Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Singer uses this term, along with East Bengal, to refer to what became the country of Bangladesh. Traditionally, the area named Bengal before the 1947 partition of India it covered the region of East Pakistan and part of India. This guide uses the name Bangladesh where Singer uses Bengal, since the country had already declared its independence at the time Singer’s essay was written and because this is the name used today.

This is defined as the aggregate value of all goods and services produced by a nation’s citizens within a given time period (usually a calendar year). Singer refers to GNP to explain the effect of consumer culture on people. While he would like to see consumption tamped down, he recognizes that it helps constitute GNP, and a healthy GNP, in turn, is required to generate money to donate as foreign aid. The term has been replaced today by the term gross domestic product, or GDP.

A moral scheme is a framework through which to view a society’s ethos—the set of norms that dictates the values we assign to moral issues and the expected ways in which to respond to them. The concept has a central role in Singer’s essay, as his argument that helping people who are poor and suffering is an obligation upends our current moral scheme, which holds that this is voluntary charity.