Wojtek Sokolowski:
> Out of sheer curiosity - why does one have an obligation to share his/her
> income with others (both individually and as a society)? I can see a
> number of motives why people do so - such as pity, merit-making, or social
> status buying - but these are not principles that one would universally
> accept even if one did not feel pity or altruism or status envy.
>
> Note that Marx's argument, which rests on the principle of value creation
> - he who creates value should own and control it; workers are sole creators
> of value under capitalism, ergo: workers should own and control all output
> of capitalist production - does not apply here. It is quite obvious that
> the claim to foreign aid cannot be truthfully based on the assertion that
> the recipients are entitled to it because they produced it
Try
http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/singermag.html
Singer's methods of working on ethical problems seems to be (from what I have read) along the lines of "You do or say X, (where X is something of undoubted ethical value), why then do you not do or say X' (something very similar)?" In the case in the article, he asks: If we think it is wrong for someone to trade a child for a television set, why do we not think it wrong for us to trade many children for our high standard of living? In this way, Singer co-opts most of his audience's ethical thinking and saves himself the rhetorical trouble of arguing to them from first principles.
-- Gordon