The purpose of this post is to showcase one of the motivations that led to me starting Math Mania and a project during my time in the Non-Trivial fellowship.
This post is centered on Peter Singer’s drowning child experiment in which a scenario is imagined as such: you are walking across a park, and you see a child drowning and splashing in a pond. Of course, it is your moral obligation to go and save their life if it is easy for you to do so.
But what if you are wearing nice clothes and shoes which would get ruined if you tried saving the child? Do you no longer have a moral obligation to save a life? Most would say you still do and that it would in fact be quite awful if you weren’t to save the life of the child.
But what if there are others walking past the child just like you are? Do you still have an obligation to save the child? The overwhelming majority of people would still consider anyone to have a moral obligation to save the child.
But what if you were riding a bike past a child, and you were in an area with a high bike theft crime rate? You don’t really care about your bike and could replace it easily, but it will probably get stolen, and you would have to walk home. Most people would still say you have a moral obligation to save the child.
But what if you already saved a child in a similar situation last week? Do you still have an obligation to save a child now? The morally sound response is still that you have an obligation; the fact that you sacrificed a cheap pair of sandals last week doesn’t mean it is morally okay for you to let a child drown in front of your eyes.
But you know that helping this child won’t contribute much to the greater cause of water safety. In the United States, drowning is the second leading cause of unintentional injury/death but saving the child won’t really change that fact. Still, helping the child is a moral obligation, right?
But what about geography? What if the only difference between the original situation and this one is that the child is very far away, and you would sacrifice just as much as in the original situation (not a great cost) and would not be putting yourself in any danger? It would make total sense for one to still have a moral obligation to save the child. Merely the child’s physical position changed, nothing else.
Now for the last hypothetical, consider a situation not related to the drowning experiment. Is it a moral obligation to make a small donation (the cost of nice clothes or nice shoes or a bike) to an overseas aid agency within the next few days (and even if you have previously done so), if you know it could save a life?
This experiment simply says you do have an obligation to donate to such an effective charity if you said yes to most, if not all, of the child drowning questions. There do exist charities that are focused on saving lives as cost-effectively as possible. More can be found at https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/cause-funds/save-lives-fund/.
