DON'T Save the Drowning Child!

Peter Singer's conclusion does not follow from Utilitarian premises

If you’re not familiar with Peter Singer’s powerful “Drowning Child” argument, this post won’t make sense to you, so watch this video first.

There are charities that treat and prevent AIDS in Africa.  Some people think this is a morally good thing.  I don’t.

Suppose that you go to a bar and you meet a guy named Chett.  After chatting for a minute, Chett demands that you give him gas money.  You see, Chett explains, Chett is about to go hook up with a woman he’s just met on tinder but the woman lives a few miles away and Chett only has a small amount of gas in his motorcycle.  He tells you that there are two routes he can take: 

1. Risky Road is short and he won’t need any more gas, but the road has not been maintained and it is dangerous. 

2. Safe Route is safe, but it’s a long 9 mile loop and Chett doesn’t have that much gas.

Chett’s motorcycle

Chett tells you that you should give him $10 to buy more gas.  $10 isn’t very much money to you, but if you give it to Chett he will be able to buy gas so he can take Safe Route instead of Risky Road.  You could save a life!

Do you think you are morally obligated to give Chett $10?  I don’t.  Not only are you not morally obligated to give Chett $10, it is not even a morally good action to give Chett $10.

Now let’s consider the situation with charities for AIDS in Africa.  AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease.  The vast majority of AIDS patients chose to risk death because they wanted to have sex, like Chett driving his motorcycle on Risky Road.  The fact that Africans are far away and Chett is close does not make Africans more deserving of our help.  The fact that Africans are black and Chett is white does not make Chett less morally deserving of our help.  Since there are no morally significant differences between the case of Chett and the case of an African adult with AIDS, we should conclude that it is not morally obligatory to donate money to a charity that helps African adults with AIDS.  If you share my intuition that it is not even a morally good action to give money to Chett, you should conclude that donating money to AIDS charities is not even a morally good action.

Here’s another thought experiment.  Suppose that you are in an airplane that crashes on a desert island.  You and 100 other passengers survive.  In the center of the island there is a whirlpool which can suck people down to their death.  If you fall into the whirlpool, it is possible for a person on the edge of the pool to pull you out, but there is a very small chance that they also will be sucked in.  You and 99 other people decide that if any of you ever see someone stuck in the whirlpool, you will pull them out.  One person, named Steven, says loudly and publicly that he would not save anyone from the whirlpool.  He says that anyone who would help someone in the whirlpool is a “sucker.”  One day you see that Steven has fallen into the whirlpool and he is about to drown.  Do you have a moral obligation to save him?

A desert island

The thought experiments about Chett and Steven illustrate circumstances in which it is plausible that it is not morally obligatory - and indeed not even morally praiseworthy - to save a person’s life.  In the case of Chett, he chose to put himself in danger.  You’re not obligated to pay for Chett’s gas anymore than you’re obligated to pay for his beer or his motorcycle.  While it is true that there is a tradeoff between Chett’s gas budget and his risk of death, the same could be said of many other decisions.  When purchasing a house there is a tradeoff between risk and expenditure; houses in safer neighborhoods cost more.  Taking a vacation to a developing country involves a small risk.  Driving in a car or flying in an airplane involves a small risk.  Since people make risk/reward tradeoffs all the time, the act of donating money to someone to decrease their risk of death should not be seen as categorically different from the act of donating money to that person to spend on anything else.  If you’re not morally obligated to give money to Chett to spend on beer or motorcycles, you’re not morally obligated to give money to Chett (or anyone else) to spend on risk reduction.

In the case of the whirlpool on the desert island, Steven would not save you if the roles were reversed, so it is plausible that it is not obligatory - and not even supererogatory - to save Steven, especially if saving Steven involves any significant risk or cost to yourself.

Now let’s look at a third case in which it might not be obligatory or even supererogatory to save a person’s life.  Suppose that in the 1760s James Watt had to choose between spending 100 hours working on his improved steam engine, or spending 100 hours donating to and caring for poor orphans on the streets of Birmingham.  Working on the steam engine is clearly the better option when judged on long-term results.  As harsh as it is to say, the result of caring for Dickensian orphans is a few moments of comfort for those orphans while Watt’s steam engine played a key role in the Industrial Revolution which has produced unprecedented prosperity for billions of people.

A Dickensian orphan next to a steam engine

The vast majority of cases in which Effective Altruists claim that we can save lives for low cost (e.g. mosquito bed nets) resemble James Watt’s choice between helping starving orphans or improving the steam engine. You could spend $5000 to replace your suit today, or you could take that $5000 and build a business which will eventually produce enough wealth to permanently support hundreds of people. Instead of building a business, many people would choose to spend an extra $5000 as a partial down payment on a house in which to build their family. But building a family is also an investment of sorts. If you are reading this essay and engaging with Singer’s argument at all, if you even consider making large donations to save drowning children on the other side of the world, you are already in the top 1% most altruistic people on Earth. If you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to have children of your own - rather than spend the money to save dozens of someone else’s children -your children will be very likely to be in the top few percentiles of altruism because they will inherit both your genes and your cultural norms. In the long run, producing a few well-raised high-IQ, highly altruistic children will be the most effectively altruistic thing you can do.

If instead you spend your money and effort to save Bangladeshi children from drowning, you will not create any new effective altruists. Universalism is a Western idea and Bangladeshis do not share it. In fact, substantial proportions of the third world not only reject the idea that they should reciprocate our acts of kindness, they actively seek to attack and destroy us. 26% of Bangladeshis say that attacks against civilians in the name of Islam can sometimes or often be justified. Among Muslims worldwide there is double-digit support for enforcing the death penalty for apostasy. A hard-headed cost-benefit analysis of a measure to save lives in a Muslim country needs to account for the possibility that an increase in the population of that country could make it more difficult for the West and its Effective Altruists to operate. Most Effective Altruists are blind the the realities of tribal conflict. An increase in the relative power of the West would likely lead to a more peaceful world with more people willing to donate to charity. An increase in the relative power of Islam would likely lead to more war, more terrorism, and less charity.

Photo by Mahmoud Sulaiman on Unsplash

In short, celebrated EA tactics such as mosquito nets and cash transfers to extremely poor people are not actually very effective. The recipients of the money would not reciprocate, so the money tends to reproduce both genes and cultures which are not interested in reciprocating acts of charity. By contrast, doing the normal work of civilization: having families, building businesses, strengthening your own tribe, etc. will produce a large community of highly capable and highly altruistic people who will be able to achieve almost anything.

Does this mean that we should not care about the vulnerable and weak?  Should we adopt the attitude of the “Nietzcheans” and “Vitalists” who think that “might makes right”?  No, we certainly should not.  We should have compassion for the vulnerable and weak.  We should hope that some miracle will allow them to survive and thrive.  We wish that we had the resources to save everyone.  But we don’t have sufficient resources.

When the “Vitalist” sees the Amhara massacre the Tigrayans, he thinks “Not my tribe, not my problem” or even “that’s nature taking its course, the whole world is struggle.”  That vitalist attitude is barbaric. Massacres of innocent people are not somehow justified because they are “natural.” Even though we will spend our own resources on our own people, not on the Tigrayans, we should treat the news of any massacre of innocents with solemnity. We should mourn the passing of their souls.

Yes, I am saying that you should decline to give assistance to the Tigrayans, and the drowning Bangladeshi children, and many other unfortunate people throughout the world, but this is not a call for callousness. It is the recognition that we are not universalistic gods who can fine tune the whole world.  We are particular human beings with our own lives to live, our own quests to fulfill. Our task is to nurture the light of civilization in our little corner of the world, and that requires that we put our own family and friends first.

So if you’re wearing your expensive suit and you encounter the child drowning in the shallow pond, should you leave him to drown? I think not. If you are ever in the extraordinarily unlikely situation in which you are wearing a $5000 suit and you come across a pond in which a Haitian child is drowning, you should save the child - but not because the value of saving the Haitian child’s life exceeds $5,000 - you should save the child because to not do so would brutalize your own heart.  It is bad for your soul to let a child drown in front of you for the same reason that it is bad for your soul to watch snuff films. Contra Singer, failing to intervene when a child is drowning right in front of you really is different from failing to intervene when a child is drowning on the other side of the Earth.

We should busy ourselves with the work of civilization. We should build up strong families and communities. We should build up wealth and technological power. We should strengthen the factions of Good and fight against the factions of Evil. This is our task.