PHIL 2750 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Famine Relief
27 Jul 2018
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Famine relief: helping poor countries produce a worse effect (excuse for doing nothing) Singer"s response: if population growth is the primary problem, then the duty of affluent people should be to give to promote solution to population growth. Resource on earth are finite, so the economic growth/consumption based model is self-defeating, i. e. we will overconsume and disastrous consequences for our way of life will follow the apocalyptic narrative. His claim: natural resources are not finite (i. e. infinite) The real natural resources is people, as innovators, inventors. Natural resources do not have value in themselves rather in what they permit us to do (service, usage) Use of the term finite is misleading or meaningless. There are infinite amount of points in the inch, but the count of an inch is finite. We need to redefine the measurement that use to measure. Example: copper planet contains 10 millions metric tonnes. No fixed amount requires for our needs.
