Peter Singer and Chitra Divakaruni each offer a powerful commentary on world poverty. Both of their respective essays, "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" and "Live Free and Starve" demonstrate good writing skills and rhetoric are therefore worthy pieces for inclusion into any book club. However, of the two authors only Divakaruni has first-hand experience of poverty. Singer's argument, while more shocking and powerful than Divakaruni's, falls short because of his lack of personal credibility and his over-reliance on making the reader feel guilty.
According to Australian author Peter Singer, We live in a cold and heartless world. The analogies in his essay "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" bluntly suggest that we in the Western world are guilty of crimes against humanity simply by not donating $200 or more each month to charitable organizations. His first story is based on a Brazilian movie called Central Station. The protagonist in the film was offered a thousand dollars to usher a child to his killer. When Dora discovers what she has done, she resolves to make amends. However, Singer twists the tale around to make it seem as if we, the readers of his essay, are guilty of a crime. Like Dora, however, we readers are not guilty of the crimes Singer is accusing us of. Furthermore, Singer offers us no ethos in his argument. His "solution to world poverty" is based purely on opinion and intellectual babble, not on experience.
Ethos is one of the three essential aspects of classical Greek Rhetoric; it refers to the speaker's credibility, his or her credentials, life experience, or education. Ethos generally means that the writer can be trusted. The other two aspects of Greek rhetoric are pathos and logos. Logos is the intellectual fodder that makes an argument palatable; while Singer has plenty of logos in his essay, his lack of ethos makes "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" fall short of being influential. Finally, Singer's article possesses ample pathos, or emotional appeal. Pathos is, however, easy to come by and therefore Singer's essay is not a unique or particularly compelling piece of writing. While he correctly urges his wealthy readers in the Western world to wonder whether their expensive night on the town is worth the cost of a child's life, Singer's diatribe falls short of being truly meaningful because of his lack of credibility.
On the other hand, Chitra Divakaruni establishes her ethos at the onset of her article. An Indian woman who grew up relatively wealthy yet amid the caste system of Indian in which she noticed the severe stratifications of society, Divakaruni writes about the same subject that Singer does: starving children. Both authors urge their wealthy Western readers to do something -- anything -- about the situation that plagues our world: the unequal distribution of wealth. Yet of the two authors, Divakaruni and Singer, only the former possesses the ethos necessary to render her essay worthy of rhetorical criticism and analysis.
Singer's essay is compelling for its literary techniques, however. The author's willingness to be controversial grabs the reader's attention immediately. In fact, Singer's article is more likely to persuade the reader to donate money to charity, no doubt. His infusion of guilt into his essay is the primary reason why readers of "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" will find the piece powerful, even motivational. There are several reasons why Singer's writing is so effective in motivating readers toward practical action. First, Singer knows his audience. All good writers must keep their audience squarely in mind as they compose their piece of material. Singer seems acutely aware that his readers will be amongst the intelligentsia of the world. Penning his emotions for an academic audience, Singer carefully crafts his writing to appeal to a specific demographic. The demographic is not based on race or ethnicity. Although Singer implies that poverty is linked with race and ethnicity, the message of his article is that economic class, more than race or ethnicity, determines one's fate in life. The central message of "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" is that readers of his piece, who would most likely be wealthy, should donate a large sum of money to charitable organizations lest they contribute to the problem of world poverty.
However, Singer fails to acknowledge that part of his audience might be from poor backgrounds. Singer also fails to acknowledge that world poverty cannot be solved simply by having every reader of his article donate a few hundred dollars to charity. In fact, if everyone who read...
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