Saving the drowning child is different

Bentham's Bullfrog misses the boat again! Or: Singer meets Hayek and markets

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As a graduate student working on my dissertation, I first taught Peter Singer’s article Famine, Affluence, and Morality—a classic applied ethics paper that argues people with financial means have a moral obligation to donate more money than they (likely) already do. And that giving to (effective) charities, when possible, is a moral obligation rather than what moral philosophers can supererogatory—something nice to do, but not morally required. One could easily, Singer argues, forgo their Starbucks and use that money instead to help those who are desperately poor through no fault of their own.

How does the argument work? First, Singer advances an abstract ethical principle with some initial plausibility:

[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.

The intuition here is that having the ability to help someone, especially at low or zero cost, generates a moral obligation to do it. Here one cannot help but think of Uncle Ben telling his nephew, Peter Parker (Spiderman), that with great power comes great responsibility—an obligation to help is tied with the ability to help.

‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ Uncle Ben imploring Peter Parker to use his powers for the good

So how does Singer move from abstract moral principle to prescribing that we must morally donate more, whenever financially feasible, to donate to people who are poor, and often desperately, through no fault of their own? He employs the now infamous drowning child thought experiment:

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. … [You] are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond […] it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. […] The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy

From there, Singer concludes that anyone in such a situation with the ability to easily and safely save the child has a moral obligation to save the child. And whenever I teach this argument, most, if not all, students claim to intuit strongly that we have a moral obligation to save the child, even after some philosophical chiding by me. The idea seems to be that saving the child from drowning does a ton of moral good for the child saved while only costing the rescuer their clothing and shoes—a minor cost by comparison. One doesn’t even come close to comparing to the other morally.

This philosophical project is often presented, in published works and the classroom, as if failing or refusing to save the drowning child—when one could easily and safely do so—is morally equivalent to not donating to effective charities when one could easily forgo money purchased on trifles and use it instead to save lives. And so, we are left to conclude that not donating money to an effective charity is morally equivalent to letting the child drown. Imagine that Robert could, after a couple weeks, adjust to the lack of Starbucks, and use that money instead to save lives, especially when saved up over time, but refuses because he likes Starbucks. Here Singer would rightly ask whether his daily Starbucks has moral priority over saving the lives of children.

And as I often remind students who object to this argument based on the fact that they earned their own money: one may have earned the money, but they didn’t earn the opportunity to earn the money. Most of us were born in the right place at the right time, unlike people who, through no fault of their own, are stuck in places like Haiti or the Congo. One is entitled to their good fortune, to a point, but beyond that it isn’t clear why their accident of birth is something morally sacred, especially if one could easily donate to save lives without losing out on their quality of life¹. As Singer argues in his original article:

When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that … [We] ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.

And so whether we refuse to save the child drowning in a shallow pond because it will ruin our nice clothes and shoes, or we refuse to donate (at least part of) our disposable income because we would rather indulge, the result is a life lost. This point was made, a while back, by Bentham’s Bullfrog²—the very failed Substacker, Matthew Adelstein—in a post that argued for that very conclusion: not donating to the poor, when we have more than enough financial resources, is morally equivalent to not saving the drowning child. Here is the relevant passage:

But I think we can make a much more direct argument: failure to give to effective charities is morally equivalent to walking past drowning children. Therefore, you have an obligation to give to effective charities, just as you would have an obligation to pull drowning children out of ponds (it seems this is how everyone has, in the intervening years, interpreted Singer’s argument, even though it’s not what was originally intended).

‘Say what?’ said the astonished Bullfrog after reading my post. He ended up agreeing with me though, so there’s that.

Bentham’s Bullfrog is simply wrong here.

Why? Moral principles aren’t the only input needed for moral judgments. Epistemic inputs are needed too—e.g., the specifics of the situation to which one is applying moral principles—to arrive at informed and morally sound moral judgments. The alternative is that we left with abstract moral principles and without any idea of how to implement them in specific circumstances. Here philosopher Matthew Braddock unpacks the connection between the moral and the epistemic:

[The] bulk of our actual moral judgments—especially the more particular moral truths represented by our everyday moral judgments—are contingent upon the empirical facts. For example, the moral truth that I wrongfully lied to someone depends on empirical facts about, say, my deceptive intention and/or the consequences of my lying. Consequentialists, deontologists, and virtue ethicists highlight the dependence of moral truths on various empirical facts. And since empirical facts are contingent, the bulk of moral truths represented by our actual moral judgments are contingent.

In an ideal world, where we had perfect or near perfect information, it would be the case that not donating is morally equivalent to not saving the drowning child. Why? One would know how best to spend their money to save a child—based on perfect, or near perfect information—just as they could know that they saved a child from drowning because they did the saving, even though, in going their separate ways, their knowledge of the child's welfare would likely fade there. And in the real world, the same epistemic situation applies—one can know the child is saved from drowning if they did the saving.

Donating to charity isn’t the same: there is more uncertainty in the case of donating than in the case of saving the drowning child in person. To highlight the epistemic asymmetry here, consider markets as (at least a partial) solution to knowing whether money will save a child’s life to the same degree of epistemic certainty compared to how I know that I saved a child’s life by rescuing them from drowning in person. The point here is not that markets provide the same amount of information as saving the child in person, but that markets are likely the best substitute, compared to saving the child in person, as a source of information for how and where best to contribute. Why? Here the economist, Friedrich Hayek, explains, collecting such information needed as an input into where and how to donate, without the aid of markets and prices, is hard to do, if not (sometimes) impossible:

Even two hundred years after Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, it is not yet fully understood that it is the great achievement of the market to have made a far-ranging division of labor possible, that it brings about a continuous adaptation of economic effect to millions of particular facts or events which in their totality are not known and cannot be known to anybody.

And elsewhere in the same article:

[The] market is essentially an ordering mechanism growing up without anybody wholly understanding it, that enables us to utilize widely dispersed information about the significance of circumstances of which we are mostly ignorant … I do not believe that it is merely present ignorance … which makes a rational effort at central planning wholly impossible. I believe such a central utilization of necessarily widely dispersed knowledge of particular and temporary circumstances must forever remain impossible. We can have a far-ranging division of labor only by relying on the impersonal signals of prices

This is not to deny that organizations such as Givewill.org exist—an institution and website devoted to ranking effective charities by how much it costs to save a life—but this is not a substitute for markets. It cannot solve the problem of generating and collecting the kind of local knowledge that one would need to put donating money on epistemic par with saving the drowning child in person. So, strictly speaking, the claim that not donating is morally equivalent to not saving the drowning child only holds in an ideal world—where we have perfect (or near perfect) information in both cases. However, that is not the case for obvious reasons.

What am I not saying? A lot. I am not saying that one has or lacks a moral obligation to donate to effective charities—I have reservations, but I also think there are strong arguments for the view. The fact that saving the drowning child from the (shallow) pond is not morally equivalent to donating money to an effective charity implies little about the nature and scope of our obligations to others. And in the final analysis, it should be pretty obvious that, at least sometimes, we owe at least some of what we can spare to others who, especially through no fault of their own, must live in poverty and squalor. Wouldn’t we want someone to help us in a similar position?

1. Singer has more extreme views he doesn’t divulge for strategic reasons. As he argues in his book on the topic:

‘Suppose you have just sent $200 to an agency that can, for that amount, save the life of a child in a developing country who would otherwise have died. […] But don’t celebrate your good deed by opening a bottle of champagne, or even going to a movie. The cost of that bottle or movie, added to what you could save by cutting down on a few other extravagances, would save the life of another child […] You must keep cutting back on unnecessary spending, and donating what you save, until you have reduced yourself to the point where if you give any more, you will be sacrificing something nearly as important as a child’s life’ (p. 3, emphasis mine).

2. To explain the running joke: the nickname Bentham's Bulldog is a spin on Darwin’s Bulldog, a nickname for Thomas Huxley, who passionately defended Darwin's theory of evolution, in part because Charlie Darwin was shy, and so less able to publicly defend the view. So, by analogy, Matthew Adelstein, is an apt defender of the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Except that when he’s wrong he's s more like a bullfrog than a bulldog. Got it? Good!