fredag 12 juni 2015

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.

15 kommentarer:

  1. Nigels comment is a bit silly. Just take off the shoes.

    SvaraRadera
    Svar
    1. It is not silly. You're missing the point. If you really need to, add the explicit premise that there is no time to take off the shoes and save the child.

      Radera
    2. That also is silly. There is time to take off the shoes. I understand the simily, bit it is a bad one. The point is that we can afford both.

      Radera
    3. Thought experiments are a very useful tool for doing philosophy. It requires an ability to focus on the essential aspects, and ignore the irrelevant ones. You need to work on that.

      Radera
  2. A reasonable position would be that you shouldn't have bought those expensive shoes in the first place but used the money to save lives.

    SvaraRadera
  3. If the only way those 5 children can be saved is by selling ones shoes, then it basically boils down to saving either 1 or 5 children. But that is an unlikely condition to hold in real life. If you can afford a pair of expensive shoes, then you probably have other assets that you could use instead, or you may convince somebody else to donate the corresponding sum.

    Warburton's counter argument seems convincing because we don't imagine that the former condition holds. But if it doesn't, then I don't think that Singer's position implies that we should let the first child drown.

    SvaraRadera
    Svar
    1. In principle, a fan of Warburton's thought experiment may respond as follows: Suppose your economic resources other than those shoes suffice for saving the lives of 1562 starving Somalian children, and suppose you're already committed to using those very resources, down to the last penny, to saving these 1562 children. Is there a way for you to save 5 more? Yes, but only if you ignore the child in the pond.

      In practice, your objection is nearly always valid, because very few of us spend every single penny helping the poor and needy. Almost everyone in the rich world's middle class spends at least some money on not-quite necessary private consumption such as, say, SUV's, red wine and chocolate. When deciding whether or not to save those 5 straving children, it is perverse to weigh that againt saving the child in the pond, when we could just as well have weighed it against our private SUV, red wine or chocolate consumption.

      Bjorn Lomborg, in several books including How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, plays exactly this perverse gambit. He arrives at the conclusion that we should not spend any money on preventing global warming, because his cost-benefit analysis suggests that the amount of world improvement per spent dollar is higher when we fight malaria or distribute vitamin pills in the third world. But why the heck should preventing climate change be weighed against fighting malaria rather than against some of our first world middle class private overconsumption?

      Radera
    2. Let us assume that you instead are carrying something irreplaceable, like the only supply of a medicine that could cure those 5 children of a rare but deadly disease, and that this medicine would be ruined by contact with water. You are on your way to hand this medicine over to a courier, who is then taking it to the children. You have never met the children, and don't even know their names. However, if you save that child in the pond, those 5 children will die.

      What would you choose?

      Radera
    3. To include in the above that there are other people that can help too: assume that there are more supplies of the medicine in the possession of other people, but also more diseased children, and the global stock of the medicine would not be sufficient to cure them all. In that case, the loss of your supply will still mean the death of 5 children.

      Radera
    4. I believe, Lars, that this setup distorts a key feature of the original thought experiment. You know there are five specific children out there that have the rare disease and that need specifically your help, because you are the one person carrying their medication. Despite you having "never met the children, and don't even know their names", this makes them seem much less anonymous to you than in the original setting, and this makes it much easier for you to prioritize them over the one child in the pond.

      Radera
    5. I think my latest comment (17:16) anticipated your objection (17:21).

      In any case, from a strictly ethical point of view anonymity should not really matter.

      Radera
    6. Aha, yes it did. When I pressed the send button at 17:21, I had not yet seen your 17:16 comment...

      Radera
  4. My impression of Singer is that he seems not to shy away from the logical consequences of his reasoning when challanged in this way.

    My guess is that he would maybe point out the flaws in the counter argument (such as the perverse gambit), but agree that, yes, if it really comes down to 1 or 5 -- then 5 it is.

    SvaraRadera
    Svar
    1. Yes, I think I remember that he actually said that when he discussed a similar example in Stockholm 2008.

      Radera