Ethics

Have professional philosophers come up with a strong response to Peter Singer's argument in "Famine, Affluence and Morality"? I take it that most find Singer's demands excessive, yet they seem irresistibly well-reasoned to me, and I've never been able to think my way around them.

Comments

There are various papers addressing Singer's argument directly, and they are easy to find. More interesting, perhaps, are more indirect responses that downplay the universalistic claims of morality in favor of special moral ties to friends and associates as well as non-moral commitments. The first of these responses is well exemplified in Samuel Scheffler's Boundaries and Allegiances (especially perhaps the essays "Families, Nations, and Strangers" and "The Conflict between Justice and Responsibility"). The second response is elegantly instantiated in the work of Bernard Williams -- for example in his collection Moral Luck (especially perhaps the essay "Persons, Character, and Morality"). One of Williams' memorable formulations is: "There can come a point at which it is quite unreasonable for a man to give up, in the name of the impartial good ordering of the world of moral agents, something which is a condition of his having any interest in being around in this world at all" (Moral Luck, page 4). Scheffler and (especially Williams) do not attempt to refute Singer's argument in its own terms, but rather seek to make attractive an alternative way of identifying what is ethically significant or simply: important.

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