BY JOHN NASH
On 29th April, Nanny Beeb’s World Service broadcast a ten-minute audio about Peter Singer and his famous Drowning Child thought experiment – considered one of the most influential ideas in modern philosophy, no less.
Imagine you are walking to work past a shallow pond and see a small child flailing, unable to keep its head above water. You can easily jump in and save the child without endangering your own life, but you are wearing expensive new shoes that will be ruined if you save the child. Do you ruin your shoes to save the child?
Almost everyone agrees that the answer is yes: a child’s life obviously outweighs the cost of a pair of shoes. From there, Singer argues, consider children dying of starvation in Bangladesh (his original motivation). You can quite easily send a sum of money – perhaps less than the cost of a pair of modern shoes – to save many of those dying children. He argues it is the same moral obligation as saving the drowning child: you can help, so, morally, you must. Despite the increased distance, you must therefore fork out some cash if you can easily afford it. The thought experiment, published in 1972, inspired the Effective Altruism movement, which has led donors to commit billions of dollars to charities.
Singer is often described as an idealist in his dreams of a vastly better, more altruistic world, but a realist in his methods that claim to be cold logic, empirical evidence, and consequence-based thinking. Ultimately, philosophers describe him as a Practical Utilitarian, a position that “balances striving for an ideal future with realistically assessing the world as it is”. Balanced, my foot.
Singer’s book, Animal Liberation, originally aimed at farm animal welfare, is widely blamed for saddling the world with the pseudo-Quakerist folly of the Animal Rights Movement. The book started well enough with concern for farm animal welfare, but then went mad and turned into a total brain fart that transformed a laudable human gift into a right owned by anything with a pulse. In reality, Singer did not endear himself to the world’s people with disabilities when he further argued that the life of a competent chimpanzee or other intelligent sentient animal can be more valuable than that of a “less sentient” newborn or profoundly disabled human infant. He really fell off the twig when he coined the term “speciesism” to describe the prejudice of favouring human interests over those of other sentient beings, arguing that being human is not a sufficient reason to have a higher moral status.
His plugs must have fallen out. Unable to tell the difference between a chimpanzee and a human, he apparently forgot that humans have used animals for food, clothing, shelter and tools for as long as we have been human, making predation and use perfectly normal and necessary human behaviour. It also leaves him oblivious to the fact that, without using animals as a resource, there would be no human civilisation to support loopy philosophers in their comfy armchairs. Sweet Fanny Adams – no land for universities, no building materials, no paper for books, no leather or stuffing for armchairs, and no supportive stipends, all of which cost many animal lives at the start of the supply chain.
Singer’s views faced severe criticism (not ’arf, vicar) and widespread protests, particularly from disability rights activists, who suspect that his philosophy promotes eugenics and undermines the inherent dignity and human rights of wobbly people. His attitude (no doubt adjusted by a few Zimmer frame bruises and wheelchair tyre marks) has since mellowed, and he has broadened his views over time to accept that “there are many worthwhile lives” – a treacly Zarmeresque bromide if ever you heard one, betraying in its pithy abstraction a total absence of the fundamental virtue of humanity. This abstract “critical thinking” of the modern far left is, paradoxically, a lack of the essential critical thinking necessary for human survival and civilisation.
And so, back to his famous Drowning Child thought experiment and the moral necessity to save people on the other side of the world. Far from being one of the most influential ideas in modern philosophy, it is a kind but soggy appeal to human sentiment, aimed at comfortable civilian readers. There are screeds of arguments for and against online.
You see, human civilisation is the human cave, designed to nurture us humans, safe from the violence and misfortune of the natural world outside. The outside world is where hunters, farmers and all primary industries operate, often in uncivilised ways, to compete with nature for resources necessary to maintain human civilisation. It is not a world well understood by civilians – it’s an objective world where predation and killing things are the normal state of affairs. That’s how we obtain all the animal, vegetable and mineral resources we need.
Inside our civilisation, the first rule for civilians is “Sharing and fair exchange without violence”. In plan, civilisation looks like a capital letter “C”, with a doorway at the right. Resources arrive at the doorway, supplied by the right-hand side and distributed by the left, revealing the sharing (left) and fair exchange (right) subtleties and demands of both political and economic processes. The right, concerned with obtaining and ownership, seeks fair exchange for resources, while the left, concerned with equality and nurture, seeks equal distribution of resources. The left is Peter Singer’s congregation – just about as far from the real outside world as you can get, deep inside the comfortable, well-protected left of the cave, where consumption level allows theorists the luxury of contemplating a world of amorphous equality. He might change his mind if he found a couple of dozen impoverished Bangladeshi immigrants rehoused in his study, cooking someone’s sentient pet cat on a fire of philosophy books.
Of course, you must save a child from drowning in front of you if you can, but giving your hard-earned money away in the hope that it will help is more about you and your civilised sensibilities than reality. You don’t have to give your money away – that is a matter of choice, your gift. It’s especially relevant if you are involved in primary industries, because you are already supplying civilisation with the things it needs to survive. Besides, you already pay taxes.
The reality is that you can’t help everyone in the world. The world is fundamentally unequal and unfair, largely because fairness is a well-fed indoor human concept rather than an outside law of reality. Deep disparities in wealth, health and opportunity exist, driven by circumstance – luck, birth, geography, DNA and culture.
The need for help is also unlimited, because even needs, once fulfilled, soon turn unseen into wants – look at the UK welfare bill. Of course, appeals to altruism flush murmurations of well-fed, safe, left-side civilians out of the woodwork to vote in droves. Look at that silly megaboobie hypno-twerp leading the red Green Party – it’s a lovely idea that the UK should help and welcome all boat people as long-lost kin, but a simple fag-packet examination of reality reveals that there are at least four billion people in the world whose lives would be vastly improved tenfold simply by landing in Blighty. Given half a chance, their numbers would form a solid rubber pontoon bridge across the Channel.
So, by all means, Dear Reader, give your money to charity if you wish – it’s your money, and choice, while we still have it, is the most important thing. Don’t be concerned that helping the unknown millions (and the hordes of greedy parasites between you and them) is any kind of moral imperative. Don’t be fooled by the Impact Calculator from Peter Singer’s organisation, The Life You Can Save, which allows you to input a specific donation amount to see exactly what “saving a life” or improving one looks like “in practice” – he is used to making monkeys out of humans.
John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa. John is the co-author of Dear Townies with the Editor.