Author: zmwu

This particular post is brought to you per the request of Varun, who is interested in learning about the Australian philosopher Toby Ord. While Ord’s more recent works center around sweeping questions of the biggest existential threats to the human race, and our role in guaranteeing that mankind survives to see another generation, it’s his earlier work that Varun is most intrigued by. Specifically, Ord is a founding member of the Effective Altruism movement, which can be more accurately described as a school of thought which outlines a clear moral obligation to minimize suffering.

This week, we will focus on the work of Peter Singer, a Princeton bioethics professor and a seminal champion of charitable giving. Singer’s work influenced and arguably forms the ideological foundations for Effective Altruism. My goal in these blog posts is to provide a condensed and instructive summary of a given work or theory while adding my own reflection and commentary along the way. 

Let’s philosophize!

Singer’s case for Effective Altruism is argued most comprehensively in The Life You Can Save (TLYCS), a text in which he espouses a rather simple view: citizens of affluent, developed nations have a pressing moral obligation to act against poverty in less affluent and developed countries. 

His basic syllogism is as follows: 

1. Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.
2. If it is in your power to prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong (immoral) not to do so.
3. By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death abroad without sacrificing anything nearly as important. 
4. Ergo, if you do not donate, you are doing something wrong (immoral).

Relatively simple, right? After all, we can all round up our McDonald’s order a few cents to donate to sick children. We can give some of our spare change to the Salvation Army bellringers outside Wal-Mart. It doesn’t seem like a decision with any philosophical implications. Yet, there are serious, valuable questions that we can ask ourselves to prod at the reasons why we might characterize these sorts of actions as moral. For instance, why do we have a moral obligation to give money that we’ve earnt? Or, more broadly speaking, why is declining to give actively immoral? 

Singer provides some incisive answers. Let’s explore a couple of central tenets that undergird Singer’s impassioned defense of giving. Some are more explicit in TLYCS, others more implied.

T1: There is no morally relevant distinction between acts and omissions.

Singer is of the belief that whether you actively perform an action or elect NOT to perform an action, both can generate moral culpability. Here, an example might help. A mother who intentionally starves their infant child and one who intentionally poisons theirs would be held equally morally culpable. In Singer’s view, starvation is no less objectionable simply because it is an omission of an action (feeding the child). 

Ergo, in Singer’s case of the global poor, failing to help people in need of assistance is the same as doing harm unto them. 

T2: The enormous, “earnt” affluence of the developed world is largely the product of a morally arbitrary “lottery of birth.”

Singer argues, the conditions of the place where you are born control your capacity to accumulate lots of wealth. Middle-class people in developed nations are advantaged by being born into good social and economic circumstances. In other places without this social capital (i.e. institutions, infrastructure, safety), no matter how hard you work, you will not be able to accumulate the same level of wealth. In other words, Warren Buffet’s mastery of selecting profitable stocks doesn’t do him any good in the sweatshops of Bangladesh. 

Ergo, the wealthiest of the wealthy do bear some moral responsibilities to the less fortunate. Having the right to spend your money on a new leather jacket or iPhone for yourself does not speak to the question of morality. Ergo, to choose to spend money on excess and additional pleasures, rather than use that money to save human lives, can still be considered immoral.

T3: Revisit parts 2-4 of the syllogism outlined above. Our moral responsibility is to give, as long as we aren’t giving up something nearly as important as saving a kid in Senegal, for instance. But, taking this premise to its logical conclusion, this calls on us to give and give and give to the point where if we give a penny more, we’ll be sacrificing something nearly as important as the Senegalese child’s life. When we extrapolate Singer’s conclusion to its fullest extent, it becomes less tame and borders on the extreme. 

However, it’s well worth noting that in practice, Singer is not advocating for this. To him, it is precisely because so few people give substantially that the need for so much more to be given is so great. A modest contribution from everyone who has the luxury to live comfortably is sufficient to lift most people out of extreme poverty. 

Ergo, it’s a comparison. Either a lot of people must give a little or a few people must give a lot. Again, he emphasizes here the relative easiness with which the wealthiest people on the planet could eradicate global poverty. 

Taken together, this brings us to Singer’s main frustration — the diffusion of responsibility. In TLYCS, Singer spends a lot of time and pages indicating that we are uniquely positioned to end global poverty. That in this particular moment, it is eminently possible to achieve sustainable development around the world. Yet, the world’s 26 richest people still have more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. 

Are you convinced? What do you make of Singer’s conclusion? Is it really true that we, middle-class Americans in affluent Naperville, have any moral responsibility to end suffering around the world? 

I’m not so sure. 

Next time, we will refute Peter Singer and identify four philosophical objections to him, and the utilitarian framework for morality that he represents. 

In 2008, I was 42 months old, stood 42 inches tall, and weighed in at 42 pounds. I enjoyed spending my time in front of the TV screen engrossed in the Kratt brothers’ animated escapades and running around playing make-believe with my neighbors Lucas and Garen.

I was, in most senses of the word, a very normal 3-and-a-half-year-old kid.

With one small exception.

In 2008, I was selectively mute, which meant I was unable to speak to certain people or within certain social settings. It meant avoiding eye contact, never asking for help, and steering well clear from any interaction with my preschool teachers and classmates.

There is perhaps no permutation of any four words in the English language more ruinous to a 4 year old with selective mutism than “may I be excused.” I learned this from my repeated failure in being excused from the lunch table at the Goddard School due to my incapacity to speak up to be excused.

My earliest memory of reading was situated within this quiet and lonely state of being. At some point — at one of the school’s Scholastic Book Fairs, I think — I was gifted a book by the principal at Goddard. It was entitled “I Grew Up To Be President.” The book tells the stories of the 44 men that inhabited the White House, beginning in their early childhoods.

I devoured this book. At home, every night before my head hit the pillow, I had to flip to a random President and read their biography. At school, when my mom or my grandpa came to pick me up in the afternoon, they’d always find me in the same place. While the other kids were playing with Lincoln Logs, I was on Abe Lincoln’s page in my book, pacing back and forth at the back of the classroom, with this book open in one hand and my puffy beige coat being dragged along the vinyl floor tiles in the other.

I knew everything there was for a 4 year old to know about the American presidency. All the important factoids about each of the presidents, I had committed to memory. James A. Garfield was ambidextrous. Warren G. Harding wore a size 14 shoe. I would only later come to learn that a political party was not a social function. Except in the case of Andrew Jackson, if you catch my drift.

An impressive arsenal of knowledge!

But I still couldn’t talk to anybody.

For the next half year, I continued to fervently read stories and spend my time metaphorically manacled to the lunch table reading the stack of books that my older neighbors had handed down to me. My recollection of the subjects of these books is very limited.

There must’ve been at least one gripping tale of a pirate and his treasure.

In fact, this entire period of a few months is mostly a blur to me. I remember immersing myself in fantastical worlds and roleplaying as a character in one of the books in my head, all while, rather paradoxically, never leaving the plastic blue chair of the lunch table from which I was never excused.

Along the lined patterns of the floors, I saw gripping car chases between cops and criminals. Oceans churned as swashbuckling pirates dueled on the high seas in the grassy field outside the classroom window. I read, as novelist Francine Prose put it, to test “how far a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there.” Reading served as a portal where a kid literally dispossessed of his voice was suddenly transformed into the most intrepid adventurer. Even in my quasi-nightly visits to the White House as I brushed my teeth, I imagined myself as a fabled war hero like Old Tippecanoe, or as the leader of my own ragtag volunteer army like Teddy Roosevelt.

Yet, from the outside looking in, nothing had visibly changed. You could reliably find me in my usual position at the corner of the lunch table, seated with my hands cupped around my chin, expressionless and in my lucid daydream. One teacher of mine was particularly relentless in trying to get me to speak. Every afternoon, while everyone else was gone playing pretend princess or with Hot Wheels cars, I, unexcused, remained at the table. She would approach me, and start asking me questions about the stuff I was reading, or the fictive stories playing in my head, always starring me.

Eventually, I cracked. I don’t remember what I said or who I said it to, but I said something. The characters imprisoned in my imagination were freed. To this day, neither my parents nor I have a psychological or developmental explanation for what clicked. But I suspect it had something to do with the stories that gave me endless confidence in myself. Something to do with the dragons I slayed or the fugitives I apprehended. Something to do with the worlds that I had so vividly and colorfully painted in my mind that would be a pity not to share.