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Peter Singer Bystander Effect

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“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 …show more content…

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

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What do you do when charitable organizations call you asking for money? Do you donate money to the organization or do you ignore it? In 1999 Peter Singer wrote the article The Singer Solution to World Poverty where he argues “that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering poverty so dire as to be life-threatening.” Singer does this by introducing his article with two very different examples: a woman who saved a child’s life and a man who killed a child to save his Bugatti. Secondly, he proposes how much money would be required to save a child from starvation, $200, and explains why more people do not give even though in the grand scheme of things $200 is not that much money.

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According to the United Nations, a child dies of hunger every ten seconds. Likewise, millions of people live in poverty and do not know when they will eat again. While the typical American throws away leftover food, children are dying across the world from starvation. To put this into perspective: By the time you have started reading, a child has died of hunger. But who is to blame?

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In one circumstance, we may feel the need to give to those who are poor to keep them from getting in our personal space; and in other circumstances we feel that we give to others out of the kindness of our heart. I completely agree with Ascher and her views on compassion, because I have been in similar situation where I have questioned why people give money, and whether they give with a whole heart or out of necessity. Furthermore, this essay can teach us plenty of lessons that can be utilized throughout our lives so we can teach others and make them aware of the need to be more

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Unfortunately, not everybody understand this, a lot of people misinterpret it as giving a lot of money to people who will do nothing in return. So they rather save it for themselves. But that is just an excuse,

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Languages have always changed and developed over long periods of time. Words and definitions change and eventually reaches a point when a whole new language is formed. When looking back at old writings of a certain language it is plain to see how much a language has changed. One example of this phenomenon is the epic poem Beowulf the first poem to ever be written in English. Despite being in English, it is incompressible compared to modern English meaning that it has to be translated to a more modern version of English.

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Most of the school children also dropped schools to work attempting to have enough money provide food along with the family provider and in some bad cases they desperately search for water or any other land sources they can use to survive. Some unfortunate people were binding their stomachs with any available material to ease the pain of hunger. Also urgent food supplies and first-aid and some basic-survival assistances reach the most vulnerable people in countries suffering famines and some civil wars. But it doesn’t seem enough to maintain such a worldwide growing catastrophe. Many more efforts and solutions must be done to prevent losing more poor suffering souls.

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According to dosomething.org, one in five American children face hunger. In theory, this means that in my class of 20 kids, roughly four of them face hunger. According to a CNBC article, 42 million Americans suffer from hunger across the nation. This food insecurity as the Federal Government so kindly puts it, exists in every county in America.

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Our world has been struggling with hunger for a while, but why doesn 't anyone put an end to it? There are people who are dying of hunger while we sit down for three big, fat meals each day. And if we don 't finish one of those meals, we just throw them away. We could be saving lives, but instead, we just throw that opportunity away. Do you ever even give starvation a thought?

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This image is making the statement that you do not need money to help others. A lot of times we think,

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There are so many ways that poverty/world hunger can be controlled. We can start by working together to help when there’s a disaster caused by Mother Nature, when there’s crop issues and your local market closing due to other issues. If that’s not good enough we can also help by raising money, start food drives and educate countries how to grow food productively. I think it could start with one person to start then imagine how many people will follow to saves these lives. There are so many people around the world that are dying from starvation, if we raise awareness, show the accurate statistics and providing great ideas, we can end world

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There are a lot of problems in the world like poverty and pollution but hunger seems to be the most severe to me. There are so many different types of people who are famished most of the day just because they are homeless or because of their race. Studies show former foster youth, L.G.B.T. students and students of color are at substantially increased risk. One group of people who are in hunger the most is college students. College alone is so expensive that a lot of students can’t afford to even feed themselves.

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Imagine being so hungry you can’t even move. Having to sleep in a house made of dirt, or being so thirsty because there is no safe drinking water. People around the World face these problems everyday. 328,000,000 children live in extreme poverty, and 1 in 10 people live on less than $1.90 a day. The conditions they live in are horrible and everyone should do what they can to help end poverty and world hunger.

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“One in six youngsters are at a risk of hunger because of limited or uncertain access to nutritious food” (“An Invisible Hunger”). This shows that countless houses in the U.S don’t have the basic essentials to feed a child. There are millions of ravenous kids in the U.S and there are very catastrophic effects because of this. “More than 17 million children are suffering from hunger in the U.S” (“Ending Childhood Hunger in America”). It was shocking to see the number this high.

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According to the WTN Global Challenges Program Hunger Initiative, 578 million people in Asia and the Pacific , 239 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 37 million in the Near East and North Africa, and 19 million in developed countries are affected by hunger. That equates to about one in every ten people being affected by hunger. According to Dr. Lindsey Shirley, the author of “A Practical Problem Approach to World Hunger: Universities Fighting World Hunger,” since the second half of the 1900s, there has been an increase of about 4 million people per year who do not have enough to eat. These numbers should not be increasing every year, and there should be a solution to stop it (Shirley

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1046 Words | 5 Pages

Since 1990, the world has reduced the number of people who live in extreme poverty by over half. But that still leaves 767 million people living on the edge of survival with less than $1.90 a day.2 The numbers of world hunger has gone down by a lot, but yet world hunger is still going on. Some of the poorest countries in the world have few to no jobs, and the few jobs that there are, are paid very little each day. Survival is key to these people and with the little money they have, it’s hard to do that. Across the globe, conflicts consistently disrupt farming and food production.

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