Hi Catracho, I accumulate some information that may help you formulate an informed response.
For Jean-Paul Sartre, life was absurd and made no sense at all (he lived through WW2). Nothing was forbidden to people — as World War 2 showed. Every individual life made its own rules, and chose to follow a dictator or the French Underground. There was no right or wrong — no morality or immorality. Life is always Total Freedom — we always have a Free Choice. Whoever denies this is "inauthentic" and lives in "bad faith" and is a "coward."
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, "even if God existed, that would make no difference." It wouldn’t change the fact that people must choose their own actions in absolute solitude, with no excuses. He believed that if God exists, humans are not free, and that if humans are free, God does not exist. If there is no god then as Sartre pointed out we are condemned to be free - our actions are entirely our own. I don’t happen to think we are 100% free to see (& therefore do) exactly what’s appropriate or the opposite: doomed to be unaware of what’s appropriate at every opportunity. Most of us occupy a place somewhere between these two possibilities and the more we accept our own self-actualization, the more free we become.
For Peter Singer, if the cost of charitable giving is "morally insignificant" to our own standard of living, then the Benthamite calculus of "great gain" for the other, "insignificant pain" to us, applies. In other words, if a terrible event causing suffering occurs, say in the tsunami of some years ago, and the cost to U.K. people would each be insignificant (a less expensive latte for a month, permitting a $5 contribution, for those whose standard of living includes daily lattes), and the U.K. contributions would resolve the material suffering, then the people of the U.K. ought help the people caused suffering by the tsunami. (Obviously, this is an idealized case: one tragedy, one affluent country.)
His views on religion can be summed up with this quote: "The evidence of our own eyes makes it more plausible to believe that the world was not created by any god at all. If, however, we insist on believing in divine creation, we are forced to admit that the god who made the world cannot be all-powerful and all good. He must be either evil or a bungler."
|