Peter Singer Bystander Effect

“About 21,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every four seconds, as you can see on this display. Sadly, it is children who die most often.”(Poverty.com) This is a terrible statistic in of itself. The bigger issue is that it could be prevented. There is enough food on earth to feed almost everyone, but many people lack the resources to get it through no fault of their own. The people with more should help those who are unable to get the resources they need to survive. Peter Singer uses the analogy of not helping a child drowning in a pond to not donating to help the poor. While I don’t love this analogy it helps illustrate the point that just because we take inaction does

They buy many things that they could do without. I am not saying you shouldn’t buy things beyond basic necessities. Rather that instead of buying that 30th pair of shoes or 7th car; the money would be better spent helping someone who has almost nothing. If each person gave a small amount, the money needed to feed and provide for these very poor people could be reached quickly. This isn’t the reality though. Since we view charity as optional, we start to run into the bystander effect. The bystander effect basically states that the more people that are witness to something the less likely each individual is to help. When this is expanded to the scale of everyone very few people actually contribute. This leads to the dilemma of how much should people give. If we follow a pure utilitarian mindset we would donate until we almost reach the point of poverty of the people we ae trying to help. This is not desirable for anyone so most people would not donate anything. The goal is to find the balance between giving too much that is becomes a burden on the individual and not giving enough so it doesn’t adequately help the people in need. Since almost no one donates any