What do ya'll think of the following argument that one often sees:
Imagine you're walking along wearing $100 shoes near a pond and you notice a child drowning. You can, without risk to yourself, save the child from drowning. But you'll wreck your shoes in the process. Here's the argument:
1) You ought to save the drowning child. If you failed to save the child for the sake of your $100 shoes, you would be doing something extremely morally repugnant.
2) There is no morally relevant difference between the drowning child in front of you and some child dying in the developing world of preventable diseases for which good aid organizations exist.
3) So, you ought to donate significantly more to help folks dying in the developing world of preventable diseases, and failing to do so is as bad as failing to save the drowning child.
The tough thing about this argument it it seems to me extremely plausible, but it has the conclusion that we're all doing something really morally wrong. And it doesn't feel right to just dismiss it with a shrug and a thought like "yeah maybe we could all stand to do more to help the less fortunate but such is life".
This is the classic Singerian argument, though consider this...it is essentially an appeal to emotion.
The intuition is that we save the child, in the abstract, but in reality quite often people stand by and watch as others suffer distress. We are evolutionarily programmed to things like the bystander effect (the more people viewing another in distress, the less likely one is to try to offer aid. The reason we suffer it is that it is evolutionarily efficient to hope that "someone else" will take care of the problem and avoid the personal cost.
Now, efficiency is not morality per se, but there is reason to think that someone who has three meals a day (rather than just one, saving the excess cash to donate to malaria treatment programs) is not being immoral and selfish.
There is another way to look at the problem though, that one who saves the child in the pond is morally laudable (aka "supererogatory", philosophers love their crazy words), rather than conclude that the inactive bystander is reprehensible. In fact, the moral reality is muddied, since we both heap praise on the savior and would look askance at the person who left the scene.
If the bystander who leaves the scene is morally reprehensible, then so are many thousands of people in far off lands who don't do "enough" to stem the tide of suffering that Peter Singer wants us to contribute funds to end, but Singer doesn't really want us to spend time blaming local governments and individuals even though that's the way societies coerce the desired behaviors from reticent individuals.
Personally, I think one also has to account for the basics of human psychology in setting ethical norms, and I think as a society we do that pretty well. That means noticing and giving some weight to notions like "in-group" and "out-group" distinctions that we all make in deciding whether to render aid, as well as problems like bystander effect. As a society, we readily draw ethical lines between in-groups and out-groups all the time. That's why Americans focus on the number of American dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not just the number of dead on both sides. That's why we feed our families three meals a day, even though we know that we could cut back and give a lot of "excess" food to feed other hungry Americans around us.
Setting up an ethical system that ignores these sorts of psychological filters is very likely to leave one with an ethical system that is maladaptive in an evolutionary sense, and so I think we need to proceed down that road with some degree of circumspection.
Though, that said, and while there is an appeal to Singer's argument, I am completely certain that no one, not even Singer, takes it to its logical end. If he did, he would live on something a budget that maximizes his ability to contribute to causes he believes in. So Singer shouldn't own a pair of $100 shoes, ever, as he can buy $5 shoes and spend $95 to help the poor and ill. He should be lobbying the Dean at Princeton hard to set the whole university on a similar path. He's certainly very generous by *my* standards, to be sure (and that is laudable), but he's also inexplicably unethical by his own standards in that he has a nice house, and he could be living in a more modest home.
His arguments (which are heartfelt) also lead him to many counterintuitive ideas like "bestiality is okay, as long as there is no cruelty to the animal" and "animals have coequal rights with humans."
Think of the latter point. Singer is quite clear that is you see a sewer rat drowning, you also need to ruin your shoes and miss your appointments to save the rat.
One can certainly accept his premise as to humans and reject it as to rats or other animals, but why? If the answer is (as I think it is) "Well, I'm a human and I care more about humans" that is really an application of defining the "in-group." One can just as well define the in-group in other ways (by nationality, by ethnic makeup, by tribal affiliation, by certain degrees of familial affinity, etc.). (And Singer's point is that because any line drawing would have an arbitrary component to it, all line drawing is invalid, and any creature that can suffer (Singer's preferred line) is entitled to equal deference).
Truth is, it is engaging to think through the problems, but is even Peter Singer doesn't live up to the ideals, then probably very few do./* As interesting as his thought experiment is, and as hard as it is to absolutely refute it, if we are honest we have to admit that hearing the argument is unlikely to make anyone substantially change their lifestyle to save the lives of unseen people living far away.
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/*Singer does make a distinction about there not being a "significant" reduction in other things of moral importance (which could include living in reasonable comfort I suppose, and could easily include feeding one's family reasonably well)...but he doesn't consider that "significant" in marginal terms, so (to me) it seems like a wishy-washy way of justifying his own failure to give up more than he does. I don't think he needs to justify it (not to me, at any rate), but I think he does to himself to remain within the bounds of his own moral system, and he does that by saying "well, I hardly notice this sacrifice."
At the same time, though, if I start sending money to far away people to be applied (I hope) in a good way rather than being wasted on bureaucracy or stolen by corrupt local officials, seeing no benefit myself, I am going to have a pretty low threshold (nearly $0) for what I consider to be a significant reduction in my personal happiness. I will spend some time fretting over that money to a greater degree than Singer does. That certainly means (by my standards) that Singer may well be a morally superior person to me, but that makes him praiseworthy, not me immoral.
I don't think Singer sees my personal fretting and unhappiness over the now missing money as a valid moral ground in and of itself not to send it, but I kinda think it is.
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Any ethical system that suggests that everyone is unethical, probably needs a rethink.
As a practical necessity, we need to have a system of ethics that we can adhere to faithfully, and that requires us to limit our
obligations to those things that either right in front of us or which we have some special connection to. That doesn't mean that you should ignore suffering that is far away, or that you don't have any special responsibility for, it just means that when you choose to intervene in such cases, you are "going above and beyond" what ethics
requires and performing a supererogatory act. At least that is what I believe.