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- [00:02]
A
This is Philosophy Bites with me, David.
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B
Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.
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A
Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com. a thought experiment involving a drowning child is one of the most famous in moral philosophy and arguably the most influential. A book has just been written about it. I should know as I wrote it here. Nigel questions me about the origins and significance of and, and the problems with the so called shallow pond.
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B
David Edmonds, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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A
Thank you for inviting me.
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B
The topic we're going to talk about today is the shallow pond, the thought experiment of the shallow pond. Could you just outline what that is?
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A
You're to imagine that you are on your way to work. You're wearing a nice suit and very expensive shoes and you walk past a pond where you see a small child struggling. You look around to see where the parents are, where the guardian is. There's nobody there. You're about to wade in to save this child when you suddenly think about your extremely expensive shoes and you think, shoes or child. That's the shallow pond thought experiment.
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B
Does anybody seriously think shoes or child in that situation?
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A
Well, that's the point. It's a rhetorical question. Nobody's supposed to think, oh, I should worry about my shoes, which I haven't got time to take off and let the child die. And the point is that the person who comes up with this thought experiment says that we are in a shallow pond thought experiment every day of our lives, every day, you and I, privileged people in the west with disposable income are effectively walking past a shallow pond and we could be saving lives.
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B
So that person is Peter Singer, the, the philosopher Peter Singer, who's been a guest on Philosophy Bites several times. Why does he think we're walking past children drowning? Because we're not. Literally.
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A
So he comes up with this thought experiment in 1971. It's the time of the war of liberation in Bangladesh. So East Pakistan, what we now call Bangladesh, is breaking up from West Pakistan. There's a terrible civil war. Millions of people are flooding across the border from Bangladesh to India and they're emaciated, they're diseased, and India can't cope. They haven't got the money to cope. And Peter Singer asks us, us people in the west, to what extent are we responsible for helping out these people on the other side of the globe? And he compares our obligations with the man walking past the drowning child in the shallow pond.
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B
There are some fairly obvious disanalogies in the sense that in the thought experiment there's nobody else around. And obviously in the world, there are quite a few other people around, some of whom are much nearer than we are and probably have a better sense of what it would take to help people. Why is it analogous to the pond example? Because it does seem to be different?
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A
Well, there are lots of differences that he identifies in that original article, which is called Famine, Affluence and Morality. You've spotted a couple of them. He says, the person in the shallow pond is right in front of us. The person in India is thousands of miles away. And he says, well, distance itself can't be morally relevant. It might be relevant logistically and might be relevant psychologically, but morally it can't make any difference if somebody is drowning on the other side of the world, as opposed to drowning in front of us if we could actually save them. Another disanalogy is that we can see the person in front of us, but we can't see the person on the other side of the world. We have an idea of the identity of this person near to us. We don't have any idea of a person's name on the other side of the world. We don't know anything about them. Again, he says, how can that be relevant? A life is a life. If you can save a life in India, what difference does it make if you don't know the name of that person or you don't know what that person looks like? Again, that seems completely compelling to me. It's also, of course, true that lots of other people could help in the refugee situation, whereas in the shallow pond they can't. And you could imagine walking past a shallow pond and there being 10 people around the shallow pond and nine of them are just doing nothing. That doesn't give you the excuse to do nothing. If there's a person drowning and you can help, you should feel an obligation to help. That's Singer's point.
- [04:13]
B
But he's assuming a kind of egalitarian approach where everybody counts equally in the world, and that's not actually that widely held as a view across the world. Many people have a strong affinity for those in their village, their county, their country. That's much stronger than their affiliation with people literally on the other side of the world.
- [04:35]
A
Yeah, that's absolutely right. He does have a totally impartial view about the value of life, which is not how 99.9999% of the population in the world think. We all think our parents are more important than other people's parents. Our children are more important than other people's children. If we've got the choice between saving our children and saving somebody else's children, it's clear what we're going to do. And Singer thinks that that is totally understandable. We're creatures who are built that way. But there is something irrational about it, that the value of life is equal wherever it is. And to the extent that we can try and overcome those irrational thoughts, we should overcome them, don't you think?
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B
There's something almost religious about this message that we're all equal. We have to be concerned with the people who are suffering in other parts of the world just as much as next door to us. It's like Christ's teaching.
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A
Well, in that sense, he won't be too alien from lots of people. People are used to hearing religious messages. I don't think he's a religious figure in the sense that he doesn't have disciples and he doesn't seek disciples. He also thinks that he himself is a deeply flawed character because he thinks that he should be doing much more than he actually does. He gives between a third and a half of his salary away. But every time he has a nice bottle of wine, he thinks that that money he spends on this nice bottle of wine could be better spent giving it to a charity that operates in the developing world. That life. It's interesting that although he is a utilitarian, in other words, he believes that we should act so as to achieve the best consequences. The most happiness in the world, the least suffering in the world. There's no mention of utilitarianism in famine, affluence and morality. It never says you should maximize happiness. The basic principle is if we could prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything morally significant, then we should do that. Clearly, preventing somebody from dying in a shallow pond is preventing something bad from happening. Clearly our shoes or our suit are of no more significance. And he thinks that that principle, which is not a utilitarian principle, can be extrapolated to our lives generally, and that we could generally be giving a lot more than we do at no sacrifice to ourselves to do a lot of good in the developing world.
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B
And to be fair to Peter Singer, the last time I interviewed him, he just won a million dollars in the Begruen Prize and had just given it all away.
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A
Yes, he's quite critical of himself, but he's difficult to criticize from the outside because he does more than the rest of us. So by his own lights he falls short. But by the lights of everybody else, he's a shining Beacon, from what you've.
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B
Been saying about him falling short of ideals. If you take this argument as far as it could go, given how many millions of people there are in extreme poverty, given how many millions of people could benefit from really basic medical provisions and their lives be transformed by that, it seems if you follow that argument all the way, you wouldn't really live as most Westerners live. You live in extreme poverty yourself and feel very happy that the money that you would have had for yourself is now being used by hundreds of others to lead worthwhile lives that they wouldn't otherwise have lived. But that's incredibly demanding. You've got to give up the opera, you've got to give up international travel, you've got to give up your car. Perhaps you can't have central heating in the winter.
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A
So this is the demandingness. Objection. The Shallow pond thought experiment eventually inspired this movement called the Effective Altruism Movement. It took four decades, but now it's a worldwide movement. And the Effective Altruism movement encourages people to give 10% of their salary or away for the kind of causes we've been talking about, charities that are helping those in the developing world who are in abject poverty and in danger of disease and so on. The effect of altruists picked up on something that the Shallow Pond doesn't identify, which is it matters not just if you give money away, but who you give it to. Imagine there are two charities. Charity A, Charity B. Charity A can save a life for every £5,000. Charity B can save a life, but it needs £500,000. Suppose you've got one person who's got £495,000. They are not doing as much good by giving it to Charity B as somebody else is by giving £5,000, only £5,000 to charity A.
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B
So how are we supposed to know which charities are like the A charity and which are like the B?
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So a whole bunch of organisations have sprung up now which analyze these, and it's very difficult to work out, because you can imagine giving money to a malaria charity that buys bed nets for people, which are one of these popular charities amongst these organizations, because they're very cheap and they're very effective. But even so, when you give money to these charities, there might be some people who have bed nets, but actually we're never going to get malaria in any case. Or there might be other people you give their bed nets to and they use it for fishing, or you might give other people bed nets and there's a hole in it and so on. So you have to include all these things in your calculation. You look at all the figures and you work out that you can save a life with X amount of money. But to get back to your demandingness question earlier. So for Singer, who is a utilitarian, this is a real problem. You have to give away everything down to the moment that your life is the same as somebody's life on the other side of the world. You'd have to end up, if not in extreme poverty, you have to give up all the luxuries in life. But that does seem to be asking a lot from people. There's this interesting thought experiment which I like. This comes from a philosopher called Theron Palmer, who's been on Philosophy Bites. You imagine that there is a green button. If you don't press it every five seconds, somebody will die. And the question is, what are your obligations? Now, if you're Peter Singer, you think your obligation is just to stay by that green button all your life. Just press, press, press, press, press, press. That is your entire life. But looks at life as a whole. It just seems to be asking too much to have somebody tied to the green button for their entire life. And when you look at life as a whole, the effective altruists say, well, obviously we have obligations to other people, to distant strangers, but our obligations can't be overriding. They can't tie us to that green button. And that's why they think, well, 10%. That's in line with a traditional tithe that people used to give in religious traditions. That's a very demanding number, but it's not totally demanding. It's much more than most of us do. But it's not demanding that we stick to that green button for our whole lives.
- [10:57]
B
But what does it mean for other kinds of charitable giving? For instance, we're both writers, probably. We feel quite good that some people decide to leave money to help down on their luck. Writers with grants and so on. There's always the possibility of that sort of safety net. But authors tend to be reasonably comfortable in the uk. They're not like they're on the breadline necessarily. They're not going to be in a comparable situation to somebody in sub Saharan Africa who hasn't eaten for three or four days.
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A
So they're very purist about this. And if the choice is between giving to a scholarship for philosophy students or an art gallery or an educational establishment, or giving it to an international charity, they're very clear that the money should go to that international development charity. I think they're very crude about some of these calculations because very important discoveries come out of education. For example, a cure for cancer might come out of one of the top universities. How the hell do you calculate that compared to giving your money to save the children? But their view is that if there's somebody dying and you've got a choice between that and a new lick of paint for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, it's clear where the money should go.
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B
There's a different line of argument that is a more empirical one that's based just on how charities distribute money and what happens to that money. It's particularly associated with the Nobel Prize winner, Angus Deaton. This is the argument that quite often, maybe nearly always, when there's an influx of funds into a poor area, it creates sub economies, patterns of behavior, which are actually detrimental to that area in the long run.
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A
So I think this is the best argument against the shallow pond analogy, and I take it very seriously in shallow pond terms. What Angus Deaton is suggesting is, is that by saving somebody in the shallow pond, you're encouraging other people to jump into the shallow pond, or you might be encouraging other people to push strangers into the shallow pond. And you can see how that works, because if an NGO takes over a big chunk of a developing country's economy, then it breaks the relationship between the citizen and that country's government. They feel no obligation to get things right, because the things that really matter are being taken care of by the charity. And so it leads to all sorts of anomalies, distortions, corruption. The government can now use the money that it has to buy arms to fight wars and so on and so forth. And there's lots of evidence that Angus Deaton is right, that some of the countries that get the least amount of aid per capita, like India and China, have done very well, whereas some of the countries that get the most amount of charity per capita have continued to do very badly, decade after decade after decade. So I do take that criticism very seriously. To take it to its extreme, you have to argue that there are no effective charities out there that you can identify that operate on a smaller scale that won't distort the national economy. That will do a great deal of good without having these very bad negative side effects. You have to argue that those charities either don't exist or can't be identified. And I just think that's too extreme.
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B
So I don't think we've accurately characterised just how impersonal a strict utilitarian would have to be. I did actually Raise this issue with Peter Singer once in a public debate, using his thought experiment. If his shoes were valuable enough, he actually should walk past the child, sell his clean, untouched, unsullied shoes and save two children, not the one in the shallow pond. And that seems callous. It's almost as if his own thought experiment refutes what it's supposed to prove.
- [14:45]
A
Singer bites every bullet. And if it was really the case that his shoes were so valuable that he could walk past the pond, ignore the child in the drowning pond, sell his shoes and save two lives or three lives or five lives, then Singer thinks that's what you should do. I think this example, your hypothetical example, is an example of how thought experiments mislead us because the setup is so weird. So you're asking us to believe that this guy has only thought just now about selling his very expensive shoes. Why hasn't he sold his expensive shoes already? If he was really considering saving lives, why is he still wearing these expensive shoes? Another assumption that you have to build into that is that you have to know with certainty that the money that you would raise by selling the shoes would actually save two lives. Now, if you accept all those assumptions, if you accept that he is really going to sell those shoes, which would really be ruined in the pond, and that two people really would be saved on the other side of the world, if we could absolutely be certain of that, then that thought experiment doesn't seem so implausible after all.
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B
I disagree completely because I think it's implausible. If you've got a humane instinct, which is no matter how expensive your shoes, you're going to save a child. A child's life is not got a price on it, whereas he's putting a price on it.
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A
It's very good that we have the instincts to save people in front of us. We know if there's somebody drowning in front of us and it's a shallow pond, we know we can step into the shallow pond and save that person. Our intuitions are built for normal cases. If we could be sure that money that we give to charity will save X number of lives in place of the life in front of us, then it seems like it might be your moral empathy which is lacking, rather than the person who really thinks about doing the most good, who really thinks that there are two lives as opposed to just one that could be saved.
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B
Is it fair to characterise these people as data driven, which is slightly strange when you think about telling people how they should live? Your life should be data driven.
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A
It's absolutely fair to characterise them that way. They're running their lives in effect, maybe not directly, but indirectly by spreadsheet. There's a whole bunch of figures they're trying to work out, not just in terms of where they put their money, but something we haven't touched on, how they spend their time. So there's a very controversial aspect of the movement which is called Earn to Give, which proposes that rather than go and work in a secondhand clothing shop for Oxfam, you should actually go and work for a hedge fund, make as much money as you can and give away almost all that money to charity. And you're doing much more good than, than the person who works for Oxfam. Again, it's a very data driven approach.
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B
Given that the motivation of Peter Singer and also of the effective altruism movement is a really good motivation. We want to help other people. They're saying other people matter. Why do they get so much flak?
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A
I'm really intrigued by this question. They seem to be loathed by all sorts of people, partly because of the point you've been pressing about how clinical and rational and nerdy they seem. Partly I think because they do, at least in this regard, more good than most of us. They're often not particularly well paid and yet they're giving 10% of their salary away, if not more. And that reflects rather badly on us and I think we resent that. It's partly that they've got links with organisations on the west coast of the us, Silicon Valley companies that people feel hostile towards. And it's a particular way of thinking, the way those people who run those techno companies thing in a very empirical, statistical way. And that seems very alien to us. So I think it's a whole combination of reasons. But I'm much more sympathetic to them than most people. I mean, I don't think necessarily they're better than other humans in other domains. I don't think necessarily they're more faithful to their partners than other people, or I don't think necessarily they more honest than other people. But I think in this one regard they're doing good and I think we should applaud them for that.
- [18:52]
B
David Edmonds, thank you very much.
- [18:54]
A
Thanks, Nigel. I've enjoyed it. For more philosophy bites, go to www.philosophybytes.com. you can also find details there of Philosophy Bytes books and how to support us.