The Importance of Luxury Needs

In the book The Ethical Life, Shafer-Landau introduces an essay by Peter Singer (229-236) on a solution to eradicate world poverty. Singer’s main point is that people should stop spending on non-essential needs. Instead, anyone who believes that helping a starving child is morally right is morally obliged to donating his extraneous income to foreign aid organizations. Singer’s argument can be summarized in argument form as follow:

1. It is morally required for one to save a dying child, if it is within his ability and doesn’t require him to sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance.
2. Donating money to foreign aid agency can help save a dying child.
3. Spending extraneous income on luxuries is not as important as saving a dying child.
4. Conclusion: people are required to give up all extraneous income to save a dying child.

Although I agree with Singer up to a point, I cannot accept his overall conclusion that people should donate all extraneous income to help children dying in Africa. I fully endorse Singer’s first premise that one should try his best to save a child, if saving that child does not compromise anything of comparable moral importance. Singer’s second premise, though dubious, can be generally accepted. However, I think Singer is mistaken in the third premise because he overlooks the importance of spending on luxury. It is certain that spending too much on luxury is a waste. However, I cannot disagree more with Singer when he ignores that “non-essential needs” can sometimes be very essential. Investing a little extra on recreation increases our overall level of happiness. In return, being happy helps us work more efficiently, earn more money and have more to spend on donation. Without that necessary recreation, people may become bored and tired of working and thus, choose to work less. Chances are people would end up working only hard enough to pay for necessities and none would be left for the starving children.

Singer may argue that one would never know how much luxury is enough for our happiness. The cycle of spending more, getting happier, making more money may go on endlessly and the starving children would have to wait forever for their turn to receive the money. Nevertheless, law of diminishing marginal returns states that: there would be a point when additional spending on luxury would no longer give us as much happiness as before. Therefore, I believe that only when extra spending on luxury cannot increase our working efficiency, spending on luxury becomes “non-essential”.

Additionally, by focusing only on one way of spending extraneous income, Singer also overlooks the importance of saving extra income for the future. Without saving money, people will face the risk of starving in the future themselves. Since it is hard to determine which live is more important, the currently dying children or people’s life in the future, it is reasonable to assume that they are equally important. Thus, saving extraneous income for future life will be as justified as donating those money to save children in Africa. As a result, Singer is mistaken when concluding that "whatever money you're spending on luxuries not necessities, should be given away." (235)