The Drowning Child Argument

Total BS! First off, the argument assumes that I have enough money to spend $100 on shoes. I don't. I wear my shoes until they are falling off my feet, because I have to. Then I sacrifice eating quality food for a few weeks in order to afford a new pair.

If I had enough money to spend $100 on shoes, I'd be very inclined to donate a rather large amount to worthy charities.

 

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Ultimately, this is a paradox.

If we were to give to those who have less than us, where do we stop? If redistribution is a moral requirement, where do we stop?

If we give more to them and they end up with less, then it's them who has to give back to us. But that's where the paradox lay. Self-preservation is, more often than not, the strongest instinct in human beings. It drives almost everything we do. It is by its very definition what drives natural selection. So, only in very very rare situations would a person give to the point that the one who once had less now has more.

So, in summary, the idea that we must give to those who have less is, in a sense, a never-ending scam. Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to donate food, money or clothing to those who don't have as much. But my point is that the simple principle of giving to those who have less is a flawed one.

Some people will ALWAYS have less or more than someone else. There is no way to control complete equality in that aspect. So, are we to spend our entire lives giving to others? And if so, at what point do we stop?

Why is there a moral obligation to give to those who have less when there will always be those who have less? Are we to give until those who have less have more than we have? If so, then the process continues on and balance is never achieved. And that is the point of charity, correct? To help make equal with those who have less?

 

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When you reach equality, presumably. Not seeing the paradox...

No, it's the other way around. Nature is going to select, and that's what made self-preservation such a strong instinct. Those populations that lacked such, got selected out in a hurry. Natural selection, by its very definition, drives the instinct for self-preservation.

Relevance? I don't see where anyone has suggested that "redistribution" should amount to the rich and poor simply swapping places.

There may well be practical problems, and perfect equality may well be an impossible ideal, but these seem to be mere generic quibbles. And not basic paradoxes that render the very idea inconsistent.

Same reason that there's a moral obligation not to kill people even though there will always be death and killing. Moral obligations do not depend on any premise that fulfilling them will, in a finite time, eliminate the very reason they exist.

That doesn't make any sense. Nobody is suggesting that the poor need to give to the rich. Where are you getting this stuff?

 

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that is all great and you should set a side 10% for your self every time you get paid . It is called Paying your self first . What gripes my ass is Obama can raise a billion dollars in a campaign year for what ? Defiantly not to save a bunch of starving kid the peace keeper kill as to do population control . So well who gives a fuck . Let the little bastard die in the street after all Frag might just call them Rats of Haiti like the deer in the Maryland area . See it is not one lower to middle class persons responsibility who is barley keeping food on the table for there personal locality. We talk a lot about discretionary income in the next level of income tax brackets . They tend to think in the terms of "what will benefit Me"
We;ll ultimately it is the under developed worlds . Untapped markets so to speak . Now we got a bunch of starving kids eating dirt cookies for lunch and a work force that works for 8 dollars a day . You can can do the math from there . So we set up all these relief funds , Except there a shill game for other countries to prosper cause every bodies in it for them selves no matter how much they think there helping . Joe blow consumer don't realize this except they do cause they get the benefit of spending and exchanging the money the poor working lower to middle class slump donated to the relief fund . You can tell I am a little disgruntled about what I found out was the base of operations when I went to Haiti . The Haitian Government in the end has been set up to fail time after time . It is bull shit and the world do gooders should be ashamed of them selves . So now they are being set up to fail again so someone else can piss money in the wind . Woopdy fucking deal . Except they did not think about Mikey rowing his boat to shore telling the Haitians what is what and what the fuck. Your getting fuck with no Vaseline.

That be about one third of the Money raised for Haiti by your good money rainy day funds that were donated after the earth quake ,so far pissed in the wind . The rest is still sat on for the time being . So I hope the fuckers wake up from the night mares we create for our selves cause as Haiti falls the rest of the world will follow . As Haiti Rises like the Phoenix out of the asses so will the world follow . See you fucker I know this . I knew it when I was little and I know it now. It is what I call the week link in the chain of production . The link that brakes the machine . You got to repair the machine or your all doomed to be un productive mules for the corporate take over. The Machine we all work for . Monetary Gain . It is sad you bunch of idiot humans . I am not talking to people like Chimpkin that has never owned a jet ski or skied boulder Colorado when the sun was shining at about 29 degrees .
Who has not seem to far past a concrete jungle .
Or am I talking about a working stiff that works 50 to 80 hr. a week trying to stay ahead of what it takes to be a legal citizen of the good old U.S.A.inc.
Discretionary income should be used to lift 3rd worlds out of there disrepair or we are are fucked . Why ? The resentment friends . Yeah the underdog that struggles to win. The ones that will not take it any more and do something about it . The Shakers and Makers in life . What are you going to be . A Player or a watcher. Well I guess you could do both . That is what I do . Eye hand coordination thing . Good for measuring too.
So five dollars for a good mission to improve is no big deal if your power bill and house payment is made and you paid your self first budgeted in some form of entertainment for your self . All is good . It is still your choice and well I would not feel guilty for any thing you do as long as your are not out shooting kids to control population or some crazy half cocked plan like that.
W.F.H. it will make your life better. Trust Me. God no one ever believes in Me . What is it My Multi Personalities ? You fuckers will see . It will be done . I will will do it . You can't stop Me . I was raised to do it . I didn't have a choice . Free will is a myth. Life is determined already by what proceeded it . A link in a fucking chain. Even that spook action at a distance shit is subject to the linkage . I seen it . Stuff that happens in one place is linked by a hidden force by event sequence . Some of you think that is bull shit . You got know Idea . That vibration on your window sends out signal that is heard around the world and its reaction could trigger anywhere it fits or to say resonate with something on the ground . It surprised Me how even lips moving with no sound put out a vibration picked up by the human senses . Fuck Me to you all are fucking incredible. I tell you that is some spooky shit at a distance . Now I have tested it over and over again now . It is not me being delusional . Fuck too wish it was . Humans are animals . Viscous animals . Even the best of us . Fuck I thought squirrels were viscous

 

The difference is a western child has every hope to grow up and have a good life. The 3rd world child could very well be saved from some disease, but they are going to live a shitty life anyway, so what's the point? It's a very real danger that in the name of doing good, western people are enabling unsustainable population numbers. It would be better to distribute condoms and prevent life rather than saving lives. And in fact,every American pays taxes which are used for foreign aid.

 

"hope" is certainly the operative word ....

 

I'm not suggesting that either. It makes perfect sense, you're just not seeing it. When do we stop giving? Where do we draw the line? When we both have equal amounts? That's impossible.

So, if they person who has less ends up having more than you, the shoes have switched and now you are the one in need of charity.

 

And, by the way, natural selection is not it's own driven entity which picks and chooses who wins and who doesn't. Natural selection is the process which nature (humans included) are subject to. The weaker are dominated and killed off by the stronger so the species can evolve. And I'm not just talking about physically.

 

Also, I'm not sure I would save any drowning child, people die that way.

Also, if your $100 shoes (the exact price of mine actually) can't take some water, you wasted your money.

Also, just take them off first.

 

Not even remotely.

If anything, Western children are exposed to more propaganda about the good life than anyone else - but this is also all there is to it.

 

So... what about those of us that wear $25 pairs of shoes... :shrug:

There will always be poor people... no matter how much money you give to the needy. After all, give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he feeds his family for life...

 

Is the value of a human life less than $100? If I conclude that it is then I have to evaluate myself that way as well and shoudn't be surprized when I am treated as being worth less than $100. Or is everyone else worth less than $100 while I am worth much more? Then I would need to rationalize why I am worth more than everyone else and why I deserve to be saved from drowning even if the cost exceeds $100 but everyone else doesn't.


What do we base the value of a human life on? The person's socio-economic position? The person's personal qualities? The person's potential? The person's age? Or do we simply value a person because he is human and being human is special.

From a pure ethical standpoint we have a moral duty to aleviate suffering and prevent the unnecessary infliction of pain. Such a duty is derived from our human need for social cooperation and our common ability to suffer both physically and psychologically and die.


So if indeed someone is drowning, ruining our 100-dollar shoes, if indeed that is all that's involved, doesn't justify ignoring our moral duty to extend a helping hand.

 

This is the classic Singerian argument, though consider this...it is essentially an appeal to emotion.

The intuition is that we save the child, in the abstract, but in reality quite often people stand by and watch as others suffer distress. We are evolutionarily programmed to things like the bystander effect (the more people viewing another in distress, the less likely one is to try to offer aid. The reason we suffer it is that it is evolutionarily efficient to hope that "someone else" will take care of the problem and avoid the personal cost.

Now, efficiency is not morality per se, but there is reason to think that someone who has three meals a day (rather than just one, saving the excess cash to donate to malaria treatment programs) is not being immoral and selfish.

There is another way to look at the problem though, that one who saves the child in the pond is morally laudable (aka "supererogatory", philosophers love their crazy words), rather than conclude that the inactive bystander is reprehensible. In fact, the moral reality is muddied, since we both heap praise on the savior and would look askance at the person who left the scene.

If the bystander who leaves the scene is morally reprehensible, then so are many thousands of people in far off lands who don't do "enough" to stem the tide of suffering that Peter Singer wants us to contribute funds to end, but Singer doesn't really want us to spend time blaming local governments and individuals even though that's the way societies coerce the desired behaviors from reticent individuals.

Personally, I think one also has to account for the basics of human psychology in setting ethical norms, and I think as a society we do that pretty well. That means noticing and giving some weight to notions like "in-group" and "out-group" distinctions that we all make in deciding whether to render aid, as well as problems like bystander effect. As a society, we readily draw ethical lines between in-groups and out-groups all the time. That's why Americans focus on the number of American dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not just the number of dead on both sides. That's why we feed our families three meals a day, even though we know that we could cut back and give a lot of "excess" food to feed other hungry Americans around us.

Setting up an ethical system that ignores these sorts of psychological filters is very likely to leave one with an ethical system that is maladaptive in an evolutionary sense, and so I think we need to proceed down that road with some degree of circumspection.

Though, that said, and while there is an appeal to Singer's argument, I am completely certain that no one, not even Singer, takes it to its logical end. If he did, he would live on something a budget that maximizes his ability to contribute to causes he believes in. So Singer shouldn't own a pair of $100 shoes, ever, as he can buy $5 shoes and spend $95 to help the poor and ill. He should be lobbying the Dean at Princeton hard to set the whole university on a similar path. He's certainly very generous by *my* standards, to be sure (and that is laudable), but he's also inexplicably unethical by his own standards in that he has a nice house, and he could be living in a more modest home.

His arguments (which are heartfelt) also lead him to many counterintuitive ideas like "bestiality is okay, as long as there is no cruelty to the animal" and "animals have coequal rights with humans."

Think of the latter point. Singer is quite clear that is you see a sewer rat drowning, you also need to ruin your shoes and miss your appointments to save the rat.

One can certainly accept his premise as to humans and reject it as to rats or other animals, but why? If the answer is (as I think it is) "Well, I'm a human and I care more about humans" that is really an application of defining the "in-group." One can just as well define the in-group in other ways (by nationality, by ethnic makeup, by tribal affiliation, by certain degrees of familial affinity, etc.). (And Singer's point is that because any line drawing would have an arbitrary component to it, all line drawing is invalid, and any creature that can suffer (Singer's preferred line) is entitled to equal deference).

Truth is, it is engaging to think through the problems, but is even Peter Singer doesn't live up to the ideals, then probably very few do./* As interesting as his thought experiment is, and as hard as it is to absolutely refute it, if we are honest we have to admit that hearing the argument is unlikely to make anyone substantially change their lifestyle to save the lives of unseen people living far away.

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/*Singer does make a distinction about there not being a "significant" reduction in other things of moral importance (which could include living in reasonable comfort I suppose, and could easily include feeding one's family reasonably well)...but he doesn't consider that "significant" in marginal terms, so (to me) it seems like a wishy-washy way of justifying his own failure to give up more than he does. I don't think he needs to justify it (not to me, at any rate), but I think he does to himself to remain within the bounds of his own moral system, and he does that by saying "well, I hardly notice this sacrifice."

At the same time, though, if I start sending money to far away people to be applied (I hope) in a good way rather than being wasted on bureaucracy or stolen by corrupt local officials, seeing no benefit myself, I am going to have a pretty low threshold (nearly $0) for what I consider to be a significant reduction in my personal happiness. I will spend some time fretting over that money to a greater degree than Singer does. That certainly means (by my standards) that Singer may well be a morally superior person to me, but that makes him praiseworthy, not me immoral.

I don't think Singer sees my personal fretting and unhappiness over the now missing money as a valid moral ground in and of itself not to send it, but I kinda think it is.
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Any ethical system that suggests that everyone is unethical, probably needs a rethink.

As a practical necessity, we need to have a system of ethics that we can adhere to faithfully, and that requires us to limit our obligations to those things that either right in front of us or which we have some special connection to. That doesn't mean that you should ignore suffering that is far away, or that you don't have any special responsibility for, it just means that when you choose to intervene in such cases, you are "going above and beyond" what ethics requires and performing a supererogatory act. At least that is what I believe.

 

that would seem to make sense but that's not how it plays out with humans.

what dominates doesn't necessarily equate to 'quality'. aggression doesn't necessarily equate to equality. for instance, the most aggressive or dominant person in africa may stir up hatred to scapegoat person/s for some calamity occuring in their village believing it is due to the victims being demon possessed etc and burning them alive. for instance, christians slaughtered, scapegoated and demonized others out of fear. as you can see, they won the natural selection lottery and according to simplistic 'surivival of the fittest' which can include manipulation, lies/deception, ignorance, corruption and aggression/might is right, they are the fittest. this is why nature is both reprehensible as well a ignorant and a vehicle we are also subject to while striving for what is best.