4 generations/Singer Solution

This video just shows us that Singer's numbers are real, but his approach puts you in an unfair situation.

In Peter Singer's solution to world poverty, he posed a question of whether you would save a kid or a car. My immediate response was save the car. First off, I didn't like this question. It puts you in an uncomfortable situation in which you have limited amount of time to respond. Questions to how you got there, why the boy was there, why you were driving an uninsured car, why you parked this uninsured car on a railroad track, why did the boy not see the train, etc. were what i was focusing on. Then when I looked at the actual question; would you save an unknown child's life or your precious car i came to the intial conclusion that you should let the kid die. Sure I was in a bad mood, and I probably would have stuck my own mother on the tracks, but logically, you work your entire life and invest everything into this car. This car essentially is all that you have worked for, you have made multiple sacrifices to make this car yours. So why would you throw all you have worked for away to save the life of a kid that you do not know? You can't see his face, you can't sense the fear he'll surely eminate when he sees the train coming and it's too late, so why should you care?

Singer says that for just 200 dollars you can save a child. Now think, a car and 200 dollars are completely different amounts here. The car he speaks of in this paper is a bugatti. The estimated cost of a 2006 bugatti is 1.24 million dollars. With 1.24 million dollars, you can save 6,200 kids. And just to further make this 6,200 hit closer to home, the estimated amount of students at Punahou is roughly 3,700. so roughly 1.67 Punahou student bodies could be saved by trashing this car. Again to put this into perspective, 2,973 people were killed in 9/11. So you would be single handedly responsible for a 9/11 over twice as deadly.

Over the original proposed question of would you let a kid die to save your 1.24 million dollar car, I would choose the car. But over 6,200 people, which is something of approximate equal value, I would choose the people.

See Im not a complete misanthrope.