哲学家只用这样道德的眼光去看次贷危机是无聊的：Peter Singer: World credit crunch could aid poor
发布时间：2009-02-25 14:57
分类名称：默认分类
分类名称：默认分类
WORLD renowned philosopher Professor Peter Singer says the global financial crisis could make us more, rather than less, inclined to help those living in poverty.
The man Time magazine voted one of the 100 most influential people in the world was in Adelaide this week to discuss his solution to worldwide poverty.
“I think there’s a good and bad side to the downturn,” he told the City Messenger.
“The bad side is people won’t have as much to spare, but it may also make people reassess their priorities; they realise they’re living just as happily with a little less, some of the things they thought were important were not so important.
“They realise family and friends are the things that really matter, not acquiring the latest status symbols or gadgets.
“If people do assess their priorities that way, they might be more likely to share with people who are really poor.”
Prof Singer is in Adelaide in the lead-up to July’s Adelaide Festival of Ideas.
He is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and spends part of the year at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.
The New Yorker has described him as the world’s must influential, yet controversial, philosopher.His latest book is The Life you Can Save, Acting Now to End World Poverty.
“World poverty on a large scale is something that we can end over the next few decades if we make enough of an effort to do it,” he said.
Prof Singer believes everyone should give a percentage of their earnings to charity, on a sliding scale commensurate with their income.
He uses the analogy of a drowning child to explain why people don’t give more to help those in Third World countries.
“I ask people if they saw a child in front of them in a shallow pond drowning and they were the only ones around, what they would do?
“They all say ‘I would wade into the pond and save the child’, and if you point out they would ruin their shoes that cost them $200, they say, ‘what’s a pair of shoes, what’s $200 compared to a child’s life?’.”
“But when you point out that there are 27,000 children who died today, according to UNICEF, because of avoidable poverty-related causes, and there are things you could do about that and it’s not much more than $200 that would save one of those children’s lives, people don’t realise that, they don’t act on it.
“There’s a psychological pull when you see that child in the pond, that psychological pull isn’t there when you talk to people about a billion people living in poverty it’s just a faceless mass.”
The man Time magazine voted one of the 100 most influential people in the world was in Adelaide this week to discuss his solution to worldwide poverty.
“I think there’s a good and bad side to the downturn,” he told the City Messenger.
“The bad side is people won’t have as much to spare, but it may also make people reassess their priorities; they realise they’re living just as happily with a little less, some of the things they thought were important were not so important.
“They realise family and friends are the things that really matter, not acquiring the latest status symbols or gadgets.
“If people do assess their priorities that way, they might be more likely to share with people who are really poor.”
Prof Singer is in Adelaide in the lead-up to July’s Adelaide Festival of Ideas.
He is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and spends part of the year at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.
The New Yorker has described him as the world’s must influential, yet controversial, philosopher.His latest book is The Life you Can Save, Acting Now to End World Poverty.
“World poverty on a large scale is something that we can end over the next few decades if we make enough of an effort to do it,” he said.
Prof Singer believes everyone should give a percentage of their earnings to charity, on a sliding scale commensurate with their income.
He uses the analogy of a drowning child to explain why people don’t give more to help those in Third World countries.
“I ask people if they saw a child in front of them in a shallow pond drowning and they were the only ones around, what they would do?
“They all say ‘I would wade into the pond and save the child’, and if you point out they would ruin their shoes that cost them $200, they say, ‘what’s a pair of shoes, what’s $200 compared to a child’s life?’.”
“But when you point out that there are 27,000 children who died today, according to UNICEF, because of avoidable poverty-related causes, and there are things you could do about that and it’s not much more than $200 that would save one of those children’s lives, people don’t realise that, they don’t act on it.
“There’s a psychological pull when you see that child in the pond, that psychological pull isn’t there when you talk to people about a billion people living in poverty it’s just a faceless mass.”
