Probably my favorite part of Ban van der Vossen and Jason Brennan’s new In Defense of Openness (Oxford University Press) is their critique of Peter Singer’s “drowning child” argument. Background: Philosopher Peter Singer famously argues that failing to donate your surplus income to help the global poor is morally equivalent to allowing a child to drown in a pond. Van der Vossen and Brennan, in contrast, argue that the global poor are perfectly able to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps… if the world’s governments will only let them.
If we’re going to have an analogy, perhaps the following would be better: the world’s poor are not like children in a pond, and they do not need to be pulled out by nobly motivated Westerners. They are people, perfectly capable of swimming and rescuing themselves, who are trapped in a pond surrounded by fences keeping them from escaping on their own initiative. What they need, what they really need, is for those fences to be taken down. They need the removal of the barriers that keep them in a position where they need help. Such an analogy would recommend protecting people’s productive rights, improving their access to markets around the world, and freeing their ability to migrate.
Alternately, instead of seeing the global poor as drowning children, we should see them as characters in a Horatio Alger novel. What they need is not charity but opportunity. And that’s great news, because charity has always been very scarce. Opportunity, in contrast, is like love – the more you offer, the more you have.
READER COMMENTS
Dylan
Sep 25 2018 at 3:20pm
As both an open borders guy and someone who has found Singer’s arguments uncomfortably persuasive ever since I was introduced to them, I’m of course biased to really like this line of thinking. And I do! But of course it doesn’t really challenge Singer (at least not the portion quoted). It may be that the best thing we could do for the world’s poor on a societal level would be to tear down those fences and walls that are keeping people out, and as individuals we should advocate for this. But we should also realize that as individuals we are pretty powerless to get this change implemented. On the other hand, as individuals there really isn’t anything stopping us from donating a large amount of our income to charities that can improve the lives of people today. Obviously figuring out which interventions/charities are the most effective isn’t trivial, but that’s why groups like GiveWell are so useful.
Mark Z
Sep 25 2018 at 4:45pm
Singer’s argument is clearly a case of false equivalence. If I show you a ‘global poor’ person, his poverty is not in immanent danger of killing him if you don’t immediately give him some money. Almost invariably, it means he has to go without some commodities you get to enjoy, will have to work more hours in less safe conditions, etc. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would be, does a well-off professional have an obligation to spend his spare time helping poorer people with their construction work or garbage hauling. Far less urgent than saving a drowning child.
It’s also far more costly. Saving a drowning child while walking past a pond has (if you can swim) essentially zero cost to you; it probably only takes a few minutes. Making a poor person permanently not poor, however, will likely take regular donations of several thousand dollars a year on your part. Let’s suppose your benchmark is bringing a single person up to the level of the American poverty level ( around $12,000 per year) from, let’s say, $2,000 per year (the median per capita income is supposedly just shy of $3,000 per year). If you’re a single, middle class (moderately above average) American making, let’s say, $60,000 a year or $30 per hour, that means you will spend 333 hours per year working to keep this person out of poverty. So, you’re committing almost an hour a day to maintaining this person’s standard of living, or (factoring in commute and such, I’ll permit myself to round up a bit) about 7 percent of your waking life (keeping quality of life constant). So, clearly, Singer’s analogy is not remotely reasonable. On the one hand, you have sacrificing a few minutes of your time to give a child the rest of his life; on the other, you have sacrificing several years of your life to improve the range of commodities available to someone and perhaps extend their lifespan slightly. Not comparable, in my opinion.
Dylan
Sep 25 2018 at 5:28pm
As you would imagine, Singer anticipates these objections and has responses for them. It’s been 20 years since I’ve read his book for a philosophy class, so I’m in no position to recite his arguments…but I remember me and my classmates making similar objections and others, and having them be addressed in pretty compelling ways (at least they were to me). Like most moral philosophers he starts with a pretty cut and dry case (drowning child) and extrapolates from it to more and more grey areas, arguing from each that there is no real difference in moral obligation between the two, until you get to his conclusion. I don’t come anywhere close to living my life by his ideal, and I’m not sure I agree with all of the moral underpinnings, but I still found it a pretty powerful argument.
In case you’re interested, I think the book we read was The Life You Can Save.
Mark Z
Sep 25 2018 at 7:25pm
Is the conclusion he reaches basically that any disposable income one has that would garner more utility for someone else, you are morally obligated to give them?
Dylan
Sep 25 2018 at 7:58pm
Not sure I’m remembering perfectly, but I don’t think he goes quite that far, but almost, if your disposable income can save someone’s life you’re morally obligated to give it. He’s a pretty hardcore utilitarian, but I do think you’re morally allowed to prioritize your own wants once the material needs of everyone on Earth are met. So, you know, totally doable.
David Manheim
Sep 26 2018 at 1:31am
He suggests that there should be a public standard that it should be viewed as unacceptable to give less than 1% of income – https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/take-the-pledge , but he also supports the idea that people in first world countries should give 10% of their income to charity as a reasonable goal. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge/
Mark Z
Sep 27 2018 at 1:18am
Those numbers seem rather arbitrary. It seems like someone could use his own arguments against them and demand that the expenditure of income on anything other than necessities of life is immoral as long as anyone anywhere lacks such necessities.
sofarin
Sep 27 2018 at 7:43am
That’s true. But I think the reason he used 10% is that if he simply said “all affluent people (many people in the developed world) should donate as much of their money as possible,” almost no one would be motivated to do so. Some would probably donate from time to time, maybe even 1% of their income. But the thing about the 10% is that it’s not an insignificant fraction. People can be motivated to do that without burning out within a year.
From a purely utilitarian perspective, there is a trade-off between the number of people who get convinced of his argument (and thus donate money) and the fraction of income donated per person. 10% is probably better than 5% (since the sorts of people who would get convinced of donating 5% would also probably be convinced of donating 10%), but >20% is probably worse than 10% since much fewer people would be convinced of this.
JDR
Sep 26 2018 at 11:45am
Singer’s argument is only compelling if you accept his starting premise: that there exists some objective morality and that some form of utilitarianism is a good starting point for building that morality. There are good reasons to doubt this and you can trace this line of thinking through philosophers like Nietzsche, Alasdair MacIntyre, Raymond Geuss, and others.
Dylan
Sep 26 2018 at 8:23pm
Fair enough. I’ve sort of decided that utilitarianism, while probably not actually true in an epistemological sense, provides a useful enough framework for most of the moral decisions that a person can be expected to come across in day to day life to have value and to even seriously consider some of the more out there implications. But I’ve always been something of a wishy-washy philosopher who doesn’t strive for complete internal consistency in ethical decisions.
DDD
Sep 27 2018 at 1:24am
Singer states that even if you wore an expensive suit, which will be damaged by going into the water, you would still help the drowning child.
Furthermore, if you assume the calculations of organizations like Giving What We Can are correct, you can indeed save lives by donating money (e.g. for malaria nets).
andy
Sep 27 2018 at 4:57am
It seems to me that Singer’s argument is ‘extrapolating from extreme’. All moral systems fail in extremes, one way or the other. Nobody generally has an obligation to help the other in distress. He uses an extreme example (drowning child, zero costs from saving) where the normal moral system fails and most societies say ‘ok, this is so extreme that you do have an obligation’. But given that this is an extreme, you cannot extrapolate.
Michael Huemer criticizes this idea based on the difference between ‘urgent emergency’ and ‘permanent problem’; it is not the same and you shouldn’t treat both the same and people generally do not.
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