An ugly twist to Peter Singer's parable about the drowning child

We, middle class people in rich countries, ought to live quite differently from the way we do live. We ought to put a lot more of our economic resources into preventing the suffering and death of others. Philosopher Peter Singer makes this case very convincingly in his famous parable about the drowning child.¹ Here is how his 1997 essay The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle begins:

To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.

I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do.

Once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, I ask: would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost – and absolutely no danger – to yourself? Virtually all agree that distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation. I then point out that we are all in that situation of the person passing the shallow pond: we can all save lives of people, both children and adults, who would otherwise die, and we can do so at a very small cost to us: the cost of a new CD, a shirt or a night out at a restaurant or concert, can mean the difference between life and death to more than one person somewhere in the world – and overseas aid agencies like Oxfam overcome the problem of acting at a distance.

Enter Nigel Warburton, who recently posed the following question on Twitter:

Is it Peter Singer's view that if your shoes are very expensive you shouldn't save that drowning child but should sell your shoes to save 5?

Footnote

1) Singer expands his case his excellent book The Life You Can Save (in Swedish translation: Det liv du kan rädda). In his recent follow-up The Most Good You Can Do (which I haven't yet read) he zooms in on the issue of donating as efficiently as possible, and (slightly more generally) on the philosophy and social movement known as effective altruism.