What is our responsibility to others? What do others owe us? These questions have long been concerns of the novel, especially the realist novel, in a relatively short history. For far longer, they have been posed by philosophy.
In questions of moral philosophy, or ethics, a common technique for exploring possible answers to such questions is, as Timothy Williamson, Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, tells us, the thought experiment.
Such episodes show how far philosophy can be inspired and guided by examples. A theory can sound plausible, even compelling, on first hearing, or even to generations of intelligent, highly trained thinkers, yet collapse when faced with an apt counterexample. If we don’t confront them with difficult examples, we are not testing our theories properly. We are accepting them uncritically, making life too easy for ourselves.
A striking feature of many examples in philosophy is that they are imaginary. I don’t know whether Dharmottara ever witnessed or heard of a real life case like the one described. The point is: it doesn’t matter. We have to imagine it, even if he didn’t. If such a case never happened, still it clearly could have happened . . .
At Philosophy Experiments, a site of The Philosopher’s Magazine, one of multiple thought experiments offered is drawn from philosopher Peter Singer’s 1997 essay “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle.”
Here is Singer’s basic introductory scenario, reframed by Philosophy Experiments, and then gradually expanded in detail in order to draw us in and complicate our thinking.
Your route to work takes you past a shallow pond. One morning you notice that a small child has fallen in and appears to be in difficulty in the water. The child is crying in distress and it seems is at risk of drowning. You are tall and strong, so you can easily wade in and pull the child out. However, although you’ll come to no physical harm if you rescue the child, you will get your clothes wet and muddy, which means you’ll have to go home to change, and likely you’ll be late for work.
In this situation, do you have a moral obligation to rescue the child?
After you probably answer “yes,” you are then asked a small handful of potentially qualifying questions. What if you had recently had your bike stolen in the area and might well again? How about if there were others around who might well effect the rescue themselves, though they appeared not to be acting? What if the chances of success were not assured? What if you knew that there is a high incidence of drowning among children, and regardless of your efforts in this instance, many other children were nonetheless bound to drown in similar circumstances? And, finally, what if the child were not right in front of you, but a far distance away, but you could be transported to the location, at no significant cost to you, in time to make the rescue? Would any of these factors mitigate your obligation to attempt to save the child?
I answered no to all. My obligation, I believe, is absolute and diminished by none of the qualifying circumstances.
Ah, but then there was just one question more.
We just want to ask you one further question, but this time it isn’t specifically to do with the drowning child scenario. Here it is:
Are you morally obliged to make a relatively small donation, perhaps to the value of a new shirt or a night out at a restaurant, to an overseas aid agency such as Oxfam within the next few days (and even if you have previously made such a donation, perhaps even recently)?
I answered no.
And I was told I was mistaken.
Now, of course, the calculation behind — and true end — all of the qualifying circumstances became clear to me.
Each is intended to replicate the kinds of rationales that people use to explain their not contributing to charities and other collective efforts to aid people in trouble far from home, people who are outside of what Singer calls our “expanding circle” of moral responsibility.
This activity is based on a thought experiment devised by Peter Singer that aims to show that if there is a moral obligation to rescue a drowning child (without sacrificing anything morally significant – i.e., at no great cost to the rescuer), then there is also a moral obligation to make a small donation to an overseas aid agency. As Singer puts it,
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.
Well, now, I feel — if not obligated, certainly — compelled, then, to disagree.
I do not disagree with the greater point Singer is attempting to make about our expanding circle of moral obligation. Many share this view. In a 2011 New Republic essay titled “The Boundaries of Justice,” Harvard economist and philosopher Amartya Sen considered David Humes’ views, back in the 18th Century, of the influence of global expansion on our sense of justice.
In the early days of the increasing globalization in which Hume lived, with new trade routes and expanding economic relations across the world, Hume talked about the growing need to think afresh about the nature of justice, as we come to know more about people living elsewhere, with whom we have come to develop new relations:
“Again suppose, that several distinct societies maintain a kind of intercourse for mutual convenience and advantage, the boundaries of justice still grow larger, in proportion to the largeness of men’s views, and the force of their mutual connexions. History, experience, reason sufficiently instruct us in this natural progress of human sentiments, and in the gradual enlargement of our regards to justice, in proportion as we become acquainted with the extensive utility of that virtue.”
The remark is of interest in itself, and also helps us to understand the general idea of justice, and its particular application to global justice, that can be seen to be part of the Humean line of analysis. But it can also be used to illustrate Hume’s general arguments for the need to interrelate ethics and epistemology, and moral reasoning and human sentiments. [Emphasis added]
“The need to interrelate ethics and epistemology”: that is, the more we know of other people and their lives, the more widely our affective associations and connections range, the greater grow the boundaries of our moral sentiments and our sense of justice. In one respect, this is a commonplace taught to children: try to understand others, to see the world through their eyes, and comity will grow. But this is actually consequential to something prior – what is it that brings us to know of – not yet even know – others in the first place. Hume refers to “new trade routes and expanding economic relations across the world,” which certainly conforms to our contemporary notion of globalization. People have differing and strong reactions to that word depending upon what is intended by it, whether economic, social, political – or technological, which enables all those others. Singer uses the term “communications.” I employ the broader “technology” because to know of and then know to some degree, even before communication, already produces effects.
However, I think the framing of the donation question to be faulty, both by Singer, who proposes to his students nothing more specific in its parameters than a donation the cost of a 1997 CD, and Philosophy Experiments, which tries to be more precise, but I think not precise enough.
I think the problems are two. One is the anonymity – the abstraction – of it. Note that as constructed, the donation proposal does not even mention a human being. I suppose the human is an implied one, but that matters. The other problem is with these terms:
within the next few days (and even if you have previously made such a donation, perhaps even recently).
Consider the following chain in which we have a developing sense of affective connection. We may think it almost certain, as I do, that there are other planets with intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe. We all know that bad things happen to good life forms, so it is likely that misfortune is occurring even as I write. We do not actually know such a planet exists, or of it, so any feeling for the misfortune of such life forms, or “feeling” of obligation, is as hypothetical and abstract as possible, likely even absent. If we know of the planet’s existence, and the beings on it, each of these factors – affective connection and sense of obligation — may be considered to increase in varying degrees in different people. If we know something about the planet, if we can communicate with its inhabitants, if we can travel there, if we can know inhabitants in their specificity — and even if not, but then again still more — their individuality, each factor will increase in intensity for most people and in our common ethical considerations. Now let’s bring matters back to earth.
In the experiment’s presentation, whereas the drowning child is concrete and individual, regarding the charitable donation we have the utmost abstraction. Shouldn’t matter. No, it shouldn’t. But.
According to various authoritative sources, over 6o million people now die globally each year, 164 thousand a day, 6850 per hour, 114 per minute, 2 per second. According to UNICEF,
In total, more than 5.0 million children under age 5, including 2.3 million newborns, along with 2.1 million children and youth aged 5 to 24 years – 43 per cent of whom are adolescents – died in 2021.
With every breath we take, someone is dying somewhere. Life is wonderful. Life is awful. It’s full of death. Every second.
In Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party,” the young Laura feels sympathetically and morally aghast that her wealthy family intends to proceed with its large and elaborate garden party in full knowledge that a man in the nearby village has that day died by accident. The story contains many class themes, but certainly its greatest – informed by just those questions about the unknown planet above – is how we live in the presence of death.
The equivalent in the charitable donation analogy is that while one donation might be of no consequence financially, we see from the figures above that there is cause to contribute at every moment of every day. In total, those yearly global deaths are the largest conceivable pond of drowning children, crying out, in their floundering, for us to wade in to save them as the occupation of our lives. Individually, they are a call to save someone, directly or by donation, every moment of our lives.
Why then, as Philosophy Experiments frames it, make the donation only, vaguely, in the “next few days”? Why not right now, and now again, and again? What is “recently” for the last donation? Last month? Yesterday? How close to broke do we have to get before we might be considered financially exhausted, and the donation not a painless daily expense? Singer does not propose very much pain to ourselves in the lake rescue, but how much financial pain is not very much pain? If his hypothetical is intended as merely a singular event in our lives — a onetime donation in a merely imaginary world, just to make a point — then it doesn’t seem to offer greater direction, beyond making the point, about how really to act out our responsibility to each other.
Singer closes,
In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people going short of food in Rwanda, the desire to sample the wines of Australia’s best vineyards pales into insignificance. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine; but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into fashion, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the added expense that marks out the luxury-car market – all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to put themselves in the position of others affected by their actions. If the circle of ethics really does expand, and a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will fundamentally change the society in which we live.
This poses the greater question of when, in the knowledge of all this misfortune and death in the world, it is permissible to think for a bit, better, about life, our own lives and what provides for us joy in the living of them, even if we then spend a “little” of the money we may, or may not, be fortunate to possess in pursuit of that joy?
And maybe there is something we can do better, too, than dropping a check in the mail, or clicking a link, with sufficient guilt-freeing frequency, addressed “to anyone who may be about to die.”
What do you think? What do we owe others in need? What commitment or sacrifice, small or great, is demanded of us to meet our moral obligation to our fellows, what financial aid, and how do we balance that against some more engaged action in our lives?
P.S. I welcome your private communications. If you have thoughts you’d prefer to share with me more personally, about what I’ve written here, ideas you’d like to share or some recommended reading that seems more appropriate to a direct message, just click the button below.
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, Extraordinary Ordinary People, and A Reader’s Review. You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
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Hi Jay,
I've always rejected the ultimate end of Singer's hypothetical.
First if giving away all your money until you hit some sort of subsistence level of wealth was the cultural norm, capitalism would cease to exist as an engine of growth and the entire world would be far poorer.
Second, prudent philanthropy involves having some degree of knowledge of where your money is going and whether it's having a meaningful impact. To measure the impact, you need to have some ability to follow the money.
Third, often the biggest leverage/impact you can have is as an advisor to people running a charitable organization. Giving money is crucial, yes, but giving your expertise or using your network can sometimes be more important than sending in a check.
I feel a keen responsibility to help those in need, according to my resources. But I also feel a keen responsibility to help my family. There's a balance there.
The post below has a call to donate to a poverty fighting charity I'm involved with.
But I include it not to solicit, but to demonstrate that you don't need to save a drowning child or give money for malaria protecting mosquito nets in order to find opportunities to make a big impact close to home.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/thirty-meals-at-a-food-bank-something
I only just read Peter Singer's piece this weekend. I've been struggling with a moral dilemma about how much to share of my resources. See my recent post. I did something like I'm doing once before and it changed my life. I opened myself up to the troubles of others and aligned myself with their needs through the commitment of friendship and funds. It became more of a challenge recently when the people I've committed to experienced life threatening conditions. I did reach further into my bank account and my friendship pockets but only when I asked my 10 year old son "if you had the money to save someone's life, would you?" Without hesitation, without asking who, he said "of course." So much more about the experience of giving of ones self, duty and commitment that I hope to explore too with the "36 Orphans" substack.