What is Wrong with Peter Singer's Thought Experiment

  A philosophical thought experiment is supposed to clarify a philosophical problem. Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment about the difference, or lack of difference, between saving a nearby life versus saving a far away life, does appear to clarify, but in fact it conceals an illegitimate move. The assumption that morality applies universally leads to a problem: are we, as individuals, morally responsible for the whole world?  This would imply an impossible burden on each human being.  Singer’s logic is relentless and seems irrefutable.  But he makes an illegitimate move when he goes from a moral ought to an ethical ought.  Singer, like most modern and ancient philosophers, (with some prominent exceptions, i.e. PF Strawson and Stephen Darwall) , believes that there is no real difference between morality and ethics. 

  As a preliminary I’d like to thank Professor Singer for doing philosophy a service in putting moral philosophy in such stark and simplistic terms, terms which have led to the comments sections of you-tube videos being turned off due to reactive expressions of rage, and to an entirely new philosophical movement dedicated to maximizing charitable good.

Peter Singer is a philosophy rock star.  You can obtain a free copy of his book “The Life You Can Save” on the internet, where you will find endorsements from other famous people, and if you prefer, you can download an audible copy, where each chapter is read aloud by a Hollywood star. He is easily the most famous philosopher alive today.

 

I thank Professor Singer for providing such a clear example of what is wrong with contemporary moral philosophy, not because he encourages saving the lives of children over our indulging in luxuries, something with which I have sympathy for.  No, what is wrong with Singer’s argument demonstrates what is wrong with adopting Utilitarianism as a universal ethical system. It is that by adopting Utilitarianism, a theory of ethics, as a sole guide for conduct, you deprive yourself of the ability to distinguish moral rules from ethical ideals, which leads to, in Singer’s own words:

“a very demanding—some might even say impossible—standard of ethical behavior. I’ll suggest that it may not be possible to consider ourselves to be living a morally good life unless we give a great deal more than most of us would think is realistic to expect human beings to give.”

 

There’s something wrong with any ethical or moral system that demands or even seems to demand the impossible from humans.  The point of morality is to avoid harm and for ethical ideals to encourage good and discourage bad. Neither can work if every individual is overwhelmed by Utilitarian demands to maximize the general welfare.

So, what is Singer’s thought experiment?

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, 

children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about 

knee-deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and the 

hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing 

about in the pond. As you get closer, you see that it is a very 

young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable 

to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the 

parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The 

child is unable to keep her head above the water for more 

than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and 

pull her out, she 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. By the 

time you hand the child over to someone responsible for 

                           her, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work.  What should you do?

It seems pretty obvious what we should do in this case.  So far, so good.  But here comes the kicker, because Singer extrapolates from this example, without explicitly saying so, a Utilitarian scenario that involves maximizing the good of the entire planet:

Think about something like that happening hundreds of times every day. Some children die because they don’t have enough to eat. More die from measles, malaria and diarrhea - conditions that either don’t exist in developed nations or, if they do, are almost never fatal. The children are vulnerable to these diseases because they have no safe drinking water or no sanitation, and because when they do fall ill, their parents can’t afford any medical treatment or may not even be aware that treatment is needed.

Now think about your own situation. By donating a relatively 

small amount of money, you could save a child’s life. Maybe it would take more than the amount needed to buy a pair of shoes, but we all spend money on things we don’t really need, whether on drinks, meals out, clothing, movies, concerts, vacations, new cars, or house renovations. Is it possible that by choosing to spend your money on such things rather than contributing to an effective charity, you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved?

This is where Singer’s thought experiment goes astray.  He starts out with an example of saving a child in one’s community and then extrapolates to the entire globe. By doing this he ignores the difference in our moral obligation between what we do in our own community and what we do globally.  Here’s the difference: as a responsible adult I am obligated to save the life of a child if I see she’s drowning and I can help without risking my own life; but I am not obligated to save the lives of children in other countries; helping avoid imminent harm in my own community is an obligation, helping to avoid imminent harm in another country, when I don’t live there, is an ideal and not an obligation.  

We can look at this difference in terms of degree of choice.  The more something is an obligation the less it is a choice.  I can choose not to help a nearby drowning child, but I will be liable to be punished and shunned, as well as to suffer from profound guilt, especially if the child ends up drowning, so it is less of a choice and more of an obligation.  But helping children live better lives in another country is a choice by necessity!  I can be criticized for not being charitable, but I’m not morally obligated.  There are 8.2 billion people in the world.  I can only help a very small fraction at most.  Moral rules are about how I can avoid causing harm to others, or stop others from causing harm.  This does not apply to donating to charities. We donate to charities because we are following ideals of benevolence. But, I save a child from drowning because as a responsible adult I am morally obligated.  

Singer’s mistake, and it is common to many contemporary and ancient philosophers, is to conflate ethics and morality.  Ethical theory, in general, could benefit from  Philosopher Bernard Gert’s differentiation between moral rules and ideals.(Gert, Common Morality)  Moral rules are rules that apply universally and that strictly forbid certain harmful behaviours and require other behaviours that help to prevent harms.  Ethical ideals are ideals that guide our behaviour but are more in the line of suggestions that encourage or discourage types of behaviour.  As humans we are always already living in normative systems, where we divide potential behaviour into behaviours that are permitted, required, prohibited, encouraged, or discouraged. Obligations concern required or prohibited behaviours. Ideals concern encouraged or discouraged behaviours.  We experience moral rules as obligations, not choices.  We experience ethical ideals as choices, not obligations.

Ethics and morality are distinct because they reflect two fundamental aspects of our nature:  approach and avoidance.  Ethics is about approach - understanding what are good things to do and how to live a good life.  These are choices we make to better our life or to help others improve their life.  There is no general agreement about how to live a good life, there is instead general disagreement.  We can choose whether or not to follow ethical ideals and to what extent we will do it.  We can choose to eschew all luxuries and donate all our extra money to charities that help prevent starvation.  If we don’t choose to do this, we might merit criticism, but no one will say that we merit punishment.

Morality is about avoidance - how to avoid imminent evils.  In human society avoiding evils takes precedence over doing good, because of the greater dangers involved in imminent harm.  Moral rules apply to everyone who is a morally responsible competent adult.  If anyone violates these rules they will incur blame, and everyone would agree that such violations could merit punishment. In general there is much more agreement about the content of moral rules than about the content of ethical ideals or principles.  Not everyone believes in Utilitarianism or Christianity, but everyone agrees that murder is wrong.

As Gert outlines, moral rules are publicly known rules that apply to everyone.  Moral rules forbid concrete harms such as stealing, deceiving physical intimidation, intentional injury, maiming, killing, as well as rules that require us to keep our promises, and obey the law. Moral rules are inescapable, whereas other types of rules are not.  Living in society, we can’t decide that, if it’s in our interest, we can simply violate a moral rule, without our being blamed, punished, and, or, possibly ostracized for doing so. 

Peter Singer is not the only philosopher to ignore this distinction.  Even John Rawls, in his theory of Justice side steps the importance of punishment for morality.  As Gert points out, in Morality, It's Nature and Justification, if we don’t understand that punishment is fundamental to moral systems, we lack a way of differentiating moral rules from other kinds of rules, such as rules of etiquette, religious rules about purity and worship, and cultural rules.  Only moral rules apply universally, are publicly known, and if violated, most people would agree that the violator merits punishment.

Ethics is the broader field of inquiry, which includes Morality as one part. Ethics is more abstract, because it concerns ideals, whereas morality is more concrete because it concerns bad outcomes in our community that we always want to avoid. Morality is primary, because society cannot exist without it.  Ethics, which is driven more by philosophical ideals, has a much wider scope, but also a corresponding greater degree of diversity and controversy, making it much less appropriate for compulsion, but still necessary for social progress.

Singer’s thought experiment is disingenuous because it borrows the force of obligation from a moral example in order to convince us to more strictly follow an ethical ideal. Since there are billions of people living on earth, it cannot be obligatory to save all of their lives.  Obviously saving children’s lives is a good thing, but it’s not a moral requirement for each of us to save everyone on earth.  Moral systems and legal systems have boundaries for a good reason - because their rules are unworkable if they include both those inside our country as well as those outside.  This, of course, is not true of international relations, but then the actors are governments and other institutions rather than individuals.

But Singer’s thought experiment does raise the issue of universality.  If moral rules are universal, why shouldn’t we be morally responsible for starving children in other countries?  If we try to understand the evolution of morality we can see that it is an evolution of scale.  The first moral systems were small groups of foragers. Everybody knew each other on sight. Only later in history, when networks of towns and cities came into existence, do we have legal systems and laws that cover much larger populations. Later still, we have the development of the modern sovereign state and most recently global institutions that deal with international conflicts, such as the United Nations,as well as charitable institutions such as Unicef and Oxfam that help in the case of famine and natural disasters. Consider the development of international agreements and institutions that are constructed to help prevent and mitigate global warming in that way too. As problems and solutions become larger, involving institutions and governments, the ethical aspect becomes less a matter of individual obligation.  Staying with the ethical/moral division we ought to see these institutions as ethical rather than moral, in part, because they operate on an international rather than local scale. 

Taking in refugees is another area of controversy.  Since the large-scale horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, many, but not all nations have agreed to take in a certain proportion of refugees from war and climate disasters - for instance,some island nations are going to disappear within the next 50  years because of sea-level rise;  many refugees flee their country because of war, famine, or escalating organized crime. These are all largely problems that individual effort is incapable of solving, so individuals are not morally responsible in the same way as they would be if their own actions could, in fact, prevent or solve it. Better to consider the acceptance of refugees into our country as an ethical choice, rather than a moral obligation.   

We can’t make it obligatory that people or countries do something about their contribution to global warming. It has to be a matter of choice, and that is what partly makes it an ethical rather than a moral issue.  We’re not going to punish politicians for denying global warming and cozying up to fossil fuel companies, and they know it.  In contrast, starting a war in order to  gain territory, as Putin and Hitler did, is considered morally wrong. We punish Putin by sanctioning him and his cronies, and by arming and supporting Ukraine.  

If ethical issues are largely a matter of choice, and moral issues a matter of obligation, we shouldn’t be using the heavier weight of a moral situation to model our approach to an ethical situation.  Doing something about global warming and starving children in Sudan are choices we can make.  As individuals we are not morally responsible for either, nor can we solve these problems on an individual scale.  But I can save a child from drowning if I catch her in time, so I am morally responsible if I ignore her cries and do nothing.