It seems to me like the intuition Timmerman relies on is really an overfitting of a heuristic against doing things that burn us out in the long term. Holding back altruistic resources is instrumental to career longevity, mental health, financial stability etc, and this helps us do the most good long term taking as fixed our psychological limitations. However, that doesn’t mean it’s *intrinsically* ok to let children drown. I think if we *weren’t* the kinds of animals that burn out from excessive altruism, or if our lives were much shorter, we probably would be obligated to spend the whole day saving the children.
I think this raises the question of, to what extent are we obligated to self-modify into the kind of creatures who don't experience burnout?
Personally, I feel the pull of worries that, if there's no intrinsic reason to stop at some point, then we are obligated to somehow try raise our threshold for burnout--and that this will either turn out not to be possible and so lead to backlash or whatever; or will be possible but will have bad incentives where people who recognize any obligation at all modify themselves into completely selfless beings, and so anyone who doesn't want to be completely selfless will instrumentally refuse to recognize any obligation at all.
I think critics are right to recognize that a lot of the intuitive pull of the drowning child is because it mostly imagines us on the current margin; if everyone took Singer 100% seriously though we'd have a totally new equilibrium and maybe then the picture would look different.
The reason I don't think this affects my overall view of Singer/BB's argument is because I think it's actually very unlikely that large numbers of people will become swayed to become completely self-effacingly altruistic; we're going to remain pretty close to the current margin for the foreseeable future, and I doubt we'll ever see such a quick shift to a new equilibrium that we can't adapt along the way (at least, certainly not because of the EA arguments alone).
Yeah good points. I think we definitely should definitely try to develop more altruistic characters, and it seems like doing so would actual have more selfish benefits (improved happiness) than costs.
Okay, but that's a different argument. That's argument from selfishness. Though luckily it makes more sense than what Mr. Bulldog wrote. ("What matters in saving someone’s life is the cost to you and the benefits to them.")
After all, obviously there's no universal moral law of obligation to be prosocial. Sure, golden rule and all, but the usual freeloader problem appears here too. (The equilibrium is to have some sociopaths, it seems. And psychologically people are really incentivized to engage in motivated reasoning. It's much harder to ignore someone drowning right in front of you than simply reading about it.)
Yeah to be clear, I share Bentham’s view about all this - the success of the drowning child argument and the proper response to Timmerman. I don’t think it’s true that we have no obligation to be prosocial. I think the selfish benefits of altruism are just a fortunate coincidence and we should still be altruistic without them.
Where is that obligation coming from? (Or any objective moral obligations for that matter?)
I agree that we should help others even if it's inconvenient for us, but that's something I believe (to some degree, and act on it to a lesser degree), because nature and nurture, not because it follows from - let's say - the Standard Model of Ethics that we discovered through the countless experiments at the Large Heart Compactor. (Though of course if this would be the case it could still fall under "nurture". But I hope you understand that I'm trying to ask what kind of metaethical framework are we working in, and what support do we have for that.)
Fair q. The drowning child, like any applied ethics argument, is meant to be sort of meta-ethics neutral. It should go through regardless of your meta-ethical commitments, as long as you believe there's something meaningful gestured at by talk of morality.
For my part, I'm usually a moral realist, so I think moral norms are simply a part of reality that doesn't come from anywhere, the same as rational norms or epistemic norms.
On the other hand, I'm sometimes a subjectivist, and the argument still works. upon reflection of my deepest values, I find (a) it's really important to me to save the drowning child (b) I don't care about distance (c) I want my actions and values to meet basic demands of logical consistency. So the drowning child argument is successful in that it gives me insight into the implications of my core values. And the argument is more generally successful insofar as a great many people agree with a, b, and c (when they genuinely reflect and don't have their hackles up, as many do when they engage with the argument).
Finally, if the term "obligation" is a roadblock here, I actually think scalar consequentialism is correct, so there's no bright line between what's obligatory and what's beyond obligatory.
I’ve thought about this quite a bit. Especially as it applies to extremely wealthy people, does one have an obligation to give away money *now*? Or is it equally defensible to accumulate wealth during one’s lifetime to give away maximally upon one’s death?
Its a thorny one imo. I think in extreme cases, there is some obligation to relieve suffering now but not necessarily in more normal ones
Yes I think the Timmerman argument is the best one. There are lots of similar considerations one can raise as well, although I agree that for middle income people they don't have strong force against giving ten percent.
For example to add even more parallels to real life the case would have to be one where helping all the kids all the time (or even a lot of the time) modestly increases all sorts of personal risks to you, especially your health risks and the chance of medical bankruptcy.
For this reason I tend towards the view that working class or lower middle income people have no obligation to give, at least not in the US. Although they may have an obligation to increase their savings rate to get to the point where they can safely give.
Edit: This also counts in favor of the investing to give model you've discussed elsewhere.
Do philosophers not study Plato any longer? Because the drowning child "thought experiment" is crying out for some really basic Socratic elenchus to demonstrate that people don't really mean what they are saying. Instead of leaping on their initial knee jerk response you need to ask them if their answer would differ if
1. You have two toddlers with you. One is your only child, you have given explicit guarantees to the parents of the other for its safekeeping. Both at very high risk of drowning if you temporarily abandon them.
2. As above, you have just child 1 with you.
3. As 1., you have just child 2 with you.
4. There's someone there who says That's my child, I will go.
5. There's someone there who says I am a professional lifesaver, I will go.
6. You think there's a 49% chance of saving the child and a 51% of you and the child drowning, and you don't see any reason to value the child's life higher than yours
If you like fancy philosophical thought experiments add
7. A trolley problem theorist comes along and says If you rescue that child I will pull this 6 person killing lever
and
8. You are an exceptionally eloquent effective altruist on your way to a meeting with a cabal of billionaires. You are confident that your arguments will secure funding to rescue a trillion insects a year from a horrible death. Conversely a no-show will enrage them so much that they discontinue existing programs already saving 100 billion insects a year.
So that's 8 sets of circumstances where the answer is Perhaps I will stay on the bank, all of them mirroring real world issues about competing obligations.
This is very closely analogous to a con trick. Traditional con artists rely on a strong human instinct to give the wrong answer to a trick question: of course I trust you vs of course I don't trust you, I have only known you for 10 minutes. So does this. The instinctive answer is Yes of course, the actual answer is It depends on things like my competing obligations to others (and indeed to myself) competing obligations of others to the child, cost benefit calculations and other things. So I don't see this as Singer making a zinger of a philosophical point. He is bragging about a transparent deception.
You absolutely cannot have it both ways like that. If you present your case as a thought experiment, interlocutors are allowed to alter the parameters of the experiment. You can't change the rules to make the argument about what the experiment is "really about." It's a naive and stupid thought experiment and vulnerable to every one of my 8 objections. That has nothing to do with my position on the underlying issue (I do in fact donate substantially to a child-in-a-different-continent facing charity).
Sure, but so, objections ought to be relevant to the original point of contention.
If there are clear ways in which they aren’t faithfully analogous to that question, that will make them bad objections.
This is why Timmerman’s objection is good, it is relevant to the situation we find ourselves in, where there are too many drowning children to save them all.
I agree that there are lots of reasons you might refuse to save the child, but the sample reasons you give above are all pretty non-generic, in that one would expect that, in a scenario where they're not explicitly specified, one should imagine none of those reasons hold.
I think Singer isn't being deceptive by leaving those things out, he's just being general.
Of course, it still might remain that his attempt to stretch the reasoning to children dying of disease or whatever isn't properly analogous because unlike the pond scenario, we expect one of your counter-reasons or another like it to *not* be generic features of these cases: for example, I agree if Singer said we all had an obligation to perform as many heart surgeries as possible to save people from dying of heart problems, your reason 5 is a systematic reason why the analogy fails.
But to convincingly argue that Singer is being deceptive, and his argument fails, you should be clear on which point exactly the obligation to save children dying of malaria by donating some money actually fails, as a general feature--as long as the cost to you is low (which I think Singer/BB are correct to think is generic, at least for middle class people in wealthy countries), I can only see 4, 5, and 8 as being potentially applicable. But 4 and 5 are dealt with, IMO pretty convincingly, by the observations that parents in poor countries may not have the resources available, and that as most of what is being asked for is donated money, so long as you have some minimum threshold, you are no less qualified than anyone else to help.
For 8, I think there are reasons to worry about whether or not you could be doing more good by finding a higher priority thing to donate to, but that's a possibility that most EAs are alive to, as it's more or less the whole point of the movement. But my understanding is that under pretty mild hypotheses, donating to save children from dying of diseases in poor countries is pretty close to the maximally effective thing one can do with one's money at current margins, and if you think that's wrong then you shouldn't disagree with the overall Singerian argument, you should just disagree on cause prioritization
This argument works because the real origin of morality is empathy which does not function as a cold calculating Utilitarian. Instead, it’s a chaotic collection of passions that integrate a person’s whole experience including what he learned but also what he internalized as moral intuitions based on his cultural and social environment.
The current ethical truths are simply the sum of whatever most people feel empathy for at a given moment. An empathy has a feature that is crucial for this argument: desensitization.
You feel empathy for a drowning child because it’s an unexpected tragedy. It might someone from your small city. It “could have been” your kid or someone you knew. It’s not something that happens every day.
But if you live in a permanent warzone where kids die all the time, then you are much less likely to do something about it. You (and your peers) have been desensitized. We actually already have similar examples in the presence of countless homeless in many western cities. They are so rampant that people describe them as part of the background. They become a problem for your taxes (the government) to solve.
The same can be said for car accidents where maybe only the first few cars have a responsibility to stop (proximity still matters). But then we expect special social services to take over the situation (police, ambulance etc.).
This shows that humans do not aggregate values and moral worth in a simplistic calculation. They do not assign a specific value to beings. Only the specific context determines the emotional response which averaged over a population creates moral intuition.
Exactly! The problem with the thought experiment is that regards the action of saving the child in the pond as a rational one. No, it's not; there is certainly a rational (utilitarian) component, but irrationality (not wanting to feel guilty, wanting to be a hero, etc.) plays a big role too. Besides what you mention about the war or the homeless people, there are videos where you see someone lying possibly dead on the street and the people who pass by don't do anything.
One key difference between the nearby child and the distant child is that the nearby child can only be saved by you AND that the nearby child is the only one you need to save. If the child’s parents knew that you blew off saving their kid, it would be reasonable of them to feel wronged *by you in particular*. However if you fail to donate $4500 to save the life of a child in Bangladesh, it would be unreasonable for her parents to feel wronged by you in particular. First, because there is no reason to single you out from the millions of other people who could have also donated. Second, because among the billion or so people in the world suffering in absolute poverty, they have no reason to demand that you expend your budget specifically on their child. These two facts cannot be dismissed as morally irrelevant considerations. The nearby child has a reasonable claim to a morally enforceable right against you; the distant child does not. Thus you have a duty to the nearby child that you don’t have to the distant one.
I don’t think you can take GiveWell’s impact estimates at face value.
Their estimates are all *by admission* speculative, relying on their own staff’s judgments about things like external validity (do these RCTs apply in the real world?) and endogeneity.
I admire GiveWell for being more honest and serious than other evaluators, but I also think it’s premature to say giving to the charities they recommend is relevantly like saving a drowning child.
Huh? I didn't say anything about Givewell's effectiveness. I said something about the effectiveness of Givewell recommended charities. Givewell doesn't run charities, it recommends charities after carefully evlauating them. So it's not true that "The only source for GiveWell’s effectiveness……GiveWell!" I haven't even said anything about Givewell effectiveness!
Hi. I've never commented on your posts before, but do read them. Let me say first that I highly admire the mix of philosophical rigor with a real call to action. Your writing is though-provoking and world-improving. Thank you for doing it.
Let me also say that I am a proponent of effective altruism. None of my objections are to effective altruism as such. They are objections to this specific thought experiment as a compelling argument for effective altruism.
I have five objections, in three classes.
CLASS 1: NITPICKING THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
OBJECTION 1: The replacement value of the suit is not the right benchmark. I may not particularly care about the suit. I may have many such suits. If I muddy one, I may or may not need to replace it. If I decide to replace it, I may or may not choose a suit of equal value. The subjective value I assign to the suit is different than the replacement cost. That subjective value is the benchmark we should be using here. (obviously, this can be easily fixed).
CLASS 2: I DO NOT ASSIGN MYSELF A UTILITARIAN OR UTILITARIAN-LIKE MANDATE TO IMPROVE OVERALL WELFARE. I WOULD STILL SAVE THE CHILD, BUT DON'T FEEL COMPELLED TO GIVE TO CHARITY.
OBJECTION 2A: I do not feel morally accountable for social welfare, broadly. However, I feel rich human empathetic sentiments triggered by the suffering of other people. However, I only feel this if I see it. As such, it is rational for me as an actor to only sacrifice my well being to address suffering that I can see
OBJECTION 2B: I do not feel morally accountable for social welfare, I do not feel strong moral sentiments, but I would still save the child. Because I am a practical asshole. If I don't, people will ask why I stood by passively. If I do, there will be some kind of acclaim, which more than offsets the cost of the suit.
CLASS 3: I DO ASSIGN MYSELF A UTILITARIAN MORAL MANDATE, AND I WOULD SAVE THE CHILD, BUT I DO NOT FEEL COMPELLED TO DONATE AN EQUIVALENT AMOUNT TO CHARITY, AT LEAST NOT RIGHT NOW
OBJECTION 3A: Expected value on paper does not have the same verifiable credibility as casual events that I can see and validate in the real world. I can read that $2000 given to a charity will achieve a life, but there is no objective way to validate that my individual contribution has this exact marginal benefit. What if my contribution puts the fund raising team over their goal, triggering them to launch a pizza party for the staff? The charity may, overall, give 98% of total contributions to address actual suffering, but there is no (realistic) way to validate that 98% of my contribution is used in this way.
OBJECTION 3B: Time horizon. Saving the child or not saving the child is a one time binary event. If I choose not to save the child, I will ALWAYS have not saved the child. Giving to charity is a continuous option. Most people give more later in their lives, or even after death. It is thus a false corollary, because I am not really presented with a give or don't give now binary. I can, as most people do, say "I'll decide later how much I can afford." (I think in one of your own past pieces you made a similar argument about investing your funds to earn a return, so that the charity will benefit from the compounding later)
I disagree. Singer's argument is best understood as an argument by analogy:
P1. We are obligated to save a child drowning in the pond even if it costs us a few thousand dollars' worth of luxury goods (e.g. suits, expensive smartphones, etc).
P2. Donating a few thousand dollars to save a child's life abroad is morally analogous to saving a child drowning in a pond even if it costs us a few thousand dollars' worth of luxury goods (i.e. there is no relevant difference which would make the former non-obligatory if the latter is obligatory).
C: We are obligated to donate a few thousand dollars to save a child's life abroad (...and this conclusion is meant to apply equally to every child abroad who needs such donations to live).
The best objection rejects P1. The best version of that objection concedes that P1 is intuitive, that it seems like we are so obligated, but rejects P1 nonetheless.
Given that there is no relevant difference between saving a child drowning in a pond even if it costs us a few thousand dollars' worth of luxury goods and donating a few thousand dollars to save a child's life abroad (P2) and given that this is would apply equally to every child abroad who needs such donations to live, P1 entails wildly counter-intuitive propositions: not only does it entail that people are morally obligated to donate to every child abroad in ways that seem intuitively mistaken, it also entails that when you fail to do so you are analogous to the sort of person who would refuse to save the child drowning in the pond. Thus, accepting the intuition behind P1 means rejecting a bunch of other intuitions we have.
Instead, we should reject P1. We should reject P1 both because our intuitions overall disfavor it (i.e. accepting P1 would require rejecting even more intuitions we have about our obligations to donate or lack thereof), but also because there is a straightforward debunking explanation which explains why P1 seems true but is ultimately mistaken. When we imagine the scenario described in P1, we immediately judge that the person who would refuse to save the child drowning in the pond is a horrible person. We then jump to the conclusion that it is morally wrong to refuse to do so. Yet, that jump is not justified: sometimes, people can be horrible despite doing nothing wrong, so long as severe character flaws explain why they do what they do.
This seems to be what's happening with P1: the person who would prioritize their luxury goods over the child's life when the child is right there in front of them fails to have the right emotional response to the horror of watching a child drown, an emotional response which would (if functioning properly) lead him to prioritize the child's life over their luxury goods. This is what makes the person horrible. Notice, then, that the same does not apply equally to failing to donate abroad: You are not a horrible person in the same way even if you prioritize your luxury goods over lives abroad, because your emotions can function and respond properly to the moral stakes at hand without leading you to prioritize those lives. However, you still would be a much better person, doing much better things with your own life, if you did choose to sacrifice your luxury goods to save lives abroad.
This is exactly what we normally think about people who refuse to donate: there is nothing wrong with them, but they would be doing a great thing if they did contribute more. Indeed, they would be saving a whole child's life, at the cost of a few thousand dollars to themselves. It would be a shame if they didn't do so, but they wouldn't be doing anything wrong by refusing to do so. Thus, once we acknowledge that the person who refuses to save the child drowning in the pond is not analogous to someone who refuses to donate to save child's lives abroad, we can explain both our intuitions in favor of P1 and the intuitions P1 would require us to reject, without actually committing us to P1. The person who refuses to save the child drowning the pond does nothing wrong (contrary to P1) but is still worthy of condemnation in light of their severe character flaws.
When we intuitively (and rightly) judge that the person who refuses to save the child drowning in the pond is worthy of condemnation, we jump to the conclusion that this is because he must have done something wrong. Yet, the presence of severe character flaws would by itself be sufficient grounds for condemnation, and so this jump is unjustified. Thus, this debunking explanation gives us good reason to think that our intuition in favor of P1 is misleading, precisely because it requires making this jump. We should therefore think that this intuition is less reliable than our normal, everyday intuitions about our obligations to donate or lack thereof. Once we reject this intuition, we can accept those normal, everyday intuitions and also accept the explanation I gave previously which seems to do a good job of explaining both our intuitions in favor of P1 and our normal, everyday intuitions, without committing us to P1.
You're right it's an argument from analogy, but you don't have to reject P1 at all. You can simply reject P2, because it's so obviously fallacious I can't stand it every time I see this argument.
"P2. Donating a few thousand dollars to save a child's life abroad is morally analogous to saving a child drowning in a pond even if it costs us a few thousand dollars' worth of luxury goods (i.e. there is no relevant difference which would make the former non-obligatory if the latter is obligatory)."
In the thought experiment, it's just you, your $4500 suit, and the child drowning. In the wider example of donating money, it's you, your $4500, and millions upon millions of other people just as capable or more capable of helping, and millions upon millions of children who may need help.
Additionally, in the thought experiment, there's the "one-timeness" of it. I don't run across drowning kids very often. In fact, I imagine a very, very high percentage of us NEVER have. The fact that it only happens so rarely, and probably I'll never see it again (unless I'm a lifeguard or somesuch, in which case I'm literally being paid my someone else to save drowning children, and I probably wouldn't sit on the beach and do it otherwise, and it would not be immoral not to do so). So who the fuck wouldn't absorb quite a bit of pain if it meant saving a drowning child the one time you'll ever see this?
The analogy is completely and utterly asinine. It's a bait and switch manipulation.
Ultimately, I think giving 10% (or more) of one's income to charity is excellent and moral, as it ensuring that the charities one chooses are good at producing the outcomes the donor desires. I simply refuse to accept that I have an obligation to save children 15,000 miles away when there's plenty of joy I can bring and suffering I can alleviate very close to home, and it ways that are meaningful to me. If you wish to ensure that the maximum number of children can trudge along in countries poor enough to need the world to buy them mosquito nets, I'm happy you find that meaningful, and I hope you save many children, and that they go on to improve their part of the world, making it better for them and all their community. If I would rather pay for poor children to get free tuition and instruments at a local music school, or donate to free speech advocates, or donate to organizations who help victims of abuse, I will, and I am not immoral because I'm ignoring the metaphorically drowning children two continents away.
Teah, so I think most of the things you discuss don't end up making a difference: We can see this when we modify the drowning cbild case accordingly:
Other people can contribute: Suppose other people could save the child from drowning, but refused to do so. It still seems like you are morally obligated to save the child.
Other children are drowning: Suppose you know that a million children drown a year in Africa, and that you could donate to prevent this. It still seems like you are morally obligated to save the child.
And so on. The one that does seem to make a difference is the one-timeness:
A child is drowning in front of you everytime you go outside. Now. it doesn't seem like you are morally obligated to save every child.
This is just the objection discussed in the blogpost, but I think it reveals that I'm right about P1, actually.
The moral costs and benefits are the same for each child you could save, and so it seems to follow that if you are morally obligated to save any of them, you'd be morally obligated (for the same reasons) to save each of them.
So, if we think (rightly) that you are worthy of condemnation for refusing to save the one-time child but also that you are not worthy of condemnation for refusing to save a child everytime you go outside, then this condemnation must not be grounded on a failure to fulfill an obligation.
Instead, its grounded on judgments of character, which are in some way anchored to what we can reasonably expect of people with properly functioning moral emotions and the like. Such a person would save the one-time child normally, but not save a child every time they go outside.
I believe I largely accept P1. So the only way to square that belief with my actual charitable intuitions (other than to posit I'm a moral hypocrite at best) is to reject that P1 is, in fact, analogous to dying children elsewhere. Perhaps another way to say it would be that the thought experiment should include not just many drowning children, but also children who are being abused, people who are amassing power to themselves and who will use that power to hurt and / or immiserate a large population, people who are suffering from illnesses that won't kill them but merely make the miserable, etc. That seems a more "analogous" representation, and then I don't feel anywhere nearly so obligated to save the drowning child. But in the real world, confronted with being the only one available to save a drowning child, yes, absolutely, I'm morally obligated if I have the ability.
But my charitable preferences run much more towards trying to improve the lives of people (who are generally in low danger of perishing) than I am towards saving lives, so perhaps the reality is that I don't actually believe I'm obligated to save a drowning child.
The requirement to save this individual would engender a moral responsibility for him to pay for any losses you might have incurred.
It's not that there is a moral requirement to always expend your money to save another's life, it's that the circumstances make it such that you currently have the ability to expend those resources while he can't. By saving him, you are effectively spending his money that he temporarily is unable to use.
It's true that he might not practically have the money to pay, or that he might choose not to pay even if he was able. Nevertheless, there remains moral requirement to attempt to repay when able.
This is where the charity case goes a step further. There, built into the system is a complete lack of responsibility or indebtedness on behalf of the individual.
The important point of what this does is that it changes the moral requirement from one that my money must be lost at the expense of saving others, into a requirement to save another in a time of an acute and immediate need where he can't save himself in the moment.
I also think that this is what the proximity or seeing arguments are trying to get at, though the technical boundaries don't quite do it justice.
Gotta disagree with this one. In a previous post, I think Bentham mentioned how it should not be expected for an individual to save every drowning child everywhere or to spend all one’s time on such activities. I agree. And practically speaking, there is a child who could be saved at every instant of every day if we zoom out far enough.
So there needs to be some mechanism to focus one’s benevolence. And I think proximity is a valid choice. Where one is closer, one can help more easily and directly. Further away, it may make more sense for those locally to provide supports. Because one person can’t help everyone anyway, this sort of reasoning squares with me as defensible.
All that being said, I don’t disagree with the larger argument as it applies to philanthropy- if you have the means to help others in need and/or reduce suffering, you have some obligation to do so.
There is something to be said for the orthogonal cases of teaching kids to swim, putting a fence around the pond, posting a life guard, or finding the guy who keeps throwing the kids into the pond and ... let err on the side of politeness and say: persuading him that this is not a fun prank but a socially unacceptable behavior not to be continued.
This article is a mass of question-begging circular reasoning. The point of the drowning child thought experiment is to provide a basis for morality. Singer is trying to justify the notion of moral obligation and explain its nature. However, BB uses the ideas of moral obligation and morally relevant features of situations to make the case that Singer successfully justifies morality. Do you start to see how this is circular? You can’t talk about morally relevant features of situations or moral obligations if you haven’t justified morality yet. For the context of this debate, see: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/effective-altruism-as-moral-slavery?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Ultimately, where do we draw the line in making altruistic sacrifices? if we cease to act selfishly for the interests of society, we lose all individualism and turn collectivist. Such reasoning is the exact same justification the CPC uses for its authoritarianism today, and the doctrine of all communist regimes in history. For this reason, I reject Singer's argument.
I had no issue with EA when it was just about maximising the social returns to donating, yet now many EAs increasingly ask us to basically change our entire lifestyles to maximise our altruistic effectiveness. This turns a lot of people off the community.
1) Timmerman's thought experiment is not in fact a thought experiment. There actually are many children dying preventable deaths right now.
2) I think Timmerman doesn't really understand the strength of his own idea here : in his scenario, saving a child is not a fixed cost - it will literally cost you everything up to your own life. Cost per children saved is increasing here : the first one only cost you your nice 4500€ costume, but at some point it would cost you more (ultimately you would die of either exhaustion or hunger). So there's a balance to reach between preserving your own life and preserving the life of the next drowning child.
3) We tend to get the balancing totally wrong though, often stopping without even saving one child.
4) As a Christian I bite the bullet on Timmerman's experiment. Not sacrificing everything to save more children is wrong and evil. The fact that this doesn't align with our moral intuitions only means that our moral intuitions are bad (for Catholics, that would obviously be as a consequence of the original sin, but you can insert any evolutionary explanation too).
What if I come across a drowning child but am wearing a particularly expensive suit who's worth is certain to save 10 children if sold, should I continue on and then donate the suit?
I mean there is obviously an entire second type of objection which is on the basis of uncertainty. The moral intuition that you should jump into the pond and save the drowning child is implicitly based on your certainty that 1) there is a child who is drowning and 2) you can jump in and save them. The combine also to create the force of duty that is so imperative. If those two assumptions about your knowledge are relaxed, the moral intuition weakens significantly and its relative certainty that you specifically have some specific duty collapses. The situation by analogy is what is your duty if you hear that there are drownings of children that happen at some rate (the precise rate of which you are unaware) and that people are proposing various solutions to (the effectiveness, appropriateness, and cost-effectiveness of which are all unknown to you). There are a continuum of possible uncertainties here (from nearly as certain as of the child in front of you to the opposite) and it seems very reasonable to have a lesser willingness to act as ones uncertainty rises.
Do you have a particular duty (above or along side all the normal duties of your life) to commit all or some fraction of the resources you are responsible for to resolving this axis of problem (from uncertainty to the saving of children)? Doesn't seem that intuitive to me that you do. Rather it seems like another of many areas where people have to engage in prudential judgement.
It seems to me like the intuition Timmerman relies on is really an overfitting of a heuristic against doing things that burn us out in the long term. Holding back altruistic resources is instrumental to career longevity, mental health, financial stability etc, and this helps us do the most good long term taking as fixed our psychological limitations. However, that doesn’t mean it’s *intrinsically* ok to let children drown. I think if we *weren’t* the kinds of animals that burn out from excessive altruism, or if our lives were much shorter, we probably would be obligated to spend the whole day saving the children.
I think this raises the question of, to what extent are we obligated to self-modify into the kind of creatures who don't experience burnout?
Personally, I feel the pull of worries that, if there's no intrinsic reason to stop at some point, then we are obligated to somehow try raise our threshold for burnout--and that this will either turn out not to be possible and so lead to backlash or whatever; or will be possible but will have bad incentives where people who recognize any obligation at all modify themselves into completely selfless beings, and so anyone who doesn't want to be completely selfless will instrumentally refuse to recognize any obligation at all.
I think critics are right to recognize that a lot of the intuitive pull of the drowning child is because it mostly imagines us on the current margin; if everyone took Singer 100% seriously though we'd have a totally new equilibrium and maybe then the picture would look different.
The reason I don't think this affects my overall view of Singer/BB's argument is because I think it's actually very unlikely that large numbers of people will become swayed to become completely self-effacingly altruistic; we're going to remain pretty close to the current margin for the foreseeable future, and I doubt we'll ever see such a quick shift to a new equilibrium that we can't adapt along the way (at least, certainly not because of the EA arguments alone).
Yeah good points. I think we definitely should definitely try to develop more altruistic characters, and it seems like doing so would actual have more selfish benefits (improved happiness) than costs.
Okay, but that's a different argument. That's argument from selfishness. Though luckily it makes more sense than what Mr. Bulldog wrote. ("What matters in saving someone’s life is the cost to you and the benefits to them.")
After all, obviously there's no universal moral law of obligation to be prosocial. Sure, golden rule and all, but the usual freeloader problem appears here too. (The equilibrium is to have some sociopaths, it seems. And psychologically people are really incentivized to engage in motivated reasoning. It's much harder to ignore someone drowning right in front of you than simply reading about it.)
Yeah to be clear, I share Bentham’s view about all this - the success of the drowning child argument and the proper response to Timmerman. I don’t think it’s true that we have no obligation to be prosocial. I think the selfish benefits of altruism are just a fortunate coincidence and we should still be altruistic without them.
Where is that obligation coming from? (Or any objective moral obligations for that matter?)
I agree that we should help others even if it's inconvenient for us, but that's something I believe (to some degree, and act on it to a lesser degree), because nature and nurture, not because it follows from - let's say - the Standard Model of Ethics that we discovered through the countless experiments at the Large Heart Compactor. (Though of course if this would be the case it could still fall under "nurture". But I hope you understand that I'm trying to ask what kind of metaethical framework are we working in, and what support do we have for that.)
"Large Heart Compactor" Lol!
Fair q. The drowning child, like any applied ethics argument, is meant to be sort of meta-ethics neutral. It should go through regardless of your meta-ethical commitments, as long as you believe there's something meaningful gestured at by talk of morality.
For my part, I'm usually a moral realist, so I think moral norms are simply a part of reality that doesn't come from anywhere, the same as rational norms or epistemic norms.
On the other hand, I'm sometimes a subjectivist, and the argument still works. upon reflection of my deepest values, I find (a) it's really important to me to save the drowning child (b) I don't care about distance (c) I want my actions and values to meet basic demands of logical consistency. So the drowning child argument is successful in that it gives me insight into the implications of my core values. And the argument is more generally successful insofar as a great many people agree with a, b, and c (when they genuinely reflect and don't have their hackles up, as many do when they engage with the argument).
Finally, if the term "obligation" is a roadblock here, I actually think scalar consequentialism is correct, so there's no bright line between what's obligatory and what's beyond obligatory.
I’ve thought about this quite a bit. Especially as it applies to extremely wealthy people, does one have an obligation to give away money *now*? Or is it equally defensible to accumulate wealth during one’s lifetime to give away maximally upon one’s death?
Its a thorny one imo. I think in extreme cases, there is some obligation to relieve suffering now but not necessarily in more normal ones
Yes I think the Timmerman argument is the best one. There are lots of similar considerations one can raise as well, although I agree that for middle income people they don't have strong force against giving ten percent.
For example to add even more parallels to real life the case would have to be one where helping all the kids all the time (or even a lot of the time) modestly increases all sorts of personal risks to you, especially your health risks and the chance of medical bankruptcy.
For this reason I tend towards the view that working class or lower middle income people have no obligation to give, at least not in the US. Although they may have an obligation to increase their savings rate to get to the point where they can safely give.
Edit: This also counts in favor of the investing to give model you've discussed elsewhere.
Do philosophers not study Plato any longer? Because the drowning child "thought experiment" is crying out for some really basic Socratic elenchus to demonstrate that people don't really mean what they are saying. Instead of leaping on their initial knee jerk response you need to ask them if their answer would differ if
1. You have two toddlers with you. One is your only child, you have given explicit guarantees to the parents of the other for its safekeeping. Both at very high risk of drowning if you temporarily abandon them.
2. As above, you have just child 1 with you.
3. As 1., you have just child 2 with you.
4. There's someone there who says That's my child, I will go.
5. There's someone there who says I am a professional lifesaver, I will go.
6. You think there's a 49% chance of saving the child and a 51% of you and the child drowning, and you don't see any reason to value the child's life higher than yours
If you like fancy philosophical thought experiments add
7. A trolley problem theorist comes along and says If you rescue that child I will pull this 6 person killing lever
and
8. You are an exceptionally eloquent effective altruist on your way to a meeting with a cabal of billionaires. You are confident that your arguments will secure funding to rescue a trillion insects a year from a horrible death. Conversely a no-show will enrage them so much that they discontinue existing programs already saving 100 billion insects a year.
So that's 8 sets of circumstances where the answer is Perhaps I will stay on the bank, all of them mirroring real world issues about competing obligations.
This is very closely analogous to a con trick. Traditional con artists rely on a strong human instinct to give the wrong answer to a trick question: of course I trust you vs of course I don't trust you, I have only known you for 10 minutes. So does this. The instinctive answer is Yes of course, the actual answer is It depends on things like my competing obligations to others (and indeed to myself) competing obligations of others to the child, cost benefit calculations and other things. So I don't see this as Singer making a zinger of a philosophical point. He is bragging about a transparent deception.
I just don’t see how any of these bear on the question Singer’s trying to address, which is our obligations to help those much poorer than us?
I could go through them all, but I think the post addresses most of them.
You absolutely cannot have it both ways like that. If you present your case as a thought experiment, interlocutors are allowed to alter the parameters of the experiment. You can't change the rules to make the argument about what the experiment is "really about." It's a naive and stupid thought experiment and vulnerable to every one of my 8 objections. That has nothing to do with my position on the underlying issue (I do in fact donate substantially to a child-in-a-different-continent facing charity).
It’s about whether you should donate money to effective charities. That is the question the thought experiment is trying to address.
You are doing that thing again. I am well aware what it's about.
Sure, but so, objections ought to be relevant to the original point of contention.
If there are clear ways in which they aren’t faithfully analogous to that question, that will make them bad objections.
This is why Timmerman’s objection is good, it is relevant to the situation we find ourselves in, where there are too many drowning children to save them all.
I agree that there are lots of reasons you might refuse to save the child, but the sample reasons you give above are all pretty non-generic, in that one would expect that, in a scenario where they're not explicitly specified, one should imagine none of those reasons hold.
I think Singer isn't being deceptive by leaving those things out, he's just being general.
Of course, it still might remain that his attempt to stretch the reasoning to children dying of disease or whatever isn't properly analogous because unlike the pond scenario, we expect one of your counter-reasons or another like it to *not* be generic features of these cases: for example, I agree if Singer said we all had an obligation to perform as many heart surgeries as possible to save people from dying of heart problems, your reason 5 is a systematic reason why the analogy fails.
But to convincingly argue that Singer is being deceptive, and his argument fails, you should be clear on which point exactly the obligation to save children dying of malaria by donating some money actually fails, as a general feature--as long as the cost to you is low (which I think Singer/BB are correct to think is generic, at least for middle class people in wealthy countries), I can only see 4, 5, and 8 as being potentially applicable. But 4 and 5 are dealt with, IMO pretty convincingly, by the observations that parents in poor countries may not have the resources available, and that as most of what is being asked for is donated money, so long as you have some minimum threshold, you are no less qualified than anyone else to help.
For 8, I think there are reasons to worry about whether or not you could be doing more good by finding a higher priority thing to donate to, but that's a possibility that most EAs are alive to, as it's more or less the whole point of the movement. But my understanding is that under pretty mild hypotheses, donating to save children from dying of diseases in poor countries is pretty close to the maximally effective thing one can do with one's money at current margins, and if you think that's wrong then you shouldn't disagree with the overall Singerian argument, you should just disagree on cause prioritization
This argument works because the real origin of morality is empathy which does not function as a cold calculating Utilitarian. Instead, it’s a chaotic collection of passions that integrate a person’s whole experience including what he learned but also what he internalized as moral intuitions based on his cultural and social environment.
The current ethical truths are simply the sum of whatever most people feel empathy for at a given moment. An empathy has a feature that is crucial for this argument: desensitization.
You feel empathy for a drowning child because it’s an unexpected tragedy. It might someone from your small city. It “could have been” your kid or someone you knew. It’s not something that happens every day.
But if you live in a permanent warzone where kids die all the time, then you are much less likely to do something about it. You (and your peers) have been desensitized. We actually already have similar examples in the presence of countless homeless in many western cities. They are so rampant that people describe them as part of the background. They become a problem for your taxes (the government) to solve.
The same can be said for car accidents where maybe only the first few cars have a responsibility to stop (proximity still matters). But then we expect special social services to take over the situation (police, ambulance etc.).
This shows that humans do not aggregate values and moral worth in a simplistic calculation. They do not assign a specific value to beings. Only the specific context determines the emotional response which averaged over a population creates moral intuition.
Exactly! The problem with the thought experiment is that regards the action of saving the child in the pond as a rational one. No, it's not; there is certainly a rational (utilitarian) component, but irrationality (not wanting to feel guilty, wanting to be a hero, etc.) plays a big role too. Besides what you mention about the war or the homeless people, there are videos where you see someone lying possibly dead on the street and the people who pass by don't do anything.
One key difference between the nearby child and the distant child is that the nearby child can only be saved by you AND that the nearby child is the only one you need to save. If the child’s parents knew that you blew off saving their kid, it would be reasonable of them to feel wronged *by you in particular*. However if you fail to donate $4500 to save the life of a child in Bangladesh, it would be unreasonable for her parents to feel wronged by you in particular. First, because there is no reason to single you out from the millions of other people who could have also donated. Second, because among the billion or so people in the world suffering in absolute poverty, they have no reason to demand that you expend your budget specifically on their child. These two facts cannot be dismissed as morally irrelevant considerations. The nearby child has a reasonable claim to a morally enforceable right against you; the distant child does not. Thus you have a duty to the nearby child that you don’t have to the distant one.
Yes, I’m appealing to your moral intuitions. If you disagree, feel free to say why.
[Edited to remove confusion.]
I don’t think you can take GiveWell’s impact estimates at face value.
Their estimates are all *by admission* speculative, relying on their own staff’s judgments about things like external validity (do these RCTs apply in the real world?) and endogeneity.
I admire GiveWell for being more honest and serious than other evaluators, but I also think it’s premature to say giving to the charities they recommend is relevantly like saving a drowning child.
Huh? I didn't say anything about Givewell's effectiveness. I said something about the effectiveness of Givewell recommended charities. Givewell doesn't run charities, it recommends charities after carefully evlauating them. So it's not true that "The only source for GiveWell’s effectiveness……GiveWell!" I haven't even said anything about Givewell effectiveness!
Sorry, you’re right: my original comment was confusingly written, as though GiveWell = the charities it recommends.
Perils of commenting first thing in the morning…
If my evidence that I could pull the child out of the pond was that Givewell said I could, then it would be obligatory imo!
Not a minimal pair. You have other evidence of effectiveness in the pond case. (And the opportunity cost is obviously much lower…)
Hi. I've never commented on your posts before, but do read them. Let me say first that I highly admire the mix of philosophical rigor with a real call to action. Your writing is though-provoking and world-improving. Thank you for doing it.
Let me also say that I am a proponent of effective altruism. None of my objections are to effective altruism as such. They are objections to this specific thought experiment as a compelling argument for effective altruism.
I have five objections, in three classes.
CLASS 1: NITPICKING THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
OBJECTION 1: The replacement value of the suit is not the right benchmark. I may not particularly care about the suit. I may have many such suits. If I muddy one, I may or may not need to replace it. If I decide to replace it, I may or may not choose a suit of equal value. The subjective value I assign to the suit is different than the replacement cost. That subjective value is the benchmark we should be using here. (obviously, this can be easily fixed).
CLASS 2: I DO NOT ASSIGN MYSELF A UTILITARIAN OR UTILITARIAN-LIKE MANDATE TO IMPROVE OVERALL WELFARE. I WOULD STILL SAVE THE CHILD, BUT DON'T FEEL COMPELLED TO GIVE TO CHARITY.
OBJECTION 2A: I do not feel morally accountable for social welfare, broadly. However, I feel rich human empathetic sentiments triggered by the suffering of other people. However, I only feel this if I see it. As such, it is rational for me as an actor to only sacrifice my well being to address suffering that I can see
OBJECTION 2B: I do not feel morally accountable for social welfare, I do not feel strong moral sentiments, but I would still save the child. Because I am a practical asshole. If I don't, people will ask why I stood by passively. If I do, there will be some kind of acclaim, which more than offsets the cost of the suit.
CLASS 3: I DO ASSIGN MYSELF A UTILITARIAN MORAL MANDATE, AND I WOULD SAVE THE CHILD, BUT I DO NOT FEEL COMPELLED TO DONATE AN EQUIVALENT AMOUNT TO CHARITY, AT LEAST NOT RIGHT NOW
OBJECTION 3A: Expected value on paper does not have the same verifiable credibility as casual events that I can see and validate in the real world. I can read that $2000 given to a charity will achieve a life, but there is no objective way to validate that my individual contribution has this exact marginal benefit. What if my contribution puts the fund raising team over their goal, triggering them to launch a pizza party for the staff? The charity may, overall, give 98% of total contributions to address actual suffering, but there is no (realistic) way to validate that 98% of my contribution is used in this way.
OBJECTION 3B: Time horizon. Saving the child or not saving the child is a one time binary event. If I choose not to save the child, I will ALWAYS have not saved the child. Giving to charity is a continuous option. Most people give more later in their lives, or even after death. It is thus a false corollary, because I am not really presented with a give or don't give now binary. I can, as most people do, say "I'll decide later how much I can afford." (I think in one of your own past pieces you made a similar argument about investing your funds to earn a return, so that the charity will benefit from the compounding later)
I disagree. Singer's argument is best understood as an argument by analogy:
P1. We are obligated to save a child drowning in the pond even if it costs us a few thousand dollars' worth of luxury goods (e.g. suits, expensive smartphones, etc).
P2. Donating a few thousand dollars to save a child's life abroad is morally analogous to saving a child drowning in a pond even if it costs us a few thousand dollars' worth of luxury goods (i.e. there is no relevant difference which would make the former non-obligatory if the latter is obligatory).
C: We are obligated to donate a few thousand dollars to save a child's life abroad (...and this conclusion is meant to apply equally to every child abroad who needs such donations to live).
The best objection rejects P1. The best version of that objection concedes that P1 is intuitive, that it seems like we are so obligated, but rejects P1 nonetheless.
Given that there is no relevant difference between saving a child drowning in a pond even if it costs us a few thousand dollars' worth of luxury goods and donating a few thousand dollars to save a child's life abroad (P2) and given that this is would apply equally to every child abroad who needs such donations to live, P1 entails wildly counter-intuitive propositions: not only does it entail that people are morally obligated to donate to every child abroad in ways that seem intuitively mistaken, it also entails that when you fail to do so you are analogous to the sort of person who would refuse to save the child drowning in the pond. Thus, accepting the intuition behind P1 means rejecting a bunch of other intuitions we have.
Instead, we should reject P1. We should reject P1 both because our intuitions overall disfavor it (i.e. accepting P1 would require rejecting even more intuitions we have about our obligations to donate or lack thereof), but also because there is a straightforward debunking explanation which explains why P1 seems true but is ultimately mistaken. When we imagine the scenario described in P1, we immediately judge that the person who would refuse to save the child drowning in the pond is a horrible person. We then jump to the conclusion that it is morally wrong to refuse to do so. Yet, that jump is not justified: sometimes, people can be horrible despite doing nothing wrong, so long as severe character flaws explain why they do what they do.
This seems to be what's happening with P1: the person who would prioritize their luxury goods over the child's life when the child is right there in front of them fails to have the right emotional response to the horror of watching a child drown, an emotional response which would (if functioning properly) lead him to prioritize the child's life over their luxury goods. This is what makes the person horrible. Notice, then, that the same does not apply equally to failing to donate abroad: You are not a horrible person in the same way even if you prioritize your luxury goods over lives abroad, because your emotions can function and respond properly to the moral stakes at hand without leading you to prioritize those lives. However, you still would be a much better person, doing much better things with your own life, if you did choose to sacrifice your luxury goods to save lives abroad.
This is exactly what we normally think about people who refuse to donate: there is nothing wrong with them, but they would be doing a great thing if they did contribute more. Indeed, they would be saving a whole child's life, at the cost of a few thousand dollars to themselves. It would be a shame if they didn't do so, but they wouldn't be doing anything wrong by refusing to do so. Thus, once we acknowledge that the person who refuses to save the child drowning in the pond is not analogous to someone who refuses to donate to save child's lives abroad, we can explain both our intuitions in favor of P1 and the intuitions P1 would require us to reject, without actually committing us to P1. The person who refuses to save the child drowning the pond does nothing wrong (contrary to P1) but is still worthy of condemnation in light of their severe character flaws.
When we intuitively (and rightly) judge that the person who refuses to save the child drowning in the pond is worthy of condemnation, we jump to the conclusion that this is because he must have done something wrong. Yet, the presence of severe character flaws would by itself be sufficient grounds for condemnation, and so this jump is unjustified. Thus, this debunking explanation gives us good reason to think that our intuition in favor of P1 is misleading, precisely because it requires making this jump. We should therefore think that this intuition is less reliable than our normal, everyday intuitions about our obligations to donate or lack thereof. Once we reject this intuition, we can accept those normal, everyday intuitions and also accept the explanation I gave previously which seems to do a good job of explaining both our intuitions in favor of P1 and our normal, everyday intuitions, without committing us to P1.
You're right it's an argument from analogy, but you don't have to reject P1 at all. You can simply reject P2, because it's so obviously fallacious I can't stand it every time I see this argument.
"P2. Donating a few thousand dollars to save a child's life abroad is morally analogous to saving a child drowning in a pond even if it costs us a few thousand dollars' worth of luxury goods (i.e. there is no relevant difference which would make the former non-obligatory if the latter is obligatory)."
In the thought experiment, it's just you, your $4500 suit, and the child drowning. In the wider example of donating money, it's you, your $4500, and millions upon millions of other people just as capable or more capable of helping, and millions upon millions of children who may need help.
Additionally, in the thought experiment, there's the "one-timeness" of it. I don't run across drowning kids very often. In fact, I imagine a very, very high percentage of us NEVER have. The fact that it only happens so rarely, and probably I'll never see it again (unless I'm a lifeguard or somesuch, in which case I'm literally being paid my someone else to save drowning children, and I probably wouldn't sit on the beach and do it otherwise, and it would not be immoral not to do so). So who the fuck wouldn't absorb quite a bit of pain if it meant saving a drowning child the one time you'll ever see this?
The analogy is completely and utterly asinine. It's a bait and switch manipulation.
Ultimately, I think giving 10% (or more) of one's income to charity is excellent and moral, as it ensuring that the charities one chooses are good at producing the outcomes the donor desires. I simply refuse to accept that I have an obligation to save children 15,000 miles away when there's plenty of joy I can bring and suffering I can alleviate very close to home, and it ways that are meaningful to me. If you wish to ensure that the maximum number of children can trudge along in countries poor enough to need the world to buy them mosquito nets, I'm happy you find that meaningful, and I hope you save many children, and that they go on to improve their part of the world, making it better for them and all their community. If I would rather pay for poor children to get free tuition and instruments at a local music school, or donate to free speech advocates, or donate to organizations who help victims of abuse, I will, and I am not immoral because I'm ignoring the metaphorically drowning children two continents away.
Teah, so I think most of the things you discuss don't end up making a difference: We can see this when we modify the drowning cbild case accordingly:
Other people can contribute: Suppose other people could save the child from drowning, but refused to do so. It still seems like you are morally obligated to save the child.
Other children are drowning: Suppose you know that a million children drown a year in Africa, and that you could donate to prevent this. It still seems like you are morally obligated to save the child.
And so on. The one that does seem to make a difference is the one-timeness:
A child is drowning in front of you everytime you go outside. Now. it doesn't seem like you are morally obligated to save every child.
This is just the objection discussed in the blogpost, but I think it reveals that I'm right about P1, actually.
The moral costs and benefits are the same for each child you could save, and so it seems to follow that if you are morally obligated to save any of them, you'd be morally obligated (for the same reasons) to save each of them.
So, if we think (rightly) that you are worthy of condemnation for refusing to save the one-time child but also that you are not worthy of condemnation for refusing to save a child everytime you go outside, then this condemnation must not be grounded on a failure to fulfill an obligation.
Instead, its grounded on judgments of character, which are in some way anchored to what we can reasonably expect of people with properly functioning moral emotions and the like. Such a person would save the one-time child normally, but not save a child every time they go outside.
I believe I largely accept P1. So the only way to square that belief with my actual charitable intuitions (other than to posit I'm a moral hypocrite at best) is to reject that P1 is, in fact, analogous to dying children elsewhere. Perhaps another way to say it would be that the thought experiment should include not just many drowning children, but also children who are being abused, people who are amassing power to themselves and who will use that power to hurt and / or immiserate a large population, people who are suffering from illnesses that won't kill them but merely make the miserable, etc. That seems a more "analogous" representation, and then I don't feel anywhere nearly so obligated to save the drowning child. But in the real world, confronted with being the only one available to save a drowning child, yes, absolutely, I'm morally obligated if I have the ability.
But my charitable preferences run much more towards trying to improve the lives of people (who are generally in low danger of perishing) than I am towards saving lives, so perhaps the reality is that I don't actually believe I'm obligated to save a drowning child.
Curious what you'd think about this argument:
The requirement to save this individual would engender a moral responsibility for him to pay for any losses you might have incurred.
It's not that there is a moral requirement to always expend your money to save another's life, it's that the circumstances make it such that you currently have the ability to expend those resources while he can't. By saving him, you are effectively spending his money that he temporarily is unable to use.
It's true that he might not practically have the money to pay, or that he might choose not to pay even if he was able. Nevertheless, there remains moral requirement to attempt to repay when able.
This is where the charity case goes a step further. There, built into the system is a complete lack of responsibility or indebtedness on behalf of the individual.
The important point of what this does is that it changes the moral requirement from one that my money must be lost at the expense of saving others, into a requirement to save another in a time of an acute and immediate need where he can't save himself in the moment.
I also think that this is what the proximity or seeing arguments are trying to get at, though the technical boundaries don't quite do it justice.
Gotta disagree with this one. In a previous post, I think Bentham mentioned how it should not be expected for an individual to save every drowning child everywhere or to spend all one’s time on such activities. I agree. And practically speaking, there is a child who could be saved at every instant of every day if we zoom out far enough.
So there needs to be some mechanism to focus one’s benevolence. And I think proximity is a valid choice. Where one is closer, one can help more easily and directly. Further away, it may make more sense for those locally to provide supports. Because one person can’t help everyone anyway, this sort of reasoning squares with me as defensible.
All that being said, I don’t disagree with the larger argument as it applies to philanthropy- if you have the means to help others in need and/or reduce suffering, you have some obligation to do so.
There is something to be said for the orthogonal cases of teaching kids to swim, putting a fence around the pond, posting a life guard, or finding the guy who keeps throwing the kids into the pond and ... let err on the side of politeness and say: persuading him that this is not a fun prank but a socially unacceptable behavior not to be continued.
This article is a mass of question-begging circular reasoning. The point of the drowning child thought experiment is to provide a basis for morality. Singer is trying to justify the notion of moral obligation and explain its nature. However, BB uses the ideas of moral obligation and morally relevant features of situations to make the case that Singer successfully justifies morality. Do you start to see how this is circular? You can’t talk about morally relevant features of situations or moral obligations if you haven’t justified morality yet. For the context of this debate, see: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/effective-altruism-as-moral-slavery?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I raise another counterargument in my defense of hedonism. See footnote 10 in particular: https://open.substack.com/pub/microfounded/p/in-praise-of-hedonism?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&shareImageVariant=overlay&r=56swa
Ultimately, where do we draw the line in making altruistic sacrifices? if we cease to act selfishly for the interests of society, we lose all individualism and turn collectivist. Such reasoning is the exact same justification the CPC uses for its authoritarianism today, and the doctrine of all communist regimes in history. For this reason, I reject Singer's argument.
I had no issue with EA when it was just about maximising the social returns to donating, yet now many EAs increasingly ask us to basically change our entire lifestyles to maximise our altruistic effectiveness. This turns a lot of people off the community.
1) Timmerman's thought experiment is not in fact a thought experiment. There actually are many children dying preventable deaths right now.
2) I think Timmerman doesn't really understand the strength of his own idea here : in his scenario, saving a child is not a fixed cost - it will literally cost you everything up to your own life. Cost per children saved is increasing here : the first one only cost you your nice 4500€ costume, but at some point it would cost you more (ultimately you would die of either exhaustion or hunger). So there's a balance to reach between preserving your own life and preserving the life of the next drowning child.
3) We tend to get the balancing totally wrong though, often stopping without even saving one child.
4) As a Christian I bite the bullet on Timmerman's experiment. Not sacrificing everything to save more children is wrong and evil. The fact that this doesn't align with our moral intuitions only means that our moral intuitions are bad (for Catholics, that would obviously be as a consequence of the original sin, but you can insert any evolutionary explanation too).
What if I come across a drowning child but am wearing a particularly expensive suit who's worth is certain to save 10 children if sold, should I continue on and then donate the suit?
I mean there is obviously an entire second type of objection which is on the basis of uncertainty. The moral intuition that you should jump into the pond and save the drowning child is implicitly based on your certainty that 1) there is a child who is drowning and 2) you can jump in and save them. The combine also to create the force of duty that is so imperative. If those two assumptions about your knowledge are relaxed, the moral intuition weakens significantly and its relative certainty that you specifically have some specific duty collapses. The situation by analogy is what is your duty if you hear that there are drownings of children that happen at some rate (the precise rate of which you are unaware) and that people are proposing various solutions to (the effectiveness, appropriateness, and cost-effectiveness of which are all unknown to you). There are a continuum of possible uncertainties here (from nearly as certain as of the child in front of you to the opposite) and it seems very reasonable to have a lesser willingness to act as ones uncertainty rises.
Do you have a particular duty (above or along side all the normal duties of your life) to commit all or some fraction of the resources you are responsible for to resolving this axis of problem (from uncertainty to the saving of children)? Doesn't seem that intuitive to me that you do. Rather it seems like another of many areas where people have to engage in prudential judgement.