"The final consideration—and this one is the only that bears any weight—is that there are many drowning children. Imagine that there wasn’t just one drowning child, but hundreds of thousands—you could never save them all. It’s plausible that you wouldn’t be obligated to spend your entire life saving children, never enjoying things."
Sorry, why is it plausible per your logic that we should be allowed to enjoy things? It seems clear that any marginal enjoyment I get is dwarfed by the obligation to save a life. Any softening seems like you just avoiding wanting to admit that we are all morally terrible per this theory? Why shouldn't I be obligated to eat nothing but rice and beans, live in a hovel, wear tattered clothes, etc? Maybe pragmatically it won't be helpful to convince people by pointing this out, but it seems like an inescapable conclusion of your moral theory.
There's a difference between what you're obligated to do and what's good to do. It seems good to devote your entire life to helping others, but it's not obvious you're obligated to do that. Also, many ways that you could enjoy life less--e.g. only eating rice and beans, which would harm your health. wearing tattered clothes--would decrease your effectiveness and your ability to convince others to do the same.
What principle draws the line between an obligation vs what's good to do? Why are we obligated to use 10% of our income and not 11%? Seems like there's a sorites concern ...
I don't know what the precise line is, and I doubt there's a fact of the matter. Some things are better to do than others. We, being non-ideal, will only do some of the good things, but we should strive to do as much as possible.
What is "as possible"? If for me I find myself unmoved by your arguments because I'm really stupid and enjoy European vacations and fancy clothes is it possible for me to give more? And under that scenario are you saying that you wouldn't judge me as morally blameworthy or you would be willing to say I have no obligation to give?
I don't think there's a precise line representing what you're required to do. The more the better. The fact that you won't do all the things you ought to doesn't mean you shouldn't do any of them.
I don't think you should think of ethics as a checklist of things you have to do, but as an opportunity to do good things. But if you are thinking of ethics as a checklist, I think morality requires, to avoid being blameworthy, making charitable giving a significant life project, not necessarily giving every last penny.
Re: checklist - you are the one calling out people for being bad because they don't act to save the drowning baby! That seems like treating morality as a checklist - such that if saving the baby isn't on your list of obligations then we should say they are bad
I wasn't claiming that morality demands nothing. My point was that you shouldn't treat it as a checklist, where the only things worth considering are the things morality holds you at gun point and demands you do.
If we consult our intuitions about the drowning child case, it's not obvious whether a person would be required to give away all their money, but they're certainly be required to make saving drowning children a significant life project.
I’m in general agreement about the thought experiment and its conclusions. One issue that I would love to hear your thoughts on is when one imagines a case where you are wearing a $6000 suit and see a child drowning.
It seems like, in this case, one should not save the child and ruin the suit, but instead leave the child to die and sell the suit because you can save a life abroad + help others with $6000.
Because of the counter-intuitiveness of this conclusion (my intuition is that you should just save the child) and by a general reflective equilibrium approach to the correct normative theory, I think this is good reason for thinking that this cold calculation should not be done in every case — though I certainly realize that people should not scope neglect their way out of every problem and, on the margin, should donate a lot more to effective charities.
Might be right. I also think this maybe reflects the counterintuitiveness of the world: because the child in front of you is so much more visceral, it seems more intuitive that you should save them, even if your reason to save the far-away one is just as great. But I agree: even if you think immediately saving a child would take a slight utility hit, you generally should do it.
Yea. This seems to be an issue with the whole reflective equilibrium — on the one hand, we have abstract intuitions (pain is bad) that seem really reliable, but we also have these others (people closer should have moral weight) that seem less reliable. Even though they seem less reliable and can be attributed to various evolutionary/ cultural pressures, it seems like they should still hold some weight in moral decision making, especially at the extremes like a case that I mentioned with little difference in amount you can save but one person being your mother, for example.
Do you really have the intuition specifically that "people closer should have more weight"? My intuition here is just that *ignoring more salient needs reveals greater callousness/viciousness than ignoring distant ones*, and *a morally good person would not be psychologically capable of just watching a child drown when they could easily save them*. But those are not the same as "people closer should have more weight". See also: https://www.utilitarianism.net/peter-singer-famine-affluence-and-morality/#salience
Fair point, and I think that I agree with you. I still think those other intuitions should actually come into play, though. If you saw a loved one drowning in the pond but you were wearing a $6,000 suit, would you be like “nah, I’m gonna shut up and multiply, sell the suit, and donate the money AMF.” Would you agree that saying that would not be the moral thing to do?
I think I actually do have the strong intuition that I should give people closer to me more moral weight. Curious to hear what your thoughts are, though.
I certainly give my loved ones more weight. I also know that my dispositions aren't a perfect guide to ethics: my default inclinations fail to give out-of-sight strangers nearly as much weight as they surely objectively warrant. Whether they warrant *as much* weight as my loved ones, I'm not sure. (It doesn't seem practically important to settle that, since I couldn't realistically follow that guidance even if it was morally ideal. All the important implications follow even just giving 1% weight to strangers. There's no way I'd tolerate a 1% chance of death for my son, when I could prevent it for just $5000.)
But whatever the correct verdict about partiality, I'm pretty sure that just being in my field of vision doesn't make someone more important or deserving of extra weight (though it does make their interests much harder to ignore).
I guess this may be my crux. It does seem important practically to know if your loved ones matter more because it would give you a thing to strive for (even if we can’t be perfect, we can certainly try to do better!!).
Similarly, in the case of what is in front of me, it still seems really hard to distinguish intuitions about whether we should care about people because they’re closer in distance from obligation due to figurative closeness.
The harder to ignore type logic seems to hold in both cases, but the only reason the partiality one is rejected is because, I think, the emotion is stronger.
If this is the case (which obviously you can disagree with), it seems like this being only a problem of different degrees would entail that one could either accept that there is no reason to treat both people closer to you equally or that you’re allowed to give some weight (amount can be debated) to those who are closer to you in both ways.
But, then again, my intuition really tells me that I should care more about my loved ones. Maybe I should just overfit the moral data and use my intuition in every case (with accounting for other preferences like wanting to be consistent/ not falling for scope neglect which just seems like another—maybe stronger— moral intuition).
Aren’t we confusing different social roles? Favoring your loved ones with your own money is different than favoring them with public funds. The impartiality is a natural requirement for a Lawmaker, not for a father.
There are not many books about social roles and utilitarian ethics. This one is the only I have read:
What does it mean for something to be morally obligated, in a way that extends beyond mere social obligation? Obviously it is "more good" to save the malaria-infected child. But it's not at all clear to me how any moral action is more or less obligated and it seems like attempts to argue that X is obligated but Y is not do not even have any idea how we would actually decide the question.
If it's an "obligation" in the realist sense, it either (a) is reducible to some descriptive fact that lacks any normative authority or force or (b) it's some non-naturalist notion of obligation, which is probably not meaningful. People can be "obligated" in a social respect as you suggest but I don't think there's any substantive notion of obligation aside from this.
Wow, this post of yours has a lot of replies, so my response will likely get buried!
The drowning child argument is a strong argument, and difficult to refute. It carries with it a counterintuitive conclusion. I think you can bite the bullet in a different counterintuitive direction though. Let me start by making the observation:
There is a 3x3 matrix of possible things: things which are morally bad/neutral/good, and things which our intuitions tell us are heartless or evil, things which our intuitions tell us are neutral, and things which our intuitions tell us are good. So something can be morally bad, but our intutions tell us it is good, or etc., for all 9 possible outcomes.
I would argue that, contrary to our intuitions, you are not morally obligated to save the drowning child, *even if you weren't wearing the expensive suit*. Saving the drowning child would be morally good, of course, but *not* saving the drowning child would be morally *neutral.* You don't *owe* the child anything. Of course, our intuitions say that this would be heartless, so this is an example where we have intuitions that tell us something morally neutral is heartless. The upside of this is that in this scenario most people would do something morally good rather than morally neutral if they saw the drowning child.
Again, I think it is more difficult than it seems to argue that you are *obligated* to save the drowning child. Of course, if I were in this situation, my empathy would kick in and I would immediately try to save the drowning child personally. We have evolved intuitions which tell us that this particular supererogatory act is necessary.
Do you realize that when you make statements like the following:
>a counterintuitive conclusion.
>different counterintuitive direction
>but our intutions tell us
>contrary to our intuitions
>our intuitions say
>We have evolved intuitions
you are making strong empirical claims about the way an underspecified but seemingly general group of people think and react? How does philosophy at all afford you the tools to understand which statements are "counterintuitive" or which mental states are evolved rather than socially induced?
I don't find it coherent to view one side of a binary choice as having any other moral value than the other side of that binary choice with a negative sign in front of it.
I'm with Paul here. I agree with EA and practice it myself, but I don't understand the 10% cutoff point. It has always bothered me that when making this drowning child argument we are condemning as immoral people who don't practice EA, but we don't have a hard cutoff for what's considered practicing EA, and our argument implies we ourselves should be condemned as well!
> Your reason to save a child doesn’t depend on how many previous children you’ve saved—or so it seems.
Two intuitions I have that appear to refute this:
(1) Suppose you come across a sea of one million drowning children. You save as many as you can, until you become exhausted. You are physically capable of saving one last child, but the exertion would be so costly that you choose to collapse on the beach and rest. During your rest, one child drowns. Meanwhile, there is an (equally fit) observer who has been watching you save the children, but instead of helping, he has been running around the sea to train for a marathon. When you decided to give up, he was equally as tired as you, so he decided to join you in resting on the beach. Surely he was more obligated to save the child who drowned than you were.
(2) (From Huemer) Suppose there is a philosopher who makes $100,000 (suppose for simplicity his gross product is exactly equal to his salary). He gives $85,000 to effective charities and lives a very meager lifestyle with the remaining $15,000. Suppose there is also a janitor who makes $30,000, but never gives to charity and simply consumes the $30,000. Now suppose the philosopher has the ability to make $200,000 in a different career, but he loves his job of defending the self-indication assumption. The janitor maximizes his earnings. Surely the philosopher is not *more* blameworthy, despite the fact that by the above logic he is failing a greater obligation to save children.
I had an article a while ago explaining why I disagree with the janitor case. I see the intuition in the first case, but I think that might be distorted simply by our dislike for the asshole marathon runner.
The vast majority of people would prefer to make noise about the perceived injustice, demand that the government force someone else to do it, and then proceed to virtue signal about how they saved someone by complaining
Interesting exercise nonetheless. You don’t really have any obligation to help anyone. It’s advantageous to sometimes, but not always.
Intuitively, people save the baby in the pond because a local baby will presumably grow up into a member of the tribe who will be an asset. Rescuing the baby drowning miles away is rescuing a baby that might grow up to attack your village. Donating millions to malaria projects and African famine relief produces billions of Africans incapable of helping themselves who want to migrate to your country, take jobs from the locals, and often stab them too.
If you could save the life of a baby for free with the press of the button, but it lives far away and there's a chance it will grow up to attack your village, you don't think you're morally obligated to save the baby?
Perhaps only malaria nets could produce that effect, but if you persist, after some income threshold, female literacy increases and then their fertility beguins an irreversible reduction.
You must have the free will to choose your actions. Being compelled to do it is more of a problem than not doing it.
I’m all for saving people, I do a ton of effective charity, always have. Both for utilitarian and moral reasons. But I don’t HAVE to, and that’s the distinction.
I think the drowning child in front of me is different from the maybe-dying-of-malaria child in Africa, in several ways.
There are the obvious material concerns: if I let a child drown in front of me, there will be direct negative consequences for me, from society and from the child's parents. (And likewise, if I save the child, they might do something to show gratitude.)
There are confidence questions: if I save a drowning child who's right in front of me, that child will definitely be saved. But if I give someone money, I only have their word that the money will go to bednets, and I only have their word that the bednets will save someone's life in aggregate. (And a person who wants me to give them lots of money may not have incentives to be totally honest!)
There are questions about how long the child will live, after I rescue them. A child that I encounter randomly in my city is likely to thrive after I save them. If a child grows up in such poverty that the parents can't afford bednets, they might have other poverty-related problems as well.
(I once gave money to a charity that finds children that are dying of malnutrition, and gives them a special baby-food-like substance derived from peanuts that can save their life. I have to wonder: after the baby-food-like substance runs out, don't they just get malnutrition all over again?)
Also there are the broader concerns about the economic effects of any charitable giving. If Westerners buy bednets en masse, do the recipients become dependent on that aid? Does the aid prevent the recipients from doing anything on their own that would stave off malaria?
None of this means that we shouldn't buy bednets for African children. But I do feel that it's sort of unfair to say "oh, yeah, the drowning child in front of you is totally the same as the children living in malaria zones in Africa, and you can just copy all your moral intuitions from one to the other without checking the details."
I think the situations are actually pretty different.
there are 92 comments and I'm not going to read them all. also, i wrote 2 posts answering Singer's argument, and it's shame i cant just link to them and have some AI translate them to English. so instead i will write quick summery - I straightforwardly disagree wit Singer (and I'm saying this as someone who do, actually, donate to EA causes).
firstly, about the existence of moral obligation at all. it just... does not exist.
secondly, about the obligation to sacrifice something of little value to prevent something really bad to happen. i see this sort of morality as coordination, as cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma. if i will sacrifice one dollar to save you ten, and you will do that for me, we will both be better off. but as you should cooperate with one that cooperate with you, you shouldn't cooperate with one that defect. it's bad to be cooperation-bot!
the "duty" to save the drowning child come for the counterfactual agreement with your community to cooperate, and does not extend to people that does not part of this agreement.
also, you tend to call people who disagree with you crazy, and it's untrue, unvirtuous and anti-convincing. there are at least 3 posts i wanted to answer to and decided it doesn't worth the bother, as you just going to calling names people who disagree with you when you don't have good arguments.
like, you understand that people who don't share you moral intuitions, just going to think badly of EA because of such name calling, right? if you also fail their ITT very badly, it's not adding you convincingness. maybe, instead of trying to call people crazy, you can stop and think why they believe what they believe?
Peter Singer has advocated for murdering infants up to one month after birth, if they have disabilities. He advocates the murder of cognitively challenged adults such as Alzheimer’s sufferers. He considers newborns and dementia patients “non persons” with no intrinsic right to live. I submit we have no need for Singer’s twisted brand of moral guidance.
Why can’t Africans supply their own nets? Why do Africans require endless assistance from other people in order to survive?
White do-gooderism accomplishes, in the long run, precisely nothing except creating the twin demons of dependency and resentment in those it purports to help.
Donating to charity is great, as is helping to save people when you can. There are no stance-independent moral facts, though, so trying to figure out what one's obligations are or what's morally correct in a manner that presupposes realism is misguided and a waste of time.
I don't think it's a waste of time. I think many or most people would end up with similar moral views whether or not they presuppose realism, because they’ll be guided by the same moral intuitions either way. The assumption of realism doesn't need to do much work.
I imagine an intuition towards impartiality does a lot of the work of non-religious moral realism. But you don't need to be a realist to want to aim for impartiality.
That being said, I suspect realism tends to favour more precise moral theories, with specifically justified tradeoffs/comparisons. And the bar for justification seems often higher under realism. Realists seem more skeptical of their direct intuitions (especially about cases) when they can't provide more general principles justifying them.
But again, an antirealist could also just have similar intuitions and be disposed towards a similar bar for justification. I just guess they'll tend not to be. I think when I better internalized antirealism, I softened a bit on justifiability and general principles.
The proximity argument helps you establish that it is in fact a drowning child and not a selkie or rusalka or something like that (the prevalence of stories of drowner creatures is pretty high across many cultures, doesn't that point to its essential validity?)
You might be able to rely on local understandings of drowners and what they are like if it is from your own culture. Otherwise you might not know the telltale signs of a kappa, for instance, whether you should eat a cucumber before going in the water or perhaps offer one as a kappa is said to favor them.
It'll be a lot liklier you'll save the child if you doff the jacket and if the child is farther out off with the shoes too. Also get trained in lifesaving. Otherwise when you come on this scene how much you donated to EA will make zero difference. The child will still drown
All true, but why are so many children drowning under certain circumstances? If only we could find out the precipitating cause rather than treating this as a static problem, maybe it could be solved for good…
You should NOT save the drowning child. In fact, in most situations it would be morally wrong to do so.
The opportunity cost is too high. If you instead invested your effort in something that would yield a high return forever, the long term benefit is better than saving many hungry people.
"The final consideration—and this one is the only that bears any weight—is that there are many drowning children. Imagine that there wasn’t just one drowning child, but hundreds of thousands—you could never save them all. It’s plausible that you wouldn’t be obligated to spend your entire life saving children, never enjoying things."
Sorry, why is it plausible per your logic that we should be allowed to enjoy things? It seems clear that any marginal enjoyment I get is dwarfed by the obligation to save a life. Any softening seems like you just avoiding wanting to admit that we are all morally terrible per this theory? Why shouldn't I be obligated to eat nothing but rice and beans, live in a hovel, wear tattered clothes, etc? Maybe pragmatically it won't be helpful to convince people by pointing this out, but it seems like an inescapable conclusion of your moral theory.
There's a difference between what you're obligated to do and what's good to do. It seems good to devote your entire life to helping others, but it's not obvious you're obligated to do that. Also, many ways that you could enjoy life less--e.g. only eating rice and beans, which would harm your health. wearing tattered clothes--would decrease your effectiveness and your ability to convince others to do the same.
What principle draws the line between an obligation vs what's good to do? Why are we obligated to use 10% of our income and not 11%? Seems like there's a sorites concern ...
I don't know what the precise line is, and I doubt there's a fact of the matter. Some things are better to do than others. We, being non-ideal, will only do some of the good things, but we should strive to do as much as possible.
What is "as possible"? If for me I find myself unmoved by your arguments because I'm really stupid and enjoy European vacations and fancy clothes is it possible for me to give more? And under that scenario are you saying that you wouldn't judge me as morally blameworthy or you would be willing to say I have no obligation to give?
I don't think there's a precise line representing what you're required to do. The more the better. The fact that you won't do all the things you ought to doesn't mean you shouldn't do any of them.
I don't think you should think of ethics as a checklist of things you have to do, but as an opportunity to do good things. But if you are thinking of ethics as a checklist, I think morality requires, to avoid being blameworthy, making charitable giving a significant life project, not necessarily giving every last penny.
Re: checklist - you are the one calling out people for being bad because they don't act to save the drowning baby! That seems like treating morality as a checklist - such that if saving the baby isn't on your list of obligations then we should say they are bad
I wasn't claiming that morality demands nothing. My point was that you shouldn't treat it as a checklist, where the only things worth considering are the things morality holds you at gun point and demands you do.
This seems like question begging - why does avoiding being morally blameworthy only required some fixed amount of donation?
If we consult our intuitions about the drowning child case, it's not obvious whether a person would be required to give away all their money, but they're certainly be required to make saving drowning children a significant life project.
Are narcissists not morally obligated because they are incapable of being convinced?
No, I think if you do wrong things because you're a narcissist, you're still blameworthy.
What principle grounds that? It's often said that narcissists can't be helped by therapy. In what way is doing more possible for them?
You're blameworthy for the things that you could change if you wanted to.
I’m in general agreement about the thought experiment and its conclusions. One issue that I would love to hear your thoughts on is when one imagines a case where you are wearing a $6000 suit and see a child drowning.
It seems like, in this case, one should not save the child and ruin the suit, but instead leave the child to die and sell the suit because you can save a life abroad + help others with $6000.
Because of the counter-intuitiveness of this conclusion (my intuition is that you should just save the child) and by a general reflective equilibrium approach to the correct normative theory, I think this is good reason for thinking that this cold calculation should not be done in every case — though I certainly realize that people should not scope neglect their way out of every problem and, on the margin, should donate a lot more to effective charities.
What do you think?
Might be right. I also think this maybe reflects the counterintuitiveness of the world: because the child in front of you is so much more visceral, it seems more intuitive that you should save them, even if your reason to save the far-away one is just as great. But I agree: even if you think immediately saving a child would take a slight utility hit, you generally should do it.
Yea. This seems to be an issue with the whole reflective equilibrium — on the one hand, we have abstract intuitions (pain is bad) that seem really reliable, but we also have these others (people closer should have moral weight) that seem less reliable. Even though they seem less reliable and can be attributed to various evolutionary/ cultural pressures, it seems like they should still hold some weight in moral decision making, especially at the extremes like a case that I mentioned with little difference in amount you can save but one person being your mother, for example.
Do you really have the intuition specifically that "people closer should have more weight"? My intuition here is just that *ignoring more salient needs reveals greater callousness/viciousness than ignoring distant ones*, and *a morally good person would not be psychologically capable of just watching a child drown when they could easily save them*. But those are not the same as "people closer should have more weight". See also: https://www.utilitarianism.net/peter-singer-famine-affluence-and-morality/#salience
Fair point, and I think that I agree with you. I still think those other intuitions should actually come into play, though. If you saw a loved one drowning in the pond but you were wearing a $6,000 suit, would you be like “nah, I’m gonna shut up and multiply, sell the suit, and donate the money AMF.” Would you agree that saying that would not be the moral thing to do?
I think I actually do have the strong intuition that I should give people closer to me more moral weight. Curious to hear what your thoughts are, though.
I certainly give my loved ones more weight. I also know that my dispositions aren't a perfect guide to ethics: my default inclinations fail to give out-of-sight strangers nearly as much weight as they surely objectively warrant. Whether they warrant *as much* weight as my loved ones, I'm not sure. (It doesn't seem practically important to settle that, since I couldn't realistically follow that guidance even if it was morally ideal. All the important implications follow even just giving 1% weight to strangers. There's no way I'd tolerate a 1% chance of death for my son, when I could prevent it for just $5000.)
But whatever the correct verdict about partiality, I'm pretty sure that just being in my field of vision doesn't make someone more important or deserving of extra weight (though it does make their interests much harder to ignore).
I guess this may be my crux. It does seem important practically to know if your loved ones matter more because it would give you a thing to strive for (even if we can’t be perfect, we can certainly try to do better!!).
Similarly, in the case of what is in front of me, it still seems really hard to distinguish intuitions about whether we should care about people because they’re closer in distance from obligation due to figurative closeness.
The harder to ignore type logic seems to hold in both cases, but the only reason the partiality one is rejected is because, I think, the emotion is stronger.
If this is the case (which obviously you can disagree with), it seems like this being only a problem of different degrees would entail that one could either accept that there is no reason to treat both people closer to you equally or that you’re allowed to give some weight (amount can be debated) to those who are closer to you in both ways.
But, then again, my intuition really tells me that I should care more about my loved ones. Maybe I should just overfit the moral data and use my intuition in every case (with accounting for other preferences like wanting to be consistent/ not falling for scope neglect which just seems like another—maybe stronger— moral intuition).
Aren’t we confusing different social roles? Favoring your loved ones with your own money is different than favoring them with public funds. The impartiality is a natural requirement for a Lawmaker, not for a father.
There are not many books about social roles and utilitarian ethics. This one is the only I have read:
https://www.utilitarianism.com/utilitarianism-justice.pdf
What does it mean for something to be morally obligated, in a way that extends beyond mere social obligation? Obviously it is "more good" to save the malaria-infected child. But it's not at all clear to me how any moral action is more or less obligated and it seems like attempts to argue that X is obligated but Y is not do not even have any idea how we would actually decide the question.
If it's an "obligation" in the realist sense, it either (a) is reducible to some descriptive fact that lacks any normative authority or force or (b) it's some non-naturalist notion of obligation, which is probably not meaningful. People can be "obligated" in a social respect as you suggest but I don't think there's any substantive notion of obligation aside from this.
Wow, this post of yours has a lot of replies, so my response will likely get buried!
The drowning child argument is a strong argument, and difficult to refute. It carries with it a counterintuitive conclusion. I think you can bite the bullet in a different counterintuitive direction though. Let me start by making the observation:
There is a 3x3 matrix of possible things: things which are morally bad/neutral/good, and things which our intuitions tell us are heartless or evil, things which our intuitions tell us are neutral, and things which our intuitions tell us are good. So something can be morally bad, but our intutions tell us it is good, or etc., for all 9 possible outcomes.
I would argue that, contrary to our intuitions, you are not morally obligated to save the drowning child, *even if you weren't wearing the expensive suit*. Saving the drowning child would be morally good, of course, but *not* saving the drowning child would be morally *neutral.* You don't *owe* the child anything. Of course, our intuitions say that this would be heartless, so this is an example where we have intuitions that tell us something morally neutral is heartless. The upside of this is that in this scenario most people would do something morally good rather than morally neutral if they saw the drowning child.
Again, I think it is more difficult than it seems to argue that you are *obligated* to save the drowning child. Of course, if I were in this situation, my empathy would kick in and I would immediately try to save the drowning child personally. We have evolved intuitions which tell us that this particular supererogatory act is necessary.
Do you realize that when you make statements like the following:
>a counterintuitive conclusion.
>different counterintuitive direction
>but our intutions tell us
>contrary to our intuitions
>our intuitions say
>We have evolved intuitions
you are making strong empirical claims about the way an underspecified but seemingly general group of people think and react? How does philosophy at all afford you the tools to understand which statements are "counterintuitive" or which mental states are evolved rather than socially induced?
Yes, I do understand that! Depending on what you mean by philosophy, I do not think that philosophy alone offers all of the tools
I don't find it coherent to view one side of a binary choice as having any other moral value than the other side of that binary choice with a negative sign in front of it.
Why not?
I'm with Paul here. I agree with EA and practice it myself, but I don't understand the 10% cutoff point. It has always bothered me that when making this drowning child argument we are condemning as immoral people who don't practice EA, but we don't have a hard cutoff for what's considered practicing EA, and our argument implies we ourselves should be condemned as well!
> Your reason to save a child doesn’t depend on how many previous children you’ve saved—or so it seems.
Two intuitions I have that appear to refute this:
(1) Suppose you come across a sea of one million drowning children. You save as many as you can, until you become exhausted. You are physically capable of saving one last child, but the exertion would be so costly that you choose to collapse on the beach and rest. During your rest, one child drowns. Meanwhile, there is an (equally fit) observer who has been watching you save the children, but instead of helping, he has been running around the sea to train for a marathon. When you decided to give up, he was equally as tired as you, so he decided to join you in resting on the beach. Surely he was more obligated to save the child who drowned than you were.
(2) (From Huemer) Suppose there is a philosopher who makes $100,000 (suppose for simplicity his gross product is exactly equal to his salary). He gives $85,000 to effective charities and lives a very meager lifestyle with the remaining $15,000. Suppose there is also a janitor who makes $30,000, but never gives to charity and simply consumes the $30,000. Now suppose the philosopher has the ability to make $200,000 in a different career, but he loves his job of defending the self-indication assumption. The janitor maximizes his earnings. Surely the philosopher is not *more* blameworthy, despite the fact that by the above logic he is failing a greater obligation to save children.
I had an article a while ago explaining why I disagree with the janitor case. I see the intuition in the first case, but I think that might be distorted simply by our dislike for the asshole marathon runner.
Do you think it's disanalogous or do you think the philosopher actually does have a greater obligation to save more children?
I think the philosopher has a stronger moral reason to save the children. Not sure about the obligation question.
The vast majority of people would prefer to make noise about the perceived injustice, demand that the government force someone else to do it, and then proceed to virtue signal about how they saved someone by complaining
Interesting exercise nonetheless. You don’t really have any obligation to help anyone. It’s advantageous to sometimes, but not always.
You don't have an obligation to save children drowning in ponds?
Why would you? Who says?
Intuitively it seems obvious that you do. No one saying it makes it true--that's not how morality works.
Intuitively, people save the baby in the pond because a local baby will presumably grow up into a member of the tribe who will be an asset. Rescuing the baby drowning miles away is rescuing a baby that might grow up to attack your village. Donating millions to malaria projects and African famine relief produces billions of Africans incapable of helping themselves who want to migrate to your country, take jobs from the locals, and often stab them too.
If you could save the life of a baby for free with the press of the button, but it lives far away and there's a chance it will grow up to attack your village, you don't think you're morally obligated to save the baby?
Nope.
In non intuitive terms, there isn’t any obligation utilitarianism can produce, because there is no reason to respect utilitarian principles.
Perhaps only malaria nets could produce that effect, but if you persist, after some income threshold, female literacy increases and then their fertility beguins an irreversible reduction.
All of which takes more money than just not donating malaria nets ad infinitum.
You must have the free will to choose your actions. Being compelled to do it is more of a problem than not doing it.
I’m all for saving people, I do a ton of effective charity, always have. Both for utilitarian and moral reasons. But I don’t HAVE to, and that’s the distinction.
I think the drowning child in front of me is different from the maybe-dying-of-malaria child in Africa, in several ways.
There are the obvious material concerns: if I let a child drown in front of me, there will be direct negative consequences for me, from society and from the child's parents. (And likewise, if I save the child, they might do something to show gratitude.)
There are confidence questions: if I save a drowning child who's right in front of me, that child will definitely be saved. But if I give someone money, I only have their word that the money will go to bednets, and I only have their word that the bednets will save someone's life in aggregate. (And a person who wants me to give them lots of money may not have incentives to be totally honest!)
There are questions about how long the child will live, after I rescue them. A child that I encounter randomly in my city is likely to thrive after I save them. If a child grows up in such poverty that the parents can't afford bednets, they might have other poverty-related problems as well.
(I once gave money to a charity that finds children that are dying of malnutrition, and gives them a special baby-food-like substance derived from peanuts that can save their life. I have to wonder: after the baby-food-like substance runs out, don't they just get malnutrition all over again?)
Also there are the broader concerns about the economic effects of any charitable giving. If Westerners buy bednets en masse, do the recipients become dependent on that aid? Does the aid prevent the recipients from doing anything on their own that would stave off malaria?
None of this means that we shouldn't buy bednets for African children. But I do feel that it's sort of unfair to say "oh, yeah, the drowning child in front of you is totally the same as the children living in malaria zones in Africa, and you can just copy all your moral intuitions from one to the other without checking the details."
I think the situations are actually pretty different.
there are 92 comments and I'm not going to read them all. also, i wrote 2 posts answering Singer's argument, and it's shame i cant just link to them and have some AI translate them to English. so instead i will write quick summery - I straightforwardly disagree wit Singer (and I'm saying this as someone who do, actually, donate to EA causes).
firstly, about the existence of moral obligation at all. it just... does not exist.
secondly, about the obligation to sacrifice something of little value to prevent something really bad to happen. i see this sort of morality as coordination, as cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma. if i will sacrifice one dollar to save you ten, and you will do that for me, we will both be better off. but as you should cooperate with one that cooperate with you, you shouldn't cooperate with one that defect. it's bad to be cooperation-bot!
the "duty" to save the drowning child come for the counterfactual agreement with your community to cooperate, and does not extend to people that does not part of this agreement.
also, you tend to call people who disagree with you crazy, and it's untrue, unvirtuous and anti-convincing. there are at least 3 posts i wanted to answer to and decided it doesn't worth the bother, as you just going to calling names people who disagree with you when you don't have good arguments.
like, you understand that people who don't share you moral intuitions, just going to think badly of EA because of such name calling, right? if you also fail their ITT very badly, it's not adding you convincingness. maybe, instead of trying to call people crazy, you can stop and think why they believe what they believe?
Morality as "Coordination", vs "Do-Gooding": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsHgyC4b2PsE3QyxL/morality-as-coordination-vs-altruism
(also, the equivocation between donating to GiveWell and drowning child is false - you get different result if you starting to change it. or, at least, i get different results. i wrote about that, in Hebrew, here: https://hadoveretharishona.wordpress.com/2024/07/18/%d7%90%d7%99%d7%a0%d7%98%d7%95%d7%90%d7%99%d7%a6%d7%99%d7%94-%d7%94%d7%99%d7%92%d7%99%d7%95%d7%9f-%d7%95%d7%98%d7%99%d7%a2%d7%95%d7%9f-%d7%94%d7%99%d7%9c%d7%93-%d7%94%d7%98%d7%95%d7%91%d7%a2/)
Peter Singer has advocated for murdering infants up to one month after birth, if they have disabilities. He advocates the murder of cognitively challenged adults such as Alzheimer’s sufferers. He considers newborns and dementia patients “non persons” with no intrinsic right to live. I submit we have no need for Singer’s twisted brand of moral guidance.
Why can’t Africans supply their own nets? Why do Africans require endless assistance from other people in order to survive?
White do-gooderism accomplishes, in the long run, precisely nothing except creating the twin demons of dependency and resentment in those it purports to help.
Donating to charity is great, as is helping to save people when you can. There are no stance-independent moral facts, though, so trying to figure out what one's obligations are or what's morally correct in a manner that presupposes realism is misguided and a waste of time.
I don't think it's a waste of time. I think many or most people would end up with similar moral views whether or not they presuppose realism, because they’ll be guided by the same moral intuitions either way. The assumption of realism doesn't need to do much work.
I imagine an intuition towards impartiality does a lot of the work of non-religious moral realism. But you don't need to be a realist to want to aim for impartiality.
That being said, I suspect realism tends to favour more precise moral theories, with specifically justified tradeoffs/comparisons. And the bar for justification seems often higher under realism. Realists seem more skeptical of their direct intuitions (especially about cases) when they can't provide more general principles justifying them.
But again, an antirealist could also just have similar intuitions and be disposed towards a similar bar for justification. I just guess they'll tend not to be. I think when I better internalized antirealism, I softened a bit on justifiability and general principles.
The proximity argument helps you establish that it is in fact a drowning child and not a selkie or rusalka or something like that (the prevalence of stories of drowner creatures is pretty high across many cultures, doesn't that point to its essential validity?)
You might be able to rely on local understandings of drowners and what they are like if it is from your own culture. Otherwise you might not know the telltale signs of a kappa, for instance, whether you should eat a cucumber before going in the water or perhaps offer one as a kappa is said to favor them.
It'll be a lot liklier you'll save the child if you doff the jacket and if the child is farther out off with the shoes too. Also get trained in lifesaving. Otherwise when you come on this scene how much you donated to EA will make zero difference. The child will still drown
All true, but why are so many children drowning under certain circumstances? If only we could find out the precipitating cause rather than treating this as a static problem, maybe it could be solved for good…
You should NOT save the drowning child. In fact, in most situations it would be morally wrong to do so.
The opportunity cost is too high. If you instead invested your effort in something that would yield a high return forever, the long term benefit is better than saving many hungry people.
Sounds harsh, but that's the truth.
https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/dont-save-the-drowning-child
Source of the problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/health/children-drowning-deaths.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9U0.6V5k.I4sgz66MtO-J&smid=url-share