Another Way To Prove My Point about African Children.

[Navers]

[ QUOTE ]
To expand further.

Sending money to starving people in foriegn countries is merely treating a symptom and not the disease. The reason the people are starving and don't have good medical care has more to do with the system of the government under which they live.

Saving one person is a useless gesture, as the system that created the starving person, will undoubtedly create more.

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Your logic is terrible. Just because others will inevitably die doesn't mean that you don't save the ones you can. It's not like this is an all-or-none situation. If you save one person out of a thousand, yes 999 of them will die. But you did save one. How is that a wasted effort? It's not like the rest of the population has to be alive for the one saved person to remain alive.
I agree with you about donation "treating the symptom and not the disease." However, that doesn't mean that you don't save lives where you can.

Peter Singer had a succient way of putting the issue:

$20 will give food to a starving child in Africa. $20 will also buy a CD. If you buy the CD, then you are saying: "This CD is worth more than the life of a starving child in Africa."

[Peter666]

Peter Singer should have dropped his crack pipe and joined the Rhodesian Army in Africa to fight Communists during the insurgency if he was so concerned about Africa and Africans. That git should be shot and pissed on. It is moral to do so.

[flair1239]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
To expand further.

Sending money to starving people in foriegn countries is merely treating a symptom and not the disease. The reason the people are starving and don't have good medical care has more to do with the system of the government under which they live.

Saving one person is a useless gesture, as the system that created the starving person, will undoubtedly create more.

[/ QUOTE ]

Your logic is terrible. Just because others will inevitably die doesn't mean that you don't save the ones you can. It's not like this is an all-or-none situation. If you save one person out of a thousand, yes 999 of them will die. But you did save one. How is that a wasted effort? It's not like the rest of the population has to be alive for the one saved person to remain alive.
I agree with you about donation "treating the symptom and not the disease." However, that doesn't mean that you don't save lives where you can.

[/ QUOTE ]

Because you have done nothing to confront the problem that made that child poor, malnourished, and sick in the first place.

Also in most cases you really have not guaranteed that the person that you "saved", will not end up in a simaliar predicament, a few months down the road.

All you have done is make yourself feel good.

The reason these people are hungry and have bad medical care, has little to do with the availabilty of food and medicine.

[Navers]

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Also in most cases you really have not guaranteed that the person that you "saved", will not end up in a simaliar predicament, a few months down the road.


[/ QUOTE ]

Oh I see. Good point.

[mike4bmp]

I think the only way to save those children or the people of most African countries for that matter is to establish an industrial as well as a socio-economic infrastructure. Those people live in a country of political and economic instability...you have to build a proper foundation in order to raise the floor on living standards. So in essence giving monetary support to feed children might be necessary but it does nothing to fix the root of the problem...It's like constantly giving band aids to a hemophiliac with an open wound...

Sorry if I am stating something that sounds obvious..

[FoxwoodsFiend]

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Don't the people in those countries have to do something for themselves eventually? Hasn't a lot of aid money over the past 30 years gone to dictators and warlords? Don't many African men consider a condom to be a unmanly? As long as tribal warfare and unprotected sex continue, they are going to have problems, no matter how much money I give.

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The reason money went to dictators in the past is because the United States, through the World Bank, knowingly gave money to dictators to bribe them for their allegiance during the Cold War.
Your assumption that our money can do nothing until Africa solves its problems is false and a common misconception used to rationalize American inaction. Saying that they'll have problems no matter how much money you give ignores the fact that through organizations such as Oxfam, your money can buy anti-diarrhea medication that saves children's lives. If you're interested in the possibilities, google "Jeffrey Sach" and "Millenium Project" sometime.

[ISF]

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The only other people who this won't apply to are the mega generous or the ones who argue that they are accumulating wealth now mainly for the ultimate benefit of others. And of course those sickies who might prefer Africans to die.

[/ QUOTE ]
I think you leave out a group of people that believe that it is often in the best long term interests of everyone to force people to solve their own problems.

I reject your basic premise that underlies this entire thread: That it is somehow in the interests of humanity in general to save every living human and elevate them to some more equal status.

If this was the case, then humanity as a whole would never have progressed beyond a filthy, diseased, ignorant condition, because to rise above such a condition, someone or some group must do something for themselves first.

A more Nietzchean view of mankind is to see it as the long development of a greater human being which benefits everyone in the long run. As an extreme example, consider the M.D. who spends $100,000 of his money (or student loans) to get the education to become a doctor. Does this mean that he did so at the expense of $100,000/$1000 = 100 African lives? And oh by the way, this same hypothetical M.D. went on to find a cure for AIDS which saved millions of African lives. But what if he never rose above a basic means of survival and gave everything to "less fortunate"?

But even more basic a question is what is the purpose of human life? Is it merely to survive? So should those who could enjoy life, prosper, advance civilization, etc., all give up these pursuits to partake in the "golden pursuit" of merely helping people survive? Leaving us back with a world with no art, no culture, no progress, no enlightenment, no entertainment, no purpose to life other than survival of each member of the species. But why even stop at [censored] sapiens? How much does it cost per day to keep any life form alive for awhile longer?

I am not one who cares nothing for others, in fact I am quite concerned with the course of the world's culture which is more preoccupied with materialism and less with living a life of importance measured beyond dollars and cents. But I think it is also flawed to suggest that the survival of every human life should be the objective of the species as a whole.

[fritzwar]

A fairly influential, and fairly widely discussed book in the world of academic philosophy takes up this issue in reasonable detail. I've used the book in a variety of courses. The book is from Oxford Univ Press and the title is *Living High and Letting Die*. The author is Peter Unger from NYU and he defends the view that even modestly well off people have very strong obligations to the worlds neediest. In contemporary times, Princeton and Australian philosopher Peter Singer revived this issue in a widely reprinted and discussed article "Famine Affluence and Morality". Singer has revisited the discussion in more recent work (eg, his book ONE WORLD). Singer and Unger are on the same side on this one.

Based on fairly recent discussions by those knowledgeable about the finances of life saving aid, David, your low sounding estimates of the cost of saving a life via donation to efficient organizations like OXFAM are actually pretty close to dead on.