You are probably evil
But don't worry, so am I
An accountant named Achilles is on his way to work. It is a beautiful spring day, but it is oddly quiet, no one else is out on the street. The only thing Achilles hears is some ducks playing in the pond to his left. As he walks by the pond, he notices a commotion in the water. “I wonder why those ducks are all worked up?” Achilles thinks to himself. He then squints over at the pond and realizes the commotion isn’t ducks at all, it's a drowning child! Achilles jumps into action, throwing down his computer bag, and sprints toward the pond. He dives into the water and reaches the child just as her head is falling below the surface, just in time! Achilles pulls the child out of the water, successfully saving her life. He says goodbye to the child and walks back to his house to get a dry pair of clothes. As Achilles walks home, he suddenly realizes he will be late to work, but it doesn't matter, the little annoyance pales in comparison to the act of saving a life. Achilles smiles because he feels like a hero.
I suspect that anyone who is reading this would do exactly what Achilles did. Not only would you do it, but it would be incomprehensible if you didn't. If Achilles shrugged off the drowning child and kept walking because he didn’t want to get his suit wet, it's almost objectively true that he isn’t just immoral, but evil.
You may be thinking "if you know I would save the child, why are you calling me evil in the title of the essay?" Good question. The reason I titled this essay "You are Evil", is because if you believe that not saving the drowning child is evil, then you are evil.
I also think by the end of this essay you will agree. My condolences.
Claims
In 1972, philosopher Peter Singer made this exact argument in a groundbreaking paper titled Famine, Affluence, and Morality. The basis for his claim was around charitable giving and his argument was simple: if you are not giving almost everything you own to charity, then you are immoral. What makes this paper so interesting is how logically sound the argument is. While the outcome is uncomfortable, it is hard to show that it's wrong.
Singer’s argument has four claims, let’s look at each:
Claim #1: “I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.”
Ok, this seems like an uncontroversial statement. If someone disagrees with this, then they are likely working with a different moral framework than the rest of us, and this paper is not targeted at them.
Claim #2: “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”
So, if we can prevent bad things from happening without a significant cost, then we should do it. Seems reasonable enough, but what does “comparable moral importance” mean? This was Achilles’ muddy suit. It did cost him something to save the child: the time of having to go home and change clothes, making him late for work. However, this was not of “comparable moral importance” with the act of saving the child. If Achilles had to decide between saving the drowning child and pulling someone out of a burning car, then we would have a harder time blaming him for choosing one or the other, because those things would be of comparable moral importance; but a dirty suit and being late are not.
Claim #2 is where most of the objections to Singer’s argument come from, and we will examine these objections in more detail later.
Claim #3: The luxuries that those in affluence enjoy and spend money on, are not morally significant. Or said by Singer: “When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief.”
The luxuries that those in affluence enjoy and spend money on, are not morally significant. But what are “luxuries”? I fly coach, which I don’t consider very luxurious. Singer is using luxuries to refer to a broad set of purchases, which includes anything that you don’t need. A coffee from Starbucks that you could have made yourself? Luxury. That new t-shirt when you already have 20? Luxury. That wine tasting trolley through the Sonoma wine country? Luxury. Anything that goes beyond you or your family's basic needs would be a luxury.
But it’s the latter part of the claim that’s the important part: “not morally significant”. We can argue on whether coffee is a luxury, but it's uncontroversial that it’s not morally significant. Putting a roof over your head, or feeding your family, is morally significant: it would be immoral to not do these things if you were equipped to do so.
Claim #4: By donating to relief agencies, we can prevent death and suffering.
When it comes to death, GiveWell estimates that it takes $4,500 to save one life. This amount is surely much higher than when Singer wrote his paper in 1972, but it doesn’t invalidate the claim. Of course, if you want something less quantifiable, there is also “suffering”, which certainly gets prevented for a much smaller sum (it costs $5 for an insecticide treated mosquito net).
There are also a lot of “inefficient” charities that waste a ton of money through negligence or bloated administrations, wouldn’t that refute this claim? Not really, even if only a fraction of your money goes to helping people, it still helps people more than not giving. Of course, it would be better to give to a charity that maximizes outcomes, which is what Effective Altruism is about, but again, I don’t think this invalidates the claim. Even if saving a life went from $4,500 to $1 million, you are still likely preventing a lot more death and suffering than buying your 20th t-shirt. Either way, I don’t think it is possible to refute the claim that donating to charities prevents suffering and death.
Putting all four claims together, we get Singer’s argument: If we acknowledge that suffering and death are bad, and if it is easily within our power to prevent something bad without morally costing us anything, then we ought to do it. Since the luxuries we spend money on are of no moral significance, then we should donate all of our excess money to charities that have proven to reduce death and suffering. Or, said succinctly, it is immoral to not give everything above that which is required for survival, to charity. Not doing so is morally equivalent to refusing to help the drowning child.
Objections
Calling everyone immoral is quite a bold claim, let’s now see if we can find some holes in Singer’s argument. Claims 1, 3, and 4 seem hard to dispute. Suffering and death are bad, buying Starbucks isn’t morally significant, and donating to charity does reduce suffering and death. However, let’s re-examine Claim #2 again.
Claim #2: “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”
Proximity
Remember that Singer uses Claim #2 to connect saving the drowning child with donating money to charity, so let's see if we can break the analogy. One place to start would be proximity - the drowning child is right in front of you, whereas charity saves someone unknown to you that is very far away. Is there a moral equivalence to proximity?
Proximity would have been an issue for most of human history, which is likely why this argument was only made in 1972 instead of during the Enlightenment or by Aristotle or someone. This argument would not have worked for someone in the 1700s. They would have argued - how do I even know there is suffering occurring elsewhere? How can I make sure my money reaches those who need it? All of these doubts would have prevented them from seeing the moral equivalence between saving a drowning child and sending money across the planet.
However, today the situation is very different. We can receive real-time information about suffering across the world, along with the ability to reliably deploy capital instantly. This was just not true at any time before the technological improvements of the last 50 years. While proximity is certainly useful to describe why we don’t give all our money to charity (we focus on what is in front of us), it doesn’t help to invalidate the argument.
Presence of others
Ok, so maybe proximity isn’t a strong objection, what about the presence of others? In the drowning child example, Achilles was the only one around, so not helping would have been immoral, but when it comes to charity, there are hundreds of millions of people that can also help. Wouldn’t this imply that since there are so many others that can donate instead of me, it absolves me from being morally obligated to donate?
Let’s apply this logic to the drowning child. Say there were 25 other people there too, but they didn’t do anything to save the child, would it be then ok if you didn’t do anything either? No, of course not, you are obligated to act whether the others did or not. The same argument can be applied to that of charity. Now, if someone else saved the child before you, then you no longer have to do anything because the issue has been resolved. This would be the same if someone gave so much money to charity that they eliminated poverty. Until that happens, you are still on the hook.
Just as with proximity, presence of others does a lot to explain why we don’t do anything, we even have a special phrase for it. However, it doesn’t absolve us from the obligation.
Demandingness
The demandingness objection goes something like this: the moral obligation to millions (billions) of people thousands of miles away is too demanding for anyone to achieve, and therefore cannot be thought of as a moral obligation. The Kantian principle of “ought implies can”, says that in order to be morally responsible for something that we ought to do, we must first be able to do it in the first place. Therefore, since living in near poverty due to giving everything one owns to charity is impractical, something that Singer himself claims, we are absolved from the moral duty due to our inability to perform that action in the first place. Demandingness is a common argument against Utilitarianism, the philosophical school which Singer’s essay falls into.
I can go either way on demandingness, on the one hand, if we are unable to do something because it is too hard, our moral framework should accommodate that. On the other hand, how do we know that we are just not living up to our moral framework? How do we separate something that we don’t want to do from something that we physically can’t do? I’m not really sure.
Why does this matter?
Remember that the goal here is not to charity shame you, but instead to introduce a philosophical argument that I find interesting. What this essay exposes, to me at least, is a potential hole in the consistency of our collective moral framework. It would be as if somehow mathematicians were able to prove in certain scenarios that 1 + 1 = 3.
I also think that the implications of everyone being immoral matter. If everyone is immoral, then no one is immoral. It can be used as an out for anyone who gets the moral high-ground argument pulled on them. If someone says to you “Oh, you don’t care about [Important Cause of the Month]? That’s very selfish of you.” The rational answer would be: “Considering you don’t give most of what you own to save lives and reduce poverty to those that need it most, you are about as selfish as I am.”
Therefore, if you are like me, you may acknowledge that you are “evil”. Although, by using a definition of “evil” that is veiled in a philosophical highfalutin mist, you won’t be losing any sleep.
If you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend this video which dives deeper into this subject: