Abstract
Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence .
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I have merged morally important elements of the story as it is told in Singer’s original article with its negligibly different expositions in his later work. For instance, in the original paper Singer talks about getting the clothes muddy, the shoes detail appearing only in his later work.
Though Singer (2011a: 178–86, 194–199) questions the intrinsic moral difference between killing and letting die, he does not claim that letting the child drown would be as wrong as drowning him. Singer (1991: 625) appeals only to ordinary moral judgment, which the latter is not. The words ‘ordinary’ and ‘commonsense’, as they are used here, should not be taken to entail anything more than the expected judgment of most people. Singer (2009a: 3–4) reports that his audiences almost unanimously express the intuition that it would be wrong to let the child drown.
Singer (2009b: 48, 2011: 145) sometimes claims that you would be a moral monster were you to prioritize your shoes. A person concerned more for his garments than the child’s life surely deserves opprobrium. But I doubt that he even comes close to being a moral monster, a term better reserved for characters like Himmler or Beria. The plausibility of Singer’s argument, however, does not depend on how the term ‘moral monster’ should be used.
Instead of ‘comparable importance’ or ‘comparably important’, Singer (2009a: 15–16) sometimes writes ‘nearly as important’. He also sometimes phrases the moral duty negatively, not as what you ought to do, but what would be wrong of you not to do. There are no important differences between these formulations of The Strong Principle and the one stated above.
Singer is sometimes taken to abstract his principles from the commonsense judgment about Pond (Cullity 2004: 14, Unger 1996: 9–10). This is a misreading. If that were the case, Singer’s strategy would be open to the objection that the commonsense judgment underdetermines these principles. Alternative principles could be proposed starting from the same judgment about Pond, most obviously the principle requiring you to prevent only the death of those you directly encounter at negligent cost to yourself. This misreading is, nevertheless, understandable, given that Singer (2009a: 3–5, 15–16, 2011a: 199–200) sometimes introduces Pond before his principles, which might give the false impression that he derives them from the entrenched judgment about Pond.
That being said, I agree with Cullity (2004: 13, 224, n. 22) that Singer appeals to his principles to explain both the wrongness of failing to save the child in Pond and the wrongness of failing to aid the world’s poor. That an intuitive judgment props up a principle which implies and explains that judgment is a known feature of the method of reflective equilibrium. It has been already noticed by McMahan (2013: 107) that, despite his long standing attacks on the reliability of intuitions in ethics (1974, 1999a: 315–316, 2005), Singer cannot resist appealing to them in Pond to underpin his principles.
Singer sometimes claims (1972: 231, 2011a: 199), rather optimistically, that The Strong Principle “seems uncontroversial,” as if it were a self-evident proposition. He (2011a: 277) also writes that The Strong Principle can “rest on the assumption that suffering and death are bad things.” But the principle cannot rest only on that assumption, as the assumption is compatible with various rival principles of beneficence. Most plausibly, Singer notes that since some people might deny the ordinary judgment about Pond, his principles need to be supported with a self-standing argument. “This argument”, Singer (2007: 480–481) writes, “might be (…) based on the nature of ethics and the requirement of universability, or impartiality, as an element of ethics.” Arguments of that sort are given in Singer and de Lazari-Radek 2014: Chs. 5 and 7.
By ‘theory’ I mean Singer’s use of the pond analogy to argue for duty to aid the world’s poor. I do not mean Singer’s theory of how to solve the problem of global poverty more generally, which includes others assumptions and arguments that need not concern us here. Singer 2009a, 2015 are expositions of that broader theory.
You had bought them before you became convinced in the truth of The Strong Principle.
Some authors (Barry and Øverland 2003: 197–198; Kamm 2007: 416–417) argue that, by logic of The Strong Principle, Singer must claim, implausibly in their view, that you are morally required to sacrifice your arm or your leg to save the child. I disagree. See the discussion below.
For more on the notions of incomparability and incommensurabity, see Chang (2013).
See, for instance, reports by UNICEF (https://www.unicef.org/mdg/childmortality.html) and WHO (http://www.who.int/pmnch/media/press_materials/fs/fs_mdg4_childmortality/en/).
If saving several children, or even one child, is costlier than an expensive pair of shoes, we should imagine that in Pond and its variants you would also ruin your new suit, new watch, and so on until the cost of saving those children is reached. I doubt that the initial intuition would differ if the example is changed in these respects. However, I am less sure that commonsense morality favors a duty to forgo a luxury sport car for a child’s life, as Unger (1996: 135–156) and Singer (1999b) believe.
Singer might accept other principles restricting the amount and the kind of costs you may impose on such people in preventing the bad. Even if he would claim that you ought to save the child at the expense of spraining your toe or ruining your wife’s shoes, he need not claim that you ought to do it at the expense of spraining your wife’s toe or stealing and then ruining her shoes. This is compatible with Singer thinking, given his consequentialist predilections, that you may impose more burden on innocent others to prevent the bad than ordinarily supposed. For more on the issue of imposing costs on others, see Unger (1996: Ch. 3), Kamm (2007: 372–374).
The same point can be made focusing on a choice between saving one child in one pond or two children in the other, assuming that you cannot do both. The Strong Principle entails that you ought to do the latter. This is so even if the cost to yourself in either action is the same (say, you will ruin your shoes). By saving two children, you are sacrificing your shoes and one child’s life, which taken together are of lesser moral importance impersonally, not just to you.
Taking The Strong Principle as strictly impartial is a common misreading (Kamm 1999: 175–176, 2007: 416; Dorsey 2009: 143–146; Barry and Øverland 2013: 193) that renders Singer’s view an easy target. Though some of Singer’s extreme claims, such as that the affluent ought to “work full time to relieve great suffering” (1972: 238) of the poor and that, in doing so, they ought to reduce themselves to “the material circumstances of the Bengali refugee” (1972: 241), suggest that his principles do not make room for any partiality towards yourself and your near and dear, his other, more moderate, claims suggest the contrary. Dorsey (2009: 150–156) argues that any such position is likely to be unstable due to difficulties of drawing boundaries of permissible partiality on principled grounds while preserving The Strong Principle’s strong demands. Singer might reply that there is no need for a principled distinction between permissible and impermissible partiality. As emphasized below, in arguing for the duty to aid the world’s poor, Singer remains ecumenical about major moral theories. He might argue that The Strong Principle holds as long as the competing moral theories converge on the conclusion that much of the affluent people’s wealth and their devotions to projects, friends, and families are less morally significant than the lives of numerous destitute strangers, even if they diverge on whether the same holds for the affluent people’s lives, body parts, and careers. This is of course a controversial assumption. For arguments that major non-consequentialist views entail the duty to give till it hurts, see Cullity (1994), Ashford (2003), Ord (2014) and van Ackeren and Sticker (2015).
The assumption is that (3) and (4) are identical options with respect to costs which might give rise to agent-centered prerogatives. The Strong Principle is not strictly impartial but it is a minimax and an aggregative principle, which is why it favors doing (3).
For dissenters, who contest impersonal badness, see Taurek (1977: 308), Thomson (2001: 19). As Dorsey (2009: 147–149) notes, there might be a reason (though not a good one) to read The Strong Principle as weighing the aggregated claims of the world’s poor against your claims as one-to-one. However, unless distance matters morally, there is no reason to read this principle as weighing the aggregated claims of the world’s poor against the claim of the drowning child in the same way. Moreover, even if there was such a reason, The Strong Principle would permit you to do (3), or at least require you to flip a coin so as to decide whether to do (2) or (3).
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify my position here.
I can support this claim only by convenience samples of audiences to which I presented Pond II, which almost unanimously say that it would be wrong to let the child drown. That commonsense morality prioritizes rescuing those with whom we are personally involved over aiding more distant equally needy people is noticed by other authors (Murphy 2000: 129; Wollard 2015: 132, 142–143).
If this error theory is correct, Singer’s appeal to Pond is an instance of what Shelly Kagan (1988: 23–25) calls ‘transport arguments’. Transport arguments assess a complex situation, with a multitude of factors, by assessing a simplified model case, with several relevant factors, and then “transport” the conclusion about the simplified case to the complex situation. Such arguments are fallacious because the role of a factor can vary with different background conditions. The conclusion reached about a simplified case need not stretch to a complex situation.
At least to the extent that there is a steady decline of poverty-driven child mortality globally in the last four decades. See, for instance, this UNICEF’s report: https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/under-five-mortality/#.
References
Arneson, R. (2004). Moral limits on the demands of beneficence? In D. Chatterjee (Ed.), The ethics of assistance: Morality and the distant needy (pp. 33–58). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Arneson, R. (2009). What do we owe to distant needy strangers? In J. Schaler (Ed.), Peter singer under fire: The moral iconoclast faces his critics (pp. 267–293). Chicago: Open Court.
Arthur, J. (1977). Rights and the duty to bring aid. In W. Aiken & H. LaFollette (Eds.), World hunger and moral obligation (pp. 85–102). New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Ashford, E. (2003). The demandingness of Scanlon’s contractualism. Ethics,113(2), 273–302.
Barry, C., & Øverland, G. (2013). How much for the child? Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,16(1), 189–204.
Chang, R. (2013). Incommensurability (and Incomparability). In H. LaFollette (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of ethics (pp. 2591–2604). Oxford: Blackwell.
Cullity, G. (1994). International aid and the scope of kindness. Ethics,105(1), 99–127.
Cullity, G. (2004). The moral demands of affluence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dorsey, D. (2009). Aggregation, partiality, and the strong beneficence principle. Philosophical Studies,146(1), 139–157.
Forcehimes, A., & Semrau, L. (2017). Beneficence: Does agglomeration matter? Journal of Applied Philosophy,34(4), 17.
Gabriel, I. (2016). Effective altruism and its critics. Journal of Applied Philosophy,34(4), 457–473.
Gomberg, P. (2002). The fallacy of philanthropy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy,32(1), 29–66.
Hooker, B. (2000). Ideal code, real world: A rule-consequentialist theory of morality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kagan, S. (1988). The additive fallacy. Ethics,99(1), 5–31.
Kamm, F. (1999). Famine ethics: the problem of distance in morality and Singer's ethical theory. In D. Jamieson (Ed.), Singer and his Critics (pp. 174–203). Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Kamm, F. (2007). Intricate ethics: Rights, responsibilities, and permissible harm. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kekes, J. (2002). On the supposed obligation to relieve famine. Philosophy,77(4), 503–517.
Lillehammer, H. (2011). Consequentialism and global ethics. In M. Boylan (Ed.), Morality and global justice: A reader (pp. 89–102). Boulder: Westview Press.
MacAskill, W. (2015). Doing good better: How effective altruism can help you make a difference. New York: Random House.
McKinsey, M. (1981). Obligations to the Starving. Noûs,15(3), 309–323.
McMahan, J. (2013). Moral intuition. In H. LaFollette & I. Persson (Eds.), The blackwell guide to ethical theory (Vol. 2, pp. 103–120). Wiley-Blackwell: Hoboken.
McMahan, J. (2017). Doing good and doing the best. In P. Woodruff (Ed.), Philanthropy and philosophy: Putting theory into practice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Miller, R. (2004). Beneficence, duty, and distance. Philosophy and Public Affairs,32(4), 357–383.
Mulgan, T. (2001). The demands of consequentialism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Murphy, L. (2000). Moral demands in non-ideal theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ord, T. (2014). Global poverty and the demands of morality. In J. Perry (Ed.), God, the good, and utilitarianism: Perspectives on peter singer (pp. 177–191). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parfit, D. (1986). Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. (1982). Contractualism and utilitarianism. In A. Sen & B. Williams (Eds.), Utilitarianism and beyond (pp. 103–128). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scanlon, T. M. (1998). What we owe to each other. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scheffler, S. (1994). The rejection of consequentialism: A philosophical investigation of the considerations underlying rival moral conceptions (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Schmidtz, D. (2000). Islands in a sea of obligation: Limits of the duty to rescue. Law and Philosophy,19(6), 683–705.
Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence and morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs,1(3), 229–243.
Singer, P. (1974). Sidgwick and reflective equilibrium. Monist,58(3), 490–517.
Singer, P. (1991). A refutation of ordinary morality. Ethics,101(3), 625–633.
Singer, P. (1999a). A response. In D. Jamieson (Ed.), Singer and his critics (pp. 269–332). Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Singer, P. (1999b). The singer solution to world poverty. The New York Times Sunday Magazine,September 5, 60–63.
Singer, P. (2005). Ethics and intuitions. Journal of Ethics,9(3–4), 331–352.
Singer, P. (2007). Review essay on “The Moral Demands of Affluence”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,75(2), 475–483.
Singer, P. (2009a). The life you can save: Acting now to end world poverty. New York: Random House.
Singer, P. (2009b). Charity: The psychology of giving. Newsweek,February 27, 48.
Singer, P. (2011a). Practical ethics (3rd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Singer, P. (2011b). Changing values for a just and sustainable world. In D. Held, A. Fane-Hervey, & M. Theros (Eds.), The governance of climate change: Science, economics, politics, and ethics (pp. 144–161). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Singer, P. (2015). The most good you can do: How effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically. London: Yale University Press.
Singer, P. (2016, July 6th). Famine, affluence, and morality. Talks at Google video, 52 min. https://talksat.withgoogle.com/talk/famine-affluence-and-morality.
Singer, P., & de Lazari-Radek, K. (2014). The point of view of the universe: Sidgwick and contemporary ethics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Taurek, J. (1977). Should the numbers count? Philosophy and Public Affairs,6(4), 293–316.
Thomson, J. J. (2001). Goodness and advice. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Timmerman, T. (2015). Sometimes there is nothing wrong with letting a child drown. Analysis,75(2), 204–212.
Unger, P. (1996). Living high and letting die: Our illusion of innocence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Ackeren, M., & Sticker, M. (2015). Kant and moral demandingness. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice,18(1), 75–89.
Wenar, L. (2010). Poverty is no pond: Challenges for the affluent. In P. Illingworth, T. Pogge, & L. Wenar (Eds.), Giving well: The ethics of philanthropy (pp. 104–132). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woollard, F. (2015). Doing and allowing harm. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
The paper has immensely benefited from comments from Ivan Milić and an anonymous reviewer of this journal. I am grateful to James Plumtree for remarks on writing style and to the audiences at the Institute of Philosophy and History seminars at American University of Central Asia for helpful discussion.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Markoč, A. Draining the pond: why Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor is self-defeating. Philos Stud 177, 1953–1970 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01293-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01293-1