract or theoretical question of looking at it calmly and dispassionately in ethical terms, "What would be the limits of our obligation?" I also look at it maybe in more practical terms, as "What kinds of realistic targets could we set?"

Now, talking about the first question, you have to consider that all over the world, people, innocent people, many of them children, are dying from poverty because they either can't get enough to eat, they can't get minimally basic health care, they don't have any education -- and that causes problems in various ways. They maybe get enough to eat, but they're malnourished and can't resist disease.

Human lives are being lost, some estimates are 30,000 deaths a day of children under five, and we could prevent that by giving up things that are not essential to us. It wouldn't take very much, some estimate maybe two percent of our gross domestic product would be enough to deal with poverty that leads to most of these deaths.

If you think about that, and you think about how much we're willing to do to save a single human life in our own country, we clearly ought to be giving up a significant amount to prevent these deaths. I mean, if coal miners are trapped underground, we'd spend millions to rescue half a dozen coal miners. We wouldn't have to do anything like that if we had an equal concern for human lives in some part of Africa or Asia far away from us.

From that theoretical point of view, I think you could say that we should be not spending money on anything that is a luxury while human lives are being needlessly lost. But of course if you look at that in practical terms, are you asking people to give up everything that's not a necessity? You couldn't ask everyone to do that. Firstly, they wouldn't. Secondly, if everyone were to do it, that would generate far more than you would actually need.

So I think that the general target would certainly be less than the traditional tithe -- the ten percent that people have traditionally given in Christian terms -- to the poor. It might be as little as two percent of what we earn that would generate enough to deal with the worst of these problems. But that at least I think would be an absolute minimum. The amount that the developed nations now give, which is much less than one percent -- in the case of the US, it's one of the lowest amounts of all the economically developed nations. I think that that is clearly inadequate.

(Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a position he has held since 1999. He was educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford and has taught at the University of Oxford, La Trobe University and Monash University. Singer was the founding President of the International Association of Bioethics and, with Helga Kuhse, founding co-editor of the journal Bioethics. Singer first became internationally known after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. His other books include Practical Ethics, How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, One World and The President of Good and Evil, and his next work, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter,will be published in May.)