If only it were that simple – Peter Singer’s aid analogy
Posted on September 13, 2010 at 9:11 am
Yesterday I stumbled across a video debate between Peter Singer and Tyler Cowen. In it they discussed the premise behind Singer’s recent book – The Life You Can Save. This is the second Singer debate I’ve seen, he debated Bill Easterly on the same topic last year.
The scenario with which Singer opens his book is essentially this – if you see a child drowning and there is no one else around would you wade in to save the child knowing that in doing so you will ruin your expensive shoes and be late for work. The answer to this is obviously “yes” most people would make these small sacrifices to save a life. He then extrapolates this to philanthropic giving and argues that everyone should therefore regularly make small financial sacrifices in order to donate the money to charities so they can save lives in other countries.
Unfortunately, aid is rarely as straight forward as the scenario the Peter presents. Here are some other ways that same scene could turn out:
- What if the child isn’t actually drowning but instead is just being a drama queen like my nephew and what looked to you like drowning is actually just horsing around. Do you think the child would appreciate being suddenly grabbed by a stranger.
- What if you aren’t a strong enough swimmer and drown while attempting the rescue. To complicate things even further, what if the next person that happens along jumps in to try to save you and drowns as well. There were several recent instances of multiple drownings just like this near where I live.
- What if the child was actually trying to escape a sex trafficker who hid when you came into view. Without understanding this you might accidentally hand the child over to a life of bondage.
- What if the child’s family was hiding on the opposite bank because they were fleeing the country. They might have been able to save their child themselves but couldn’t because they were forced to stay hidden during your rescue efforts for fear of being caught.
- What if while in the middle of the river you look down stream and realize that it’s not just this one child that’s drowning but there are hundreds of helpless children struggling in the river. Do you stay and try to save them all or do you leave to get more help knowing that many of them may drown while you’re away?
To prevent these complicating arguments Singer includes many caveats in his scenario – the child is a toddler, the water is only knee-deep, it’s a pond not a river, it’s an area you’re familiar with. Thus making the situation as simple and clear cut as possible. Desperate for your donations many charities present their work in the same manner. Unfortunately aid is rarely that simple and clear cut in fact it’s often just the opposite.
Even the most basic first aid class teaches would-be rescuers to take a minute and survey the situation before rushing in to help. A common saying in the search and rescue world is that “A dead rescuer is no good to anyone and often makes things worse”. The same could be said for a poorly run charity. I urge all donors to take a minute to evaluate the situation before jumping in to help. Make sure the charity has a clear understanding of the problem and of all possible impacts of their work.
Related posts:
There is no free lunch – even in aid
The problem with giving free food to hungry people
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As you rightly say, the analogy assumes certain things about the ‘aid problem’.
For example:
1. the solution to aid is immediate and obvious (stop child drowning)
2. the aided people are helpless victims (the child cannot help itself)
3. There is immediate feedback from action to impact (intervening will result in a saved life immediately)
4. The intervention itself is simple (there is only one person willing able to save the child, and other potential interveners will allow this person to act in the childs own interests)
etc…
Ben,
Great additional points you made. Thanks!
Great post Saundra. Was thinking of a way to address the Singer analogy and you did it quite well. I believe Easterly debated him over this, but you have done a better job at showing how it can be flawed.
Some other possibilities (just for fun):
1) Alligators/Crocodiles in the water
2) Just plain ‘boy who cried wolf’ faking it to get someone to react
3)Electrical current in the water (I mean this is like the go to scenario they have when learning first aid and lifeguarding)
4) It is a trick….(and allow Dwight-like scenarios to grow from here)
5) Hypothermia
Tom,
I forgot the alligator scenario, I’d thought of it while in the shower. Thanks for the inclusion of that idea and the others.
In using this particular rhetorical device, Peter Singer is not making the claim that helping the world’s poor is easy – anyone familiar with aid and its distribution is also aware of the complex interplay of social, political, and economic factors that impact on its efficiency.
He is making the claim that effective aid is cheap in relative economic terms – that a small financial sacrifice by an individual in a wealthy nation equates to a disproportionately large benefit to an individual in a poor nation, and, consequently, that we ought to donate more money to charity.
In general, there is no necessary correlation between cost and difficulty – just because something is cheap, does not mean it is easy. A five thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle only costs a few dollars, but may take many days of patient work to complete. Likewise, Peter is arguing that effective aid is relatively cheap, not that it is simple to implement.
The what-if trick is really terrible. Civil servants like it, as well as Consultants. Any idea how many kids have drowned while the what-if scenarios are discussed and preferably (?) studied… What Singer simply argues is; if you would step in for a kid next door, why not step in for a kid in Malawi. You can’t go into Lake Malawi because you’re not there, but you can chip in few dollars through an aid organisation that does something relevant (etcetc) for kids in Malawi. Good heavens is it that complicated….?
Yes, it is that complicated, unfortunately. I wish it weren’t. But I have seen over and over again the negative impact of poorly planned aid projects on the very people they are supposed to help. This is the reason I have sacrificed so much to educate donors. We should be constantly evaluating our own actions and second guessing our motivations. Regardless of whether what we are doing is right or wrong, we are doing to people who can least afford for us to fail.
Robert makes some good points of clarification regarding Singer’s argument. There is more. Philosopher’s like Singer use simple examples like the drowning baby not because they map on directly to real world cases, but because they help isolate certain intuitions and biases. These intuitions and biases can then be explored in detail by complicating the scenarios. In essence, the philosopher’s thought experiment is like a controlled experiment in which you hold some variables constant. The aid problem is a multivariate problem. It is, in many ways like having multiple see-saws. Put weight on one, and there is an immediate imbalance in the other. Singer’s goal is to push utilitarianism as far as he can, to show what kinds of difficult choices people must make, and to think hard about how we evaluate our values and the consequences of our actions.
Singer chose the scenario very carefully so that only the most sadistic person would say no. It’s the innocence of youth, absolutely no chance of physical harm to yourself, no one else to share the cost or blame, obvious action/solution. Change just one variable and then see what happens.
For instance, if you weren’t alone but there were others standing around not doing anything what would you do? If you weren’t sure if the child was really drowning how would that affect your decision? If the person in trouble was the town drunk who beat his wife and kids, how would that affect your decision? If you were in the next town over and had to pay someone the price of your shoes to save the child would you do it? Would you trust that the child was actually drowning, that the person actually saved them?
What if it weren’t the obvious drowning scenario but instead a child approached you with a note from a doctor saying they would die without a treatment that costs the same amount as your shoes, would you pay?
As far as the cost effective argument goes, if Bill gates were willing to match you 2 to 1 on everything you gave to feed starving children in your own town, would you do it? What if you were asked to pay the price to have a life guard on duty at all times, would you do that – they work much more cheaply over there. What if it were far less expensive to work with the government to help them develop their own immunization system rather than paying per shot to save a child’s life, would you do that?
What if aid isn’t the best way to make their lives better but instead it’s increased immigration and the remittances that creates. What if it’s lobbying your congressman to stop shipping food aid from US farmers and instead to purchase food locally. What if the solution is paying more for the goods you buy every day so that people are paid a living wage? What if Whites in Shining Armor aren’t the solution?
Aid isn’t philosophical, it’s real. And the impact that aid has on the people it’s supposed to help is very real and not always positive. There is no silver bullet project like the one in the scenario. If you take just one step away from Singer’s carefully crafted scenario, it falls apart.
“He is making the claim that effective aid is cheap in relative economic terms – that a small financial sacrifice by an individual in a wealthy nation equates to a disproportionately large benefit to an individual in a poor nation, and, consequently, that we ought to donate more money to charity.”
And in purely economic terms, he is absolutely right. Unfortunately he misses the facts that a) transaction costs work against this effect and b) we are still entirely unclear about what actually “works” in development. So essentially he’s asking you to donate to a lottery that pays out less than you put in.
I’ve said in other forums that Singer’s arguments are faith-based, and bear strong resemblance to religious arguments (although this is not to say that religious arguments are without merit).
Also: children don’t exist in a vacuum, they exist in families and communities, and I don’t think those families and communities are helpless. By offering up the standard “give to Oxfam” line, Singer is reinforcing a mid-Victorian notion of charity that I do not believe sits well in the modern world.
Make sure the charity has a clear understanding of the problem and of all possible impacts of their work.
I’m afraid I have no idea how to go about doing that. This seems to be the classic problem of hiring an expert. I can only detect extremely obvious fraud or incompetence because I may lack the knowledge/background to be able to ‘check their work’, whether we are talking about a charitable organization, a financial advisor, a doctor, or an auto mechanic. At least with the doctor or the mechanic, I can see if I’m getting a good result (although one can survive and recover from unnecessary surgery and your car will run just fine if your mechanic replaces instead of repairs your transmission) but it seems that the problem of ‘what is a good result for charitable aid’ is so intractible that the experts don’t agree on the answer.
Is the right solution for an individual who wants to ensure their aid dollars are at least well-targeted (if not perfectly-targeted) to set up a charitable trust that doesn’t start giving away money until there is enough money in the trust to hire an expert to make sure the money is allocated wisely? Even then how do I pick that expert?
This whole discussion is very disheartening.
There are so many people in need, and I have so much. I want to help.
Your help may do more harm than good.
How do I make sure I do more good than harm?
Nobody knows.
Is that really the world we live in?
You could try using The Charity Rater http://thecharityrater.com. It’s a system I developed to help donors evaluate a charity before giving. This is no guarantee that the charity has a positive impact, but it does help you make an educated decision.
“Is that really the world we live in?”
Yes. The good news is that you can do something about it. Reading this blog is a good start, for example – just by reading Saundra’s posts you’ll start to get a feel for which ideas simply aren’t very good. You may not have a lot of time to put in to learning about these things – but that’s where I’d agree with Singer that in terms of attention, I have an obligation to think about these issues rather than the pair of shoes that just caught my eye.
Our biggest problem in engaging the public – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmsLUNFk_Qg
This is a great discussion you’ve started here, Saundra. What I find especially useful about Singer’s scenario and approach as you describe it is that it helps to make concepts like international aid which can seem esoteric, complicated or of little interest to the ‘uninitiated’ seem more relevant to their daily lives. And as a tool for donor education, making something more relevant may inspire potential donors to go the next step of “evaluating the situation before jumping in.” The rhetorical scenario thus becomes the real life pathway…
I have to admit that the scenario has been a handy device. There have been a hundred ways to tweak it in ways that an average person can understand. I can see why philosophers do it.
Robert, as I understand it, Singer is not trying to say aid is cheap. I believe he wants his audience to make the connection that the moral imperative that would cause a person to jump in and save the child should not change based on distance. Further, suffering does not change even if a person is near or across the world. He wants people to understand that their empathy should not change.
There is a lot to agree with there, but it is still a far to simple scenario. I understand the point of the exercise, but it gets to be problematic if it is not expanded further. As I see it, Saundra does not take issue with the scenario itself, but with the fact that it does not have further considerations that address the complexities that would then go into development. There is an important second step that must be considered. Empathy is the start but a bad decision can be harmful.
[...] other day I read this interesting blog (I also watched this interesting debate with Tyler Cowen) looking at Peter Singer’s premise [...]
Yes, local bus rides across the mountains Peru often result in seeing a collapsed body in the middle of a road. If you stop, get out and help, you will be mugged and passengers may be raped or killed for money.
What a horrible, indescribable dilemma those bus drivers have to drive over the body and save the numerous passengers on board. Unthinkable horror.
I think you are unfairly picking on Peter Singer. His pond metaphor is not meant to encapsulate every important facet of aid (does anyone here have a metaphor that does that? I’d love to read it) but rather to pose a general philosophical question to people about how they value the lives of strangers. They are simply writing to different audiences (at least Easterly and Singer, the debate I saw); Singer’s target audience is most likely the average affluent American, one who doesn’t give anything to help others or perhaps just a small sum to their own local religious group. He’s presenting a moral and philosophical concept, not discussing the nuances of international aid- although he tries to set people in the right direction, giving them some resources to consult and stressing you shouldn’t just donate blindly but to really think and analyze where your money will go. Easterly is obviously writing less about whether or not affluent citizens have a moral obligation to give and more about what strategies are and are not effective in alleviating global poverty. I don’t think their arguments were at all in opposition to one another, just slightly different topics to different audiences, and that’s why when you watch the Singer/Easterly talk you’ll see much more agreement (usually after some clarifications by both men) than irreconcilable differences.
Singer is not telling people to blindly throw money at a problem and hope that it gets fixed. He is simply showing that distance should not be a factor when one is determining whether or not to help another person. he is not saying that charity is a simple thing, he is just saying that the cost of saving a life is relatively small. He is a consequentialist so obviously he wouild counsel that one should attempt to donate somewhere that will maximize the effect of their money. If everybody did this then I doubt it could be argued that it would be detrimental to the happiness of the world. his analogy is simple because the idea he is expressing is simple, the value of a stranger’s life doesnt change depending on how far away that stranger is. So your decision to save that stranger should not change either. (assuming that the distance doesnt make it so difficult to save the person’s life that it is no longer worth it, which I don’t think anyone is arguing).
The objection of alternate means of charity would help better is interesting, but ultimately does not affect his argument. The answer is simple, if it would be better to give money somewhere else then one should give money to the place that is better. If you don’t know of the better place then give to the good place that you do know because even giving to something that is not the best (but still good) is better than not giving at all.
[...] messages, journalists often use a Whites in Shining Armor narrative, and some philosophers promote simplistic morality. But the celebrities make these errors with much broader audiences. So it’s reasonable that [...]
Good points. We can’t know for sure the consequences of the actions we might take, we can’t really be sure we know what the situation actually is–the child *could* be a tiger in disguise–or she could be your daughter in disguise. Come to think of it, we can’t even know the consequences of *not* doing anything. This leaves us in a real pickle, doesn’t it? Maybe we should appoint a committee, unless the committee might in some way infringe on our freedoms and rights, or the freedom or rights of others.
Bruce and many others: One of the ways that Singer argues for the claim that we should be doing much more than we are to fight world poverty is by using this analogy. Many of you have attacked Singer by showing that there are many different ways that the “child” scenario could have gone. I think that that completely misses Singer’s point. He is trying to reveal to us certain claims that we almost certainly believe (e.g., that suffering is bad, and that if we can prevent suffering *without compromising something of equal moral worth*, we should do so), and then show that we act inconsistently with those claims. The fact that things *could* have gone differently doesn’t change the fact that almost everyone (save for the nihilist) answers the drowning child question by saying, “yes, I would save the child.”
Once we answer in this way, I think it is *very* hard to deny that we have a moral obligation to helping people who are suffering. While the original post and later comments talk about different things that could happen when I child is playing in water, no one has shown how that relates to the equivalent moral scenario about world poverty. For example, the first “alternative scenario” given by the author is the following:
“What if the child isn’t actually drowning but instead is just being a drama queen like my nephew and what looked to you like drowning is actually just horsing around. Do you think the child would appreciate being suddenly grabbed by a stranger.”
How does might this relate to the current situation with world poverty? Is the author suggesting that those who are in poverty are actually “horsing around”? If so, the author obviously have not read the rest of Singer’s book, or done even the slightest bit of research about the situation of others around the world. But, if he/she is not suggesting that, then this modification to the scenario has *no* relevance to the drowning child thought experiment at all.