The article, Who Should Pay for the Cost of Rescues?, stated, “The National Park, for example, spends $5 million a year on operations.” Even though it is rescuer's job to rescue the person in trouble, the rescuee should pay because self-infliction and expensive and dangerous work for the rescuer. The self-infliction, the expensive and dangerous work, and America versus Europe debate show that a rescue should pay when they put themselves at risk.
In the first place, the work of the rescuer is very expensive and dangerous, so the rescuee should have to pay for the expenses. As explained by The Seattle Times, Ranger Killed During Rescue of Climbers on Mount Rainier, a climbing ranger fell to his death after helping rescue two climbers who had fallen into a crevasse. A rescuer’s job is already very hazardous without having to rescue people who are reckless and put themselves at risk. Also, according to Article 1, Who pays for rescues at sea?, “ It can cost about $11,000 an hour to fly their choppers.” It is extremely expensive to conduct searches and rescues, so it doesn’t help when people have to be rescued when they put
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As stated in Who Should Pay for the Cost of Rescues?, “The European system, while harsher, works in the sense that it forces people to confront the consequences of their actions.” In Europe, if you act reckless and then need to be rescued you would have to pay the cost of the rescue. Although in America, the rescuee doesn’t have to pay for the cost of the rescue even though they put themselves at risk while society has to pay for it. As stated in Who Should Pay for the Cost of Rescues?, The American system doesn’t penalize obvious recklessness and makes the people pay in extreme cases. In short, the rescuees should pay for the expenses of their rescue if they put themselves at risk due to the evidence provided in the America versus Europe
Everest in 1996. This became the deadliest expedition to ever climb with 15 people losing their lives. Krakauer explains his intrinsic motivations to accept this challenge and many of the mistakes that helped lead to the disasters of that day. He includes himself, and explicitly blames himself for at least one person's death. The experience affects him profoundly, and in addition to telling the story, the book focuses on how Krakauer is forever changed as a result of what happened. All of the clients have difficulty adjusting to the altitude, tiring easily, losing weight and moving slowly. The climbers' experience in mountain climbing and at high altitudes varies some of them are quite qualified, others very inexperienced and highly reliant on the
Peter Singer organizes his arguments into an outline form allowing a reader to take individual thoughts, adding them together giving a “big picture.” Within the first few pages, Singer shares two guiding assumptions in regards to his argument to which I stated above. The first assumption states “that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad” (231). Singer steps away from the typical writing style; he states the assumption yet he does not give a personal comment in regards to the assumption. He chooses to do so because the assumption itself is surely uncontroversial; most people would agree, but to those who don’t agree, there are so many possibilities at which to arrive to this assumption that, after all, if they don’t yet comprehend its truth, it would be hard to convince them of its accuracy. Speaking for myself, if I encountered an individual that does not agree to the assumption that death by avoidable causes is bad; I would not hesitate to declare them of being heartless. There are many cases, whether across oceans on foreign land or areas to which we live, where people are dying because of inescapable, unfortunate reasons. Within such cases, even a possible little voice in the back of the head can lead one to wonder who has the responsibility of helping those who are enduring such unnecessary deaths. This sense of wonder leads us to Singer’s second assumption; “if it is in our power to prevent something from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (231). To better clarify what this assumption is looking for, Singer points out that “It requires u...
response to the Singer. Cullity argues that Singer’s conclusion, that we ought to help others in need so long as this does not cause any significant damage to ourselves, is severely demanding, as it is essentially arguing that we are morally obligated to help everybody in the world. The only way in which we would be able to justify not helping somebody who needed our help would be if doing so would put the person helping at significant risk. Cullity argues in his paper that Singer’s argument is asking too much of people when it claims that donating to aid agencies is a moral obligation and that not doing so would be immoral. His main way of doing so is by rejecting the Severe Demand.
In Peter Singer’s work, “The Life You Can Save,” he presents the famous scenario of a child drowning in a shallow pond. This scenario presents readers with the question of whether they would save a child from a life or death situation at a certain cost. After encouraging his readers to develop an answer, he creates an analogy between the presented scenario and the act of donating to a life-saving charity. Singer argues that the two scenarios are ethically similar and that if you would save the child in the pond, then you should be donating to charity without question; however, his argument comes with some faults. The shallow pond case and the charity case are ethically dissimilar due to differences in costs, direct versus indirect contributions,
How much money is one morally obligated to give to relief overseas? Many In people would say that although it is a good thing to do, one is not obligated to give anything. Other people would say that if a person has more than he needs, then he should donate a portion of what he has. Peter Singer, however, proposes a radically different view. His essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” focuses on the Bengal crisis in 1971 and claims that one is morally obligated to give as much as possible. His thesis supports the idea that “We ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility – that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift” (399). He says that one's obligation to give to people in need half-way around the world is just as strong as the obligation to give to one's neighbor in need. Even more than that, he says that one should keep giving until, by giving more, you would be in a worse position than the people one means to help. Singer's claim is so different than people's typical idea of morality that is it is easy to quickly dismiss it as being absurd. Saying that one should provide monetary relief to the point that you are in as bad a position as those receiving your aid seems to go against common sense. However, when the evidence he presents is considered, it is impossible not to wonder if he might be right.
The first reason society should pay for rescue services is, most people can’t afford to pay for their own rescue. If someone were walking on a trail and a rock slide happens, they could be in a canyon, they would call for help and rescue services would come, but what if rescue services charged you a bill. In many cases it is an accident that you are stuck or need rescue services. Some people are too poor to afford a rescue bill. Some places around the world do actually do charge people if they need help, “Pikes Peak instituted a $500 fee for hikers who reach the top… and call for help because they are too tired to walk down,” according to “Who Should Pay for the Cost of Rescues” by Steve Casimiro. The solution to people having to be billed is taxes, United Sates citizens are taxed for rescue services.
This topic is relevant to today’s society because it is important to save lives, and doing the opposite would just be inhumane. For example, there’s a single mom on a little adventure on Everest, alone, and she fell. Should rescue services help her to reunite with her little kids? Or should they “accidentally” put the poor kids in an orphanage? With the example given above, it is crystal clear that the option to save the mom is the best choice. And that’s why people do have the right to rescue services when they put themselves at risk. There are a lot of mountain climbing accidents happening every day, think about it, imagine how grieving life would be for the unfortunate climbers’ families if rescue services can’t help
To truly answer if a value should be put on a human life, Amanda Ripley, author of “What Is a Life Worth”, wrote on how human lives after September 11th, 2000, were placed into a monetary value chart so as to “compensate” the families for their loss. “Is a poor man's life worth less than a rich mans?” Ripley wrote ( Ripley 56). A man by the name of Feinstein had to create a chart that “accurately” calculated the life of a human being.
Peter Singer, in his influential essay “Famine, Affluence and Poverty”, argues that affluent people have the moral obligation to contribute to charity in order to save the poor from suffering; any spending on luxuries would be unjustified as long as it can be used to improve other’s lives. In developing his argument, Singer involved one crucial premise known as the Principle of Sacrifice—“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it”. To show that such principle has the property to be held universal, Singer refers to a scenario in which a person witnesses a drowning child. Most people, by common sense, hold that the witness has the moral duty to rescue the child despite some potential costs. Since letting people die in poverty is no different from watching a child drowning without offering any help, Singer goes on and concludes that affluent people have the moral duty to keep donating to the poor until an increment of money makes no further contribution.
Ultimately there is no specific reason to blame for the disaster that happened, nevertheless greed, selfishness, erratic weather and misinterpreted information contribute to the deaths. Conclusively, most of the climbers themselves that died hold a great responsibility for their own death for the sake of their lack of knowledge on what they were encountering for their greed along with their selfishness. They knew they were on the most dangerous mountain in the world as a consequence, sadly, greed and selfishness got in the way of their own
Everest. “The falling ice hit twenty-five men, killing sixteen of them, all Nepalis. Three of the bodies were buried beneath the debris and were never recovered,” (Source 2). This tragedy had occurred all when mountaineering. This is not something rare either, according to Source 1 “Keep Everest Open”, “...Everest exacted a ratio of one death for every four successful summit attempts”. This sport is extremely dangerous if something goes wrong, which means that the chance of death is high. So why would anyone want to risk their life just to climb a
Everest is an unbelievable mountain that has taken the lives of a number of the greatest climbers in history. It was my job to ensure that clients make it up that treacherous mountain safely. My name is Rob Hall. I was the main guide and cofounder of a climbing company called Adventure Consultants. My friend, Gary Ball, and I used to be professional climbers. Together we succeeded in climbing to the highest summit on each of the seven continents in seven months. This was our greatest achievement. After this, we decided to start our own company guiding clients up large mountains. In May 1992, we successfully led six clients to the summit of Everest. Unfortunately, Gary died of cerebral edema in October 1993 during an attempt on the world’s sixth-tallest mountain. He died in my arms and the next day I buried him in a crevasse. Despite the pain that his death had caused me, I continued guiding for our company and eventually led thirty-nine climbers to the summit of Everest.
This statement leads me to my next point of Singer’s argument that being one of many to assist does not take away the responsibility that you have as an individual. He supports his viewpoint with a progressive scale of every person donating at least one percent of their income and taxpayers giving five percent of their income. If everyone in affluent countries donated with Singer’s proposed scale, they would raise $1.5 trillion dollars a year –which is eight times more than what poor countries aim for in hopes of improving health care, schooling, reducing death rates, living standards, and more. Even though Singer proposes the progressive scale for giving money to aid extreme poverty, he does not introduce any alternative methods to giving aid. Singer presented this point in the argument accurately, but is not strong enough to support the child-drowning example. In comparison to the child drowning, Singer’s proposal is weak because you cannot hold people accountable for not donating a percentage of their income; however, you can hold a person or group of people accountable for watching and not saving the child from
This obligatory nature of his argument urges people to donate the money that would otherwise be spent on luxuries. Singer’s profound conclusion has been supported by an analogy: What would you do if you saw a small child drowning? There can be little doubt that, despite the inconvenience of getting our clothes muddy and shoes wet, people will attempt to save the child’s life. From this example, Singer builds on to argue that there is no moral difference between letting the child drown and letting one die of poverty in a greater geographical distance. After refuting some objections raised by other scholars, Singer reiterates the importance of our obligation to help, which should not be lessened by the refusal of other people to help.
Ethics and moral judgment will always continue to be a controversial topic due to the different beliefs of those living around the world. One’s surrounding and upbringing is different from almost every human being; making no two people alike. As a health specialist it is our job to uphold the standards of professional conduct and ethical codes. We must respect decisions of others and be held accountable for our own personal mistakes. In the case of The Overcrowded Lifeboat making a vital decision with the lives of the people involved can be a major controversy. The question of whether a situation can be considered moral may never be answered and is left to the interpretation of the own solitary individual.