post 9

Singer wishes to get rid of pain and focus on having pleasure. When it comes to extreme poverty, he, himself, gives a fifth of his income to starving children. He says that Americans have the responsibility to aid the world’s poor and hungry. He argues that Americans spend most of their income on useless things that are not needed to secure a safe and healthy life. They indulge on vacations, nice clothes, expensive electronics, and other gadgets they don’t really need for survival. If these people would send that money to charitable organizations many lives would be saved. Singer wants people to be more thoughtful and aid others in need. He wants people to think about those that are suffering and help them instead of wasting their money on useless things. In doing so people would do away with a lot of people’s pain and more people would be able to have pleasure. I agree with him because people’s lives, even people that you’ve never met before, are more important than material things. Do I follow these ideas to the best of my ability? No, I know that I am more selfish than I would like to be. I think that if everyone gave money to charity everyone would be better off.

With this same idea of Singer’s that people should stay away from pain, you can imagine what he thought of euthanasia. Euthanasia is when someone is basically “put to sleep” as you would say for an animal. When a person most likely does not have the ability to get better some people choose to “put their loved ones to rest” in order to keep them from having pain and suffering. Knowing this, of course Singer would be for euthanasia. There are more than one type of euthanasia. One where the person tells someone that they do not want to live anymore, which is considered assisted suicide. He is for euthanasia for disabled infants. He says that parents of newborns should be happy, but parents of severely disabled babies may not be and that can be a reason to do so if no other couple is willing to adopt it. Children with spina bifida are usually in such sever pain that some doctors find it hard to perform surgery to keep the baby alive because they do not want it to suffer it’s entire life. In such sever cases Singer finds it acceptable to perform euthanasia because the baby is unable to be self conscious and decide whether it wants to live or die.
Singer’s views on abortion are not very clear whether he considers himself pro-choice or pro-life. He argues that a person that is pro-choice simply feels that a fetus is not a human being until it is born because it is unable to think and perceive. He points out that pre-mature babies are less developed than some fetuses and those fetuses are ok to be killed but the pre-mature baby is not ok to be killed. He is saying that people must agree on when a fetus becomes a human. And only then can they make laws about abortion.