The Morality and Pleasantry of Rescuing Drowning Children

By kal mehta

Ethics is a field of philosophy that focuses on matters of right and wrong, both in theory and in praxis. Applied ethics is a subset of ethics that looks at ethics in the real world, and debates the morality of certain behaviors and responses in real-life situations. This piece is a look into one of the most famous and widely contested essays in applied ethics: Peter Singer’s Famine, Affluence, and Morality. I read up on both this piece and well-known rebuttals to Singer’s argument, and chose to write a philosophical defence of Singer’s argument against the rebuttal pieces I read.

Can commonsense morality grant you a break from doing unpleasant things?

In the argument for charity as an obligatory moral good, it is important to draw distinctions between moral intuitions and emotional responses. It is not necessarily morally acceptable to avoid what is unpleasant. This idea is explored well in academic responses to ethicist Peter Singer’s famous essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, in which Singer argues that charity should be seen as a moral obligation. I seek to defend Singer by proving that his moral argument remains sound despite objections to the intuitive morality of its second premise, as these objections ignore a crucial moral principle, rendering them invalid.  

I will begin with a brief review of Singer’s argument and ethicist Travis Timmerman’s objection, which I seek to defend it against. I will then make an argument for the truth of Singer’s second premise with the addition of a crucial moral principle. Furthermore, I will argue that this principle indicates the invalidity of Timmerman’s objectionary argument, and that given this invalidity, Singer’s argument remains sound. Lastly, I will further address the response that Timmerman’s experiment begets from readers, explaining that this response is not necessarily a moral reaction.

Having laid out my methodology, I will thus proceed. The main argument Singer (1972) expresses is the following:

Premise 1) Suffering from lack of resources is bad.

Premise 2) “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it” (Singer, 1972, p. 231). 

Singer illustrates the application of this premise and its alignment with commonsense morality by using a thought experiment dubbed the Drowning Child. You are walking past a muddy pond in which you see a child drowning. To save them would soil your shoes, but since the child’s life is of greater moral importance, you ought to wade into the pond. 

Premise 3) By donating money or resources to charities or foundations, we help mitigate suffering. This is less a philosophical point and more a real-world assumption. 

Therefore, charity is not a supererogatory good but an obligation: we are not sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance when we give up all surplus wealth to fund necessities for people in need, therefore we ought to do so.

In a 2015 paper titled Sometimes there is nothing wrong with letting a child drown, ethicist Timmerman grants Singer the truth of the first and third premises, but argues that he fails to demonstrate the intuitive truth of the second premise: the idea that it is wrong not to prevent something bad from happening if it is within your power to do so without sacrificing anything of relatively similar moral significance. According to Timmerman, because Singer’s Drowning Child is an anomalous event, it does not accurately portray the reality of applying this premise to one’s life. Timmerman thus creates an alternate thought experiment, Drowning Children, where the event of having to save a child from drowning at the cost of reaching a bank in time to save money being lost at the hands of hackers is an everyday occurrence in the would-be rescuer’s life. He argues that in this case, a reader’s intuition is that it is morally acceptable for one to forgo saving the child on at least a single day to save the money and indulge in a comparably insignificant good, like going to the theater. Timmerman concludes by rejecting Singer’s premise on the grounds that commonsense morality does not appear to support it the way Singer claims it does.

The conclusion Timmerman draws from his experiment appears convincing. Surely, one would think, I am allowed to indulge in some pleasure just once, given that the rest of my life has been and will be occupied with the painful task of sacrificing all the money I have beyond what is needed for bare survival in order to save children. However, I argue that Timmerman’s experiment does not justify his moral conclusion and that Singer’s second premise is true. My argument is as follows: 

1. When contemplating a decision, there are different things to be considered, some of which are more morally significant than others. This is illustrated in the original experiment and Timmerman’s: the child’s life is more important than your clothes or money.

2. In principle, we ought to prioritize things with greater moral significance. This is tautological. 

3. Previous moral actions with no common stakeholder apart from the actor do not have any bearing on the morality of later moral actions. 

This is a new principle that I argue aligns with commonsense morality. Consider the following. A man jumps into the road and pulls an unsuspecting child out of the path of an oncoming car, saving her life. A week later, this same man sexually assaults a child at a daycare center where he works. The two children are different and unrelated. Is the man’s act of sexual assault morally acceptable, or any less morally reprehensible? 

Most readers will respond in the negative. It seems absurd to say that the man’s current action is made any more morally acceptable because this same man performed a morally good action a week earlier. Essentially, when there is no common being involved in two moral actions besides the person performing them, the past action has no bearing upon the morality of the current action. I say “no other common being” and specify “past action” to eliminate possible alignments regarding time and other stakeholders which could lead to ethical dilemmas beyond the scope of the principle thus illustrated. The actions must have nothing in common but the performer.

This applies to Timmerman’s experiment; every day, you decide to sacrifice saving a child at the cost of some money that you could otherwise use to indulge in comparably insignificant goods (Timmerman uses going to the theatre as an example). You are the same person: the children are different and unrelated. The sacrifices you have made in the past- or will make in the future, for that matter- have no bearing on the fact that if you choose “to indulge in theatre at least one time in, let’s say, the remaining 80 years of [your] life” (Timmerman, 2015, p. 210), you are, on that day, choosing a theatre show over a child’s life. 

Therefore, despite “the totality of the sacrifice [you are] making” (Timmerman, 2015, p. 210), morality does not condone this action. To not prevent something bad from happening when doing so requires the sacrifice of a comparatively insignificant thing is still wrong regardless of the bad things you have previously prevented from happening or will prevent from happening in the future. 

The conclusion Timmerman draws from his experiment is therefore invalid given the truth of this new premise, which Timmerman did not consider. A reader’s intuition that they should be allowed to forgo saving a child for a day or more does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that it is moral to do so. Singer’s second premise remains true, and with the truth of the first and third premise granted, Singer’s argument remains sound.

However, it is hard to deny the appeal of Timmerman’s point. Even though it may not be morally acceptable, the proposal he makes that “it’s a viable option that morality permits [you] to, at least on 1 day over the course of [your] entire life, stop the hackers in time to enjoy some good that is not nearly as important as a child’s life” (p. 210) is comforting in a way that Singer’s conclusion is not. I posit that if readers are drawn to this idea, it is because of an emotional reaction to the consequences of Singer’s conclusion, which necessitates that, as he himself states, “our traditional moral categories are upset” (Singer, 1972, p. 235): we are required to sacrifice every possible thing that is not as morally significant as the life of a child. This conclusion requires painful sacrifices in the name of moral obligations. More significantly, it is at odds with what we currently do in the real world, where money spent on going to the theatre is often spent with little remorse. Singer calls for a demanding change to our existing scheme of morality, the price of which is paid in the pleasure of people with charity to give. Timmerman’s proposal preserves the possibility of maintaining this pleasure; thus, the reader is tempted to agree with the moral argument he makes. The problem is, as my argument shows, that this psychological or emotional appeal does not bear relation to the morality of the proposal, which is flawed. 

As it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss solutions to this problem, I will quote Singer in saying that “I think the conclusion must stand, however strange it appears” (Singer, 1972, p. 236). Given that commonsense moral intuitions fail to prove the objections Timmerman presents, Singer’s second premise remains true. The application of Singer’s conclusion is not necessarily a pleasant thing, but that does not, unfortunately, prove his argument any less sound. 

References

Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265052

Timmerman, T. (2015). Sometimes there is nothing wrong with letting a child     drown. Analysis, 75(2), 204-212. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anv015