\documentclass{article} \title{ Does \emph{Can} Imply \emph{Ought}?\\ Singer on Intuition, Responsibility, \\and World Poverty} \usepackage{setspace} \author{Joseph Barillari\footnote{Florian Becker provided advice on the construction of this paper. Anne Caswell Klein of the Writing Center provided advice on the revision of this paper.}} \date{14 May 2002} \begin{document} \bibliographystyle{plain} \maketitle \section{Introduction} In \emph{Rich and Poor}\cite{SingerRP}, ethicist Peter Singer outlines an approach to world poverty that renders individuals responsible to give in proportion to their ability to help. Arguing from intuition, he advocates an overhaul of current moral attitudes toward economic destitution, and obligates the advantaged to contribute to the disadvantaged to the extent that they can do so without giving up anything of ``comparable moral significance.'' In this paper, I argue that Singer's analysis cannot be used to substantiate such blanket obligations, and that the thought-experiments Singer uses to buttress his claims are unconvincing when applied to problems of this scale. I will begin by outlining a few practical objections to any universal obligation to donate. I then turn to the philosophical arguments. After finding Singer's use of intuition to be unpersuasive, I consider his tacit admission that killing and letting die are sufficiently different as to be intrinsically distinguishable, and close with analysis of intuitive objections to Singer's obligation. \section{Practical objections} Admittedly, the practical is the domain of economists and policymakers, but, as Singer prefaces his own remarks with empirical observations, I cannot help but articulate a few of my own. Singer counters the objection raised by his critic Susan Wolf (that the obligation to donate will destroy what we view to be the good life) by claiming first that no right to the ``good life'' can be recognized in a world that is not a ``world of plenty,'' and second that we need not sacrifice our human relationships to end poverty, as they constitute a good in themselves, and are therefore protected by the criterion of ``comparable moral significance.'' While the latter claim is ultimately dependent on one's calculus of significance,\footnote{I posit that by Singer's reasoning it would be \emph{very} difficult to justify assembling the resources necessary to beget and raise one's own children, as few things are as significant as the certain deaths of poor children.} the former is based on an incorrect factual assertion that, were it even true, would be actually aggravated by Singer's advocacy of massive donation. \subsection{The efficacy of donations} That is to say, Singer's assertion that ours is not a ``world of plenty'' directly contradicts his assertion (twelve pages earlier) that redirecting grain use from raising livestock would make short work of hunger. We \emph{already} live in a world of plenty, albeit one with poor distribution. Distribution is impaired by bad local attitudes and worse local governments -- and unless Oxfam is permitted to raise its own army, our donations are unlikely to shake either. Singer mentions that we are under no obligation to donate if we think our aid will have no long-term value; the causes of poverty make this the case virtually everywhere: countries are never hungry by accident. A Niagara of grain shipped into Africa will do nothing to topple a tyrant who keeps it from his people to starve them into submission. Some services --- public safety, social welfare, and education, for instance --- are supported by collective taxation, not individual initiative because if they had to rely on individuals, they would be far less effective. No army supported by donations can be as effective as one supported by taxes; likewise, effective solutions to poverty are best implemented by governmental actors, because they can supplement the purse with the sword. Famine and disease are typically symptoms of despotic government. Consequently, lasting change is impossible without military intervention. Our poverty-ending efforts, therefore, ought not to go into soliciting donations, but into lobbying our Congressmen. \subsection{The end of human motivation} The feasibility of Singer's thesis hinges on human malleability. Can people be motivated to work without rewards? Cash can always be exchanged for virtue: a man unmotivated by money can donate it to charity. But Singer's plan would leave men with neither cash \emph{nor} virtue as compensation: there is no special virtue in \emph{not} committing crimes against humanity (which is what visiting a theater will become, should Singer's thesis become widely accepted). What has been the mark of a highly moral man will become obligatory, and traditional forms of internal and external motivation will be effectively eliminated. \subsection{Output redirection and economic collapse} The notion that our world will \emph{ever} become a world of plenty through donation-to-the-point-of-comparable-loss is extraordinarily shortsighted. Plenty follows growth and growth follows spending. A moratorium on non-essential spending will drive the world faster and farther from plenty than the most misguided economic planning imaginable. Even if human beings could be motivated to work ever harder without compensation, the result of directing an entire economy's non-essential consumer spending into foreign aid will be an unmitigated disaster which will forever foreclose the opportunity to create a world of plenty. Entire sectors of industry will collapse, prompting staggering unemployment. The notion that spending on luxury goods can be so easily diverted overseas is premised in a na\"{\i}ve and atomistic view of economics.\footnote{Ironically, Singer criticizes Locke and Nozick for advocating a na\"{\i}ve and atomistic (but nevertheless widely accepted) view of human rights.} The expectation\footnote{Florian Becker mentioned this objection.} that new sectors will spring up around the business of helping the impoverished is equally unrealistic: as Singer admits, there is no difficulty in producing enough food to feed the world, so no agribusiness boom is likely to answer the luxury bust. Indeed, the loss of the profitable meat industry alone will more than dwarf the increased demand for grain for the third world. Nor can we expect to make short work of poverty and quickly return to luxurious normalcy -- the labor necessary to rebuild impoverished countries will be long and (for the foreseeable future) economically unrewarding. It will take decades to build sufficient infrastructure to make these countries self-sustaining. While dire forecasts are subject to suspicion, if only because they are premised in counterfactual claims (in this case, the widespread adoption of the Singer ethic), it is unreasonable to believe that the fallout from the collapse of non-essential industries is so trivial as to be dismissable as a short-term transition cost. \subsection{Objections to the practical} The arguments above are are not objections to Singer's obligation because they claim that widespread donation would fail to do any good, or that we would sacrifice something of comparable moral significance (our \emph{own} sustenance, for instance) in being compelled to donate. Let us suppose that triage or inaction would not be better solutions, that government-led intervention is ineffective, and that by `saving' a child we do not mean `staving off starvation and disease for six months, only to have the child killed in a civil war or by a new famine,' but something more permanent. Let us suppose that each and every one of the practical objections above is ungrounded. Even if they are (which is unlikely; they are moderate and supported by basic economic reasoning), I argue that Singer does not meet his burden of proving a moral obligation for giving rooted in the status of having. \section{Moral objections} %check singer quote \subsection{Singer's assignment of responsibility for inaction} Singer assigns responsibility on the basis of one's ability to help without ``sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance.'' He teases the notion of culpability for inaction from our intuitions using the famous well-dressed man/drowning child thought experiment: it would be unfathomably callous for the man to fail to rescue the child, given that he could easily do so. To ignore the child is to bring about its death. This is the kernel of his argument about poverty: to choose luxuries over donation is to choose death for children in absolute poverty. Singer claims that our responsibility for the deaths of these children is intrinsically (though obviously not extrinsically) no different from our responsibility if we had murdered them. No longer can those of us who do not work for de Beers safely say that we have done nothing to cause the deaths of African children. Is this what we intended when we intuitively levied moral sanctions against the man who would not ruin his shoes to save a drowning child? I argue that it is not, and that Singer has tried to magnify our intuitions to a scale at which they are useless. \subsection{Intuition does not scale} \subsubsection{Proliferation of actors} Singer employs some rhetorical sleight-of-hand to establish responsibility: he showcases a simplistic single-actor example (the drowning child) to substantiate his views on the remote, complex, multi-actor problem of world poverty. This thought-experiment draws upon intuition that does not scale to situations with more than one actor. Consider a different spin on the drowning-child scenario: what if the victim-to-be is an inebriated Princeton student who passed out in the fountain outside Robertson Hall on Thesis Day, with dozens of his classmates cavorting in the water alongside him? If they all neglect to drag him to safety (they're far too busy gamboling), is each one as responsible for his death as if he were the only one present? Do we feel quite the same about them as we did about the lone well-dressed man? Should they all be considered murderers? Obviously not. Intuitively, the proliferation of potential actors reduces the moral culpability of each individual actor. A former classmate of mine has referred to this exculpation as the ``multiple agency'' exception. The addition of potential actors to these thought-experiments changes the dynamics sufficiently to render the single-actor-single-victim analogy useless. Intuition says that each may be responsible, but not to the same extent as if each were alone. If an individual is less culpable because his fellow bystanders didn't do anything either, then (by extension) each Westerner is several orders of magnitude less culpable for third-world death-by-starvation by virtue of being in good company. Alternatively, if the presence of others does \emph{not} make a difference, then we can say that the situation does not change when we add actors, and by extension, that those actors would make no difference if they did not exist. This \emph{should} exculpate them (for the first man therefore bears the guilt), except that Singer says that no salvation can come from counterfactual positions. In this case, Singer has to claim that individually, each and every one of those bystanders is as guilty (recall that we're supposing that guilt is unaffected by the number of actors) as the man who couldn't be bothered to save the drowning child (and thus aggregate guilt increases without bound as we add more bystanders). Now intuition starts to work against him: are we really as culpable for the drowning child as we are for the African millions? Put another way, are we all guilty of dozens of murders every minute? Intuition would say no. Let us test our intuition a bit further with another thought-experiment: what if the notorious Man with the Bugatti had an outing in a trainyard, with dozens of friends (whose savings were similarly invested in their respective cars), each standing by a switch?\footnote{Florian Becker discussed similar examples in a meeting on May 6.} When the speeding trolley came along, if any individual threw his switch, he would destroy his own car and save the child. If none of them did so, the child would die -- but would we consider them all murderers? Does failure to make the sacrifice necessary to save the child make one a murderer, if any one of a group of people might have shouldered it instead? Intuition says no. Singer's teasing-out of intuitions does not scale to these larger problems. \subsubsection{Long- and short-term problems} Crucial to all of these scenarios is the element of acute crisis and immediacy. World hunger, by contrast, is a chronic problem, insolvable by a single sacrifice. The intuition that Singer uses to lead us to the sacrifice-everything-of-lesser-moral-significance thesis, even if it scales up to multi-actor problems (and I have argued that it does not), is not applicable long-term problems. Consider a new spin on the thought-experiment above. Suppose that the child above was not stuck on a track, but in a small cottage, with a large sign on the front lawn, informing the passer-by that the child would die of a chronic illness if his family did not receive a specified sum every month for his treatment. Each of the men drives by and recognizes that sum to be equivalent to the market value of his car, plus enough of his pension to cut his spending down to the bare minimum needed to survive. None of the car-owners could miss the sign. If each of them merely shakes his head with pity and drives past, do we make them all murderers? If so, should we stay in our houses to avoid seeing such things and becoming culpable for them? Let us take it even closer to reality: suppose that the sign admits that there is some small (but nonzero) chance that governmental funding may be secured to save the child, but there's no way for the car-owner to know that it's been secured until it's too late to save the child. %Furthermore, ...(chanc At this point, intuition has either failed us completely (in which case, refer to the argumentation in the next few sections), or led us to the conclusion that the mere ability-to-assist does not create an obligation to assist, for the alternative would obligate us to deposit our savings at every legitimate donation-place, collecting-tin, or charitable organization we happened to see. That is exactly Singer's argument, and I do not believe it is possible to substantiate it with mere intuition. Obviously, the notion that we have \emph{some} duty to the poor may be widespread, but few people act upon it -- whereas most people would act upon the intuitive obligation to save the drowning child. Why the difference? It seems to indicate either that our intuitions, when scaled, no longer motivate us into direct action (a problem in human psychology and motivation), or perhaps that there is some difference -- namely, the scaling factors\footnote{The number of actors and the duration of the obligation.} -- between the situations (drowning child and world poverty) that makes intuition for one inapplicable to the other. We can't accept the sacrifice-until-the-loss-of-something-comparable obligation simply because we're browbeaten into support for it by the intuitive immorality of allowing the drowning child to die. Just as our geometric intuition is of no use to us in higher-dimensional spaces,\footnote{Professor R. Sedgewick, CS226 lecture notes, Spring 2002} our small-scale, single-actor moral intuition is no substitute for careful analysis in situations with multiple potential actors and victims, analysis with which Singer does not provide us. \subsection{Singer's implicit concession of the dissimilarity of killing and allowing to die in regards world poverty} Singer writes that a reasonable policy should expect people to donate only ten percent of their income, with some flexibility based on ability to give. In setting a guideline for ``minimum morality,'' much less admitting that this number is arbitrary, he destroys the legitimacy of the claim that the acts/omissions distinction is meaningless. If there were truly no intrinsic difference between buying a stereo set and shooting children, then both ought to be intolerable, and a ten-percent compromise regarded as an insult to humanity. By contrast, if indeed we must fulfill only a portion of our moral obligation to stop people from dying, then we should recognize the same degree of leeway in cases of active murder: perhaps, one must only abstain from murder in ninety percent of cases, for morality in the remaining ten percent might be more than we should expect from human beings. Even if we admit that Singer gave the ten-percent figure as a public-policy suggestion, such a suggestion would be absurd if we recognized no relevant intrinsic distinctions between passive and active murder. The only way to avoid the absurdity is to recognize that the acts/omissions distinction cannot be so easily brushed aside. By admitting that we can set an approximate donation amount by which one can be regarded as being ethically average, Singer tacitly concedes this point. If letting-die were truly equivalent to murder, it would be intolerable to permit people to contribute only a fraction of their potential donation. While my presentation of objections to erasing the killing/letting die distinction is not meant to be exhaustive, a second, better-known\footnote{Singer discusses it.} objection underscores the difficulty of erasing it: some argue that culpability cannot be equivalent because those who ``kill'' by omission generally lack murderous intent. Singer answers this objection by considering speeding motorists, who are prosecuted when they strike pedestrians despite a lack of intent to kill. I posit that this example does not map cleanly onto failure to donate, where the killer and victim are not so readily identifiable, and blame not so easily assigned. Without the usual direct interaction between the parties, assigning blame for large-scale inaction is non-trivial. \subsection{The absurdity of unbounded responsibility\footnote{Florian Becker suggested improvements to this section.}} Singer claims that ``if a consequence of my spending money on a luxury item is that someone dies, I am responsible for that death.'' We want to avoid having that death on our conscience, so hypothesize that instead of buying a stereo, we send our money to an NGO who uses it to save five people. If the price of a stereo set was the maximum we could sacrifice, we have acted morally. However, if there was some chance we could have donated more --- perhaps by cutting back on luxuries, perhaps by earning more, we have (according to Singer) murdered those whom we could have but did not save. Until an economist sets a cap on human productivity, one can \emph{always} theoretically earn more. This means that one can choose no employment other than that which is most likely to end hunger, typically the most lucrative. Some may try to escape this conclusion by claiming that a man is not culpable for worldwide deaths-by-hunger if he has done \emph{all that he can} to prevent them.\footnote{I discussed this with a classmate.} Singer implicitly casts this objection aside in a footnote: he claims that one is obligated to retain a high-paying job, even if it requires spending a portion of one's income on the trappings of the position (clothes, a car, etc.), if a lower-paying job would leave less net profit left over to donate. Consequently, we ought to direct our lifestyles to maximize our earnings, so a man who fails to work hard enough to earn a salary increase is guilty for the deaths that the money he could have earned would have prevented. Thus doing ``all that you can'' means absolutely that. No man is permitted to be a painter if he could earn (and donate) more as a graphic designer, no man may become a scholar if he would save more lives as a corporate lawyer. This destruction of preferences is inevitable. The ``comparable moral significance'' exception is of no help if we want to write poetry instead of advertising copy. Are the the dozens of lives lost comparable to the freedom to write a few books of verse? While the short-term sacrifices that Singer explicates are intuitively obligatory, intuition may not stretch far enough to compel us to reject all lifestyle choices except those that are most likely to save children in poverty. Nor does it seem intuitive that we are morally required to ignore virtually all of our personal preferences. Is this what we intended when we condemned the well-dressed man? \section{Making sense of obligation} Singer's obligation to give fails in several respects: first, it is impractical. Second, it is primarily substantiated by unscalable thought-experiments and misapplied intuition. Third, he admits that our policies regarding letting die can be lax in relation to those concerning killing, which is a tacit admission that the erasure of the intrinsic distinctions between the two --- a crucial component of Singer's argument --- is impossible: if we truly regarded murder and failure to save as equivalent, a policy that required only donating ten percent of one's income would be an insult to humanity. Finally, even if we accept the give-until-something-of-comparable-moral-significance-is-sacrificed obligation as having withstood these criticisms, we realize that that no human being is capable of acting ethically within it without sacrificing not only money, but virtually any hope for fulfillment. Foreclosed are all opportunities except those expected to save the most children, effectively destroying individual agency -- a highly counterintuitive stance. With those objections, I find Singer's obligation to give to be unworkable. \bibliography{final-bib} \emph{This paper contains approximately 3387 words (not counting title, author, date, this paragraph, or the \textbf{References} section). This paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations.} \end{document} % LocalWords: Oxfam tinpot Unicef Nozick NGO catalogue Dawkins % LocalWords: na ive hari kiri neo unfulfilling railyard ve consequentialist % LocalWords: trainyard