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Peter SingerA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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. His proposal would change what we have long taken to be acts of kindness into acts of duty. (Note: This guide frequently replaces Singer’s term with the phrase “moral framework”, because “framework” is more commonly used in American English for this meaning of “scheme.”)
Singer describes this as something we view as good to do, but not required—an optional and voluntary act that is received by others as positive. However, if one does not do it, there is no negative reaction. In the context of discussing moral schemes, Singer states that charity is seen as supererogatory in our current moral framework, but will be an obligation under his proposed new moral framework.
This is a school of philosophy developed in the late 18th century by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and popularized in the 19th century. The goal of utilitarianism is to promote things that are good, like happiness and pleasure, and prevent things that are bad, such as suffering, poverty, and unhappiness, in an attempt to achieve the greatest wellbeing for the greatest number of people.
By Peter Singer
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