Travis Timmerman: a Reply to Singer

question 9

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Travis Timmerman: A Reply to Singer
In "A Reply to Singer," Travis Timmerman examines Peter's Singer argument for the claim that we are morally obligated to donate most of our expendable income to aid organizations. Timmerman focuses on the second premise of Singer's argument (which states that if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable importance, we ought, morally, to do it), and argues (i) that Singer fails to justify the truth of this premise and (ii) that there are positive reasons to reject it.
Singer's defense of his second premise rests on the famous "Drowning Child" thought experiment. According to Singer, our intuitive moral reaction to this thought experiment-that it is wrong not to save the life of a drowning child at the expense of new clothes-shows that we already accept the truth of his premise, at least implicitly. Timmerman disagrees. Because we rarely, if ever, find ourselves in the position Singer describes, our intuitive reaction to the "Drowning Child" case is informed, according to Timmerman, by the implicit assumption that it describes an anomalous, one-off event. Timmerman then points out that an intuitive conviction that it is wrong not to make a single, one-time monetary sacrifice to save the life of a child is not the same as, nor does it entail, the belief that we are obligated to spend our entire lives repeatedly making similar sacrifices, as Singer's premise requires of people in situations like ours. Singer's attempt to justify his second premise-by showing that our moral intuitions reveal we already accept it-therefore fails on Timmerman's view.
Timmerman next argues that if we consider a more relevant analogy ("Drowning Children"), in which a person is in a position to save many drowning children everyday over the course of her entire life at comparably insignificant personal cost, our moral intuitions actually conflict with Singer's second premise. Timmerman therefore concludes that not only do our commonsense moral intuitions fail to support Singer's second premise, they also reveal that people positively reject the truth of the premise.
-Timmerman claims that commonsense morality would not require saving as many children as possible in the "Drowning Child" case. Do you agree with Timmerman about that? Why or why not?

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Definitions:

Atomic

In the context of logic, atomic refers to propositions that cannot be broken down into simpler components, functioning as the basic, indivisible units of meaning.

Symbolize

To represent or stand for something else, especially through symbols or symbolic actions.

Quantifier

A logical term that specifies the quantity of specimens in the domain of discourse that satisfy a conditional statement.

Atomic Open Sentence

An atomic open sentence is a type of logical statement that contains variables and is either true or false depending on the values of those variables.