Re: Another Way To Prove My Point about African Children.
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I'm figuring that your point is that "other people's welfare is not our responsibility," and that your situation is supposed to prove that axiom in some way. As it only applies to a (small) subset of the population, and doesn't at all pose a problem to those who agree with the converse of your statement, "other people's welfare is absolutely and in all cases our responsibility," your goal hasn't been achieved.
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I may have completely misunderstood, but I think David is getting at something about absolutist morality, not collective responsibility - in other words, given that hardly anyone does what David describes (gives their money to literally save the lives of the poor - enough so that they themselves are living with just enough resources to sustain themselves) - it might have some rather disturbing implications for what we term as 'morality' - as in, considering our willingness to accept the preventable deaths of African children, there's probably some conclusion to be made about the validity of Kantian moral imperatives or fidelity to the Ten Commandments, etc.
Or I could be way out in left field.
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