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Response to Thought Experiment 22: The Lifeboat

8/21/2015

14 Comments

 
Picture
The local station house for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. (I live just behind that white house on the right.)
In Peter Singer's 1972 essay Famine, Affluence and Morality, the Australian philosopher "posits that citizens of rich nations are morally obligated to give at least some of their disposable income to charities that help the global poor. He supports this using the drowning child analogy, which states that most people would rescue a drowning child from a pond, even if it meant that their expensive clothes were ruined, so we clearly value a human life more than the value of our material possessions. As a result, we should use a significant portion of the money that we spend on our possessions and instead donate it to charity."

Singer is the most outspoken proponent of arguments like this, but several other philosophers have modified this analogy over the years in an attempt to probe just how altruistic or selfish we are when it comes to helping those in need around the world. This week's thought experiment provides yet another path of exploration down this line of thinking.

---------------------------------------------------
     "Right," said Roger, the self-appointed captain of the lifeboat. "There are twelve of us on this vessel, which is great, because it can hold up to twenty. And we have plenty of rations to last until someone comes to get us, which won't be longer than twenty-four hours. So, I think this means we can safely allow ourselves an extra chocolate biscuit and a shot of rum each. Any objections?"
     "Much as I'd doubtless enjoy the extra biscuit," said Mr. Mates, "shouldn't our main priority right now be to get the boat over there and pick up the poor drowning woman who has been shouting at us for the last half hour?" A few people looked down into the hull of the boat, embarrassed, while others shook their heads in disbelief.
     "I thought we had agreed," said Roger. "It's not our fault she's drowning, and if we pick her up, we won't be able to enjoy our extra rations. Why should we disrupt our cosy set-up here?" There were grunts of agreement.
     "Because we could save her, and if we don't she'll die. Isn't that reason enough?"
     "Life's a bitch," replied Roger. "If she dies, it's not because we killed her. Anyone for a digestive?"

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 61.
---------------------------------------------------

Well that's a bit harsh. And I don't mean Captain Roger's words, but the implication behind them that it is we who are Roger. Yet this is what Singer basically said in 2009, when he expanded his 1972 essay into the book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. In it, Singer presents the following philosophical argument (p. 15):

1.) First Premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad.

2.) Second Premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.

3.) Third premise: By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

4.) Conclusion: Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong.


Singer says that, "many of his readers enjoy at least one luxury that is less valuable than a child's life. He says his readers ought to sacrifice such a luxury (e.g. bottled waters) and send proceeds to charity, if they can find a reliable charity. ... He endorses GiveWell, a charity evaluator, as a way to identify the most reliable, effective charities."

But in a much-shared article from the New Republic last year, called Stop Trying to Save the World: Big Ideas are Destroying International Development, a long-time aid worker casts doubt on Singer's third premise and tells how organisations game these charity evaluations all the time by hiding overhead costs in the day-to-day work of already overstretched staff, making the whole operation even more inefficient. When I was in the Peace Corps, a book about how the international aid world was failing made the rounds among many of the volunteers in our country, but when I tried to find it online today for this post, I couldn't because any such search on this topic turns up dozens and dozens of similar books detailing failures in this arena.

In just one of these books, Dead Aid, the Zambian economist and author Dambisa Moyo argues we should, stop giving aid to Africa; it's just not working. Specifically, she says:

"As early as the sixties, Peter Bauer, the development economist, was describing development aid as 'a tax on poor people in rich countries that benefits rich people in poor countries'. ... My own family suffers the consequences of development aid every day. What are those consequences? First and foremost the widespread corruption. The people in power plunder the treasury and the treasury is filled with development aid money. The corruption has contaminated the whole of society. Aid leads to bureaucracy and inflation, to laziness and inertia. Aid hurts exports. Thanks to foreign aid the people in power can afford not to care about their people. But the worst part of it is: aid undermines growth. The economies of those countries that are the most dependent on foreign aid have shrunk by an average of 0.2 percent per year ever since the seventies."

In Ukraine, my wife and I witnessed this first hand on a much smaller scale, and were even chastised by U.S. government officials when we cautiously asked if money could be steered away from a known corrupt local. There is no doubt that good people exist who are doing good aid work, but it turns out it's really hard to know who they are. And that's not even trying to factor in unintended consequences of good acts.

Earlier this year, Singer published yet another book on this subject: The Most Good You Can Do. When University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner reviewed the book for Slate Magazine, he concluded:

"So what’s an effective altruist to do? The utilitarian imperative to search out and help the people with the highest marginal utility of money around the world is in conflict with our limited knowledge about foreign cultures, which makes it difficult for us to figure out what the worst-off people really need. For this reason, donations to Little League and other local institutions you are familiar with may not be a bad idea. The most good you can do may turn out to be—not much."

For all his talk, Singer only settles on recommending a standard of giving of "at least 1% of net income", which truly isn't very much. So sifting through these arguments back and forth, we find that things aren't so clear as rowing a boat over to pluck a drowning woman from the sea. This week's thought experiment is therefore a very weak analogy. Our path forward in trying to find solutions to a very complex problem should, as is often the case, take a clue from evolution by tinkering around the edges with small scale trial and error processes as we work towards the admittedly obvious goal of increasing human flourishing everywhere.

In the FAQs for Bridging the Is-Ought Divide, I wrote a little bit about this that I think still stands. I said:

Q. Does this concern for all of life mean we can’t enjoy many of the things that make us human? Singer already tells us we should morally give all our spare money to other poor people across the globe. Do we have to do the same for birds and flies and plants and bacteria now too?
A. Singer stated that we should have “equal concern for all human beings” but that lead him to conclusions about charity and largesse that were out of touch with our actual moral urges. While all human beings originally have equal standing for claims, especially from the point of view of the veil of ignorance, the actual force of their claims on us is variable depending on many things such as our ability to satisfy their claims, their reputation from prior actions, or their possibility of reciprocating aid over repeated interactions in the future. Moral concerns are a force that behaves somewhat like gravity with stronger pulls by larger bodies at close distances often overshadowing the background tugs of fainter objects far away. As long as we remain sensitive to the possibility that the collection of those tugs from fainter objects may occasionally outweigh those from more obvious sources, then there is no reason we can’t enjoy many of the localized concerns that make us human.


But what do you think? Do you agree with the argument that only giving 1% is enough to make us human?
14 Comments
atthatmatt link
8/21/2015 11:08:45 am

As in all things, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Simplifications are often over-simplifications. A big problem with just mailing money in the general direction of poverty is that the people who need the money don't have the power to get or keep the money. Poor people aren't dangerous. Criminals are dangerous and we deal with them using police. But police cost money and therefore poor people often do not receive protection from the police. http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_haugen_the_hidden_reason_for_poverty_the_world_needs_to_address_now?language=en

The people who control money understand all this and they treat it like any other form of power. That's why money is listed right alongside guns in the DIME (diplomacy, information, military, economic). Aside from simple corruption, like padding overhead, or embezzling, or stealing, money can and is used as a weapon. If you dump free money into someone's economy you depress that economy by distorting market signals. If you loan money that can't possibly be repaid you own them as a debtor http://www.economichitman.com/

It's silly that, in addition to oversimplifying, he picked rescue at sea as his moral illustration. Maritime law has long required those at sea to rescue other people who have gotten into trouble, regardless of the circumstances. It's such a transparently obvious decision that legally you don't even have the option of arguing whether or not it's a good idea. Using that as an example is like questioning if Hitler did anything wrong or if it's okay to abuse children. http://www.unhcr.org/487b47f12.pdf

In a less tangible sense it's also a dangerous argument. It's not a great idea to leverage the assertion that X needs charity more than Y. Like, why not donate that 1% to a friend by buying them some diapers for their kid? Why not give it to a local homeless person? Why not spend it on a campaign to pool 1% with lots of other people, build up an endowment, and provide a permanent source of charitable giving? Why not keep the money and donate time or attention to charitable causes? You can solve problems and give the solutions away.

I don't think we get to say that someone else isn't human just because they're totally self-centered. That actually seems like something that IS human. Managing to not be totally self-centered is, like, weird and kind of inhuman.

Reply
@EdGibney link
8/24/2015 07:55:54 am

Excellent points. I really liked that TED talk about the criminality that exists in the world of the poor. In Ukraine, we all understood the mafia and oligarchs ran everything in that broken society, but none of our aid money or programs were addressing it. Part of the rationale for our programs was a long term focus on just pumping money into a new middle class that could eventually rise up and pay for better protection. We heard it argued that the US didn't care if that middle class got to the middle by using corrupt means--that was just what was required for the current rules of the game. That's not totally non-pragmatic, though it is dishonest to donors (and us volunteers) who thought they were doing better than that. Just charging in to address the criminal element is dangerous and hard work that can often lead to war or an end to diplomacy, so we look the other way. Seems like there are only "least bad" options there.

My last line about being human was a throwaway inspired by some simple-minded questions I answered in my FAQs, but you're right that we're more like that quote from the Roman poet Terence -- I am human, nothing human is alien to me. We can do anything along the spectrum from extreme competition to extreme cooperation.

Reply
John A. Johnson link
8/23/2015 10:22:39 am

It seems to me that Peter Singer truly believes that we could end poverty if he could convince everyone to donate 1% of their income to charities. Why else would he endorse the lifeboat argument and try to convince us that we are inhuman if we don't follow his exhortation? Even if Singer's belief is correct (and it is not because his third premise is faulty), I object to his argument because it amounts to emotional manipulation. It also denies the reality of self-interest, which is a fundamental aspect of being human. Any argument that denies reality is bound to fail to convince the audience.

Now, if a philosopher could convince us that it is in our self-interest to do something that would reduce poverty, that would be a great argument because the argument would actually accomplish what it is meant to accomplish.

Reply
atthatmatt link
8/23/2015 10:59:07 am

I've heard it's a common belief among philosophers (at least of the Western persuasion) that philosophy is not practical. Like, if you're trying to accomplish something tangible, you're not doing philosophy.

Reply
@EdGibney link
8/24/2015 08:01:41 am

I'd like to think that's a position only held by a few "idealists" (in the philosophical sense, not the romantic sense) in the field, but I'm not truly a part of that profession to estimate with any accuracy. The fields of experimental philosophy and applied philosophy certainly wouldn't agree with that though.

@EdGibney link
8/24/2015 08:29:46 am

I should clarify that these exact thought experiments that I'm sharing have been written by Julian Baggini *based* on the thought experiments of others. There have actually been a few lifeboat scenarios written by others, but I think they were derived from Singer's first essay about the drowning child in a pond. It's all roughly the same though so your meaning is taken. I just wanted to clarify authorship.

As you and Matt both say, it gets tricky to deal with emotional pulls towards others. I think we *can* use reason to rank the importance of these emotions though, and that doesn't necessarily mean we are manipulating people. (Is there a thing such as "rational manipulation" or is that just argumentation?) I think John Rawls used his "veil of ignorance" (imagining if we wouldn't know where we'd end up in society once we were born) to show that we all agree social justice is important. The work on income inequality lately (specifically The Spirit Level for me, which was written by epidemiologists) actually shows that it is in the best interest of the *rich* not to have so much more than the poor (they get stressed out being so far apart from the herd), but that's not the same thing as ending world poverty since groups are so separate between nations. I think "convincing us that it is in our self-interest to do something that would reduce poverty" would be a hard argument to make over the short-term span of a current human life, even though we might agree things should level out eventually. (Eventually, probably always being defined as 2 to 3 generations from now...) Maybe though, by looking at the benefits we all accrue by trading and traveling between developed nations, we could extrapolate how much better our lives would be if we could do that with every corner of the earth. Does that convince you?

Reply
John A. Johnson link
8/24/2015 12:31:46 pm

Re the authorship of the lifeboat thought experiment, I did notice that it was attributed to Julian Baggini and therefore did a search to see if I could find the source. I discovered that Google books had a full text copy of portions of Baggini's book and also that Baggini cites Lifeboat Earth by Onora O'Neill as the source of the thought exercise. Whether Singer was the inspiration for O'Neill, I don't know; I only meant to say that Singer endorsed this kind of argumentation.

I doubt that anyone has the authority to tell us what constitutes "real philosophy"--whether a proper philosophical argument is only an attempt to discover and communicate truth or whether it is acceptable to argue in order to move people to action. It seems to me that philosophers since the time of the ancient Greeks were in fact interested in moving people to what they considered to be The Good. So I have no problem with making arguments designed to motivate people toward actions. I simply prefer such arguments to be based on showing people what is good for them over arguments based on fear, guilt, or embarrassment. It's just a personal preference.

There are two difficult things about creating a convincing argument that it is in our self-interest to do something that would reduce poverty. One is gathering the data showing that the non-poor also gain when the poor become less poor. Imagining improved trade and travel with, say, Africa might be a piece of the argument. More convincing would be demonstrating actual rather than hypothetical gains, and I think that kind of data would be difficult to assemble.

The second difficult part of the argument would be specifying the "something" that would actually reduce poverty. We've already seen strong arguments against simply donating to charities, given the corruption in third-world countries. So what would actually work?

atthatmatt link
8/24/2015 02:27:05 pm

"I simply prefer such arguments to be based on showing people what is good for them over arguments based on fear, guilt, or embarrassment"

I think it's important to clarify what kind of "good for them" you mean. On the one hand, you could mean that the laws of physics indicate "it" is most likely a net contribution to their survival and/or thrival. On the other hand, you could mean that "it" is definitely or deducibly appropriate based on your understanding of that person's personal moral standard(s). They're not the same thing and the distinction is important.

For example, many people are realists in the political sense, meaning they think relative power balance is the most important factor in dealing with other actors. To them, anything that increases the power of other people relative to their own power, either through an actual increase or a decrease of their own power, is bad. Anything that increases or decreases each actor's power equally, maintaining the same balance, is neutral. They do not value the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats and they devalue the idea of a helping hand.

Convincing a realist to give to charity is difficult.

Reply
John A. Johnson link
8/24/2015 05:07:27 pm

By "good for them" I meant what they perceive to be in their own self-interest, the achievement of what they value, whether that is survival, thriving, power, popularity, or whatever. And you are absolutely right about how difficult it would be to find a way to convince a political realist that giving to charity would be in his/her self-interest. Probably the only chance would to be demonstrating that to realists other ways in which they could benefit. Power might be their most important value, but not their only value. Also we need to keep in mind that giving to charity is not the only avenue for reducing poverty. In fact, doubts have been raised by that method. There is a lot of thinking that needs to be done by those who wish to reduce poverty.

Realists are probably not the only type of person who would have difficulty in seeing self-interest furthered by giving to charity (or any other plan to reduce poverty). Again, if there is a solution, it would be to find *something* in each individual that he/she would perceive as "good for me" if they engage in reducing poverty. If we fail to find a way to show people that the plan to reduce poverty is in their self-interest, I think the argument will fail to convince. Expecting people not to act out of self-interest of some sort is unrealistic.

Reply
atthatmatt link
8/24/2015 06:44:39 pm

Short of that one might be able to convince them that reducing poverty isn't contrary to their interests so at least they don't get in the way.

Alternatively, one could focus on altering the system itself to change dynamics/incentives rather than convince individuals to make a certain choice.

The thing about people and their self-interest is that they rarely believe you when you tell them that you understand what's in their self-interest better than they do. And poverty's been around for so long in so many different contexts it's already a given that it's impossible to eliminate.

@EdGibney link
8/25/2015 04:27:40 am

Great discussion guys! Sorry I missed so much of it while I was asleep in England...

John, I get your distinction now between argumentation showing a personal interest vs. showing fear, blame, or some kind of "wrongness." That's probably a wise path to try to take with others. I've been doing some thinking lately about the is-want-ought connection I laid out in my philosophy paper on morality and how that might be applied elsewhere. For example, the world *is* a certain way, I try to use fictional worlds to inspire *wants* in people, so they'll act the way I think they *ought* to. That's my general process, but it could be applied to this poverty question quite easily. (And fiction isn't the only way to inspire *wants* in people, just one of the methods I'm trying at the moment.) The Sally Struthers Christian Childfund commercials trying to tug on our sympathetic heartstrings inspired many people to *want* to help all those kids with flies on their eyes, but as we've seen, it only directed them to send money, which left their *wants* ultimately unmet. So there's an issue both with rational problem solving and with emotional inspiring.

You both get all this. I'm just thinking out loud about the framework I'm using in my head to consider this...

Reply
atthatmatt link
8/25/2015 06:18:32 am

I think when it comes to someone's own priorities you really have to lead them to an internal realization like in Inception. You can't just tell them what's what, and you can't get very far with reasoning alone anyway. Heinlein said that the only reason he wrote fiction was that he realized people would sit and listen to his lectures that way. If he just lectured he'd have no audience, but if he wrapped it in a thin candy she'll of story he could get away with an enormous amount of lecturing.

Reply
@EdGibney link
8/25/2015 06:54:08 am

I'm totally going to work that Heinlein quote into my next essay on my own fiction writing. I feel much the same. Plus, there's no other artistic medium that lets you drone into someone's consciousness for such an extended period of time. I know this is how other books have changed me.

John A. Johnson link
8/25/2015 01:06:09 pm

I read in some cognitive psychology literature somewhere (sorry I don't have the reference) that the human mind is particularly receptive to stories. We pay attention to and remember material presented in story form better than information presented any other way. So it makes sense to try to win minds and hearts through fiction.




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