@Jacob Bowden | Created: October 27, 2024 | Last edited: December 8, 2024

In his enduringly provocative 1972 paper Famine, Affluence, and Morality (FAM), Peter Singer encourages us to reflect upon our behaviour towards those in need, and to ask ourselves whether we can really do so little to help whilst maintaining a clear conscience. The extent to which we keep things for ourselves, Singer informs us, is unjustifiable, and we ought to be doing much more than we are to help those suffering and dying from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care. Contrary to some others, I take this to be the thesis of FAM.

But is this right? Can’t we keep things for ourselves, even though others are suffering? After all, we might think, we are not responsible for the plight of others; although we might be praiseworthy for helping them, surely we cannot be blameworthy for failing to! Such, it might be said, is the ‘common-sense morality’: so long as I am not responsible for the undesirable circumstances of another, I am under no obligation to help them.

But this ‘common-sense morality’ (if it exists) is flawed, and its falsity can be demonstrated with the following thought experiment (Drowning Child):

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for him, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. What should you do? (Singer, 2010: 3; based on Singer, 1972: 231; cited in Timmerman, 2015: 206)

In Drowning Child, you ought to help the child, despite the fact that it is not your fault that they find themselves in need of it. So it is not the case that you are under an obligation to help only when you are responsible for the person’s circumstance, and the ‘common-sense morality’ view is incorrect.

What are the implications of this? According to Singer, with whom I agree, the implications of this finding are stark: we ought to be doing much more than we are to help those suffering and dying from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care. As in Drowning Child, we are in a position to help at relatively small cost to ourselves. So, as in Drowning Child, we ought to take on this small cost, so that those in need can be provided with this help. This, again, I take to be the thesis of FAM. Allow me to briefly justify this.

Singer begins FAM by stating that he will argue that ‘the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society’ ‘needs to be altered’ (Singer, 1972: 230), and he clarifies what he is referring to with this ‘way of life’ later in the paper: ‘we… have to give away enough to ensure that the consumer society, dependent as it is on people spending on trivia rather than giving to famine relief, would slow down and perhaps disappear entirely.’ (241) As a result, some (e.g., Timmerman [2015: 204]) take it to be the thesis of FAM that we ought to donate (more) to aid agencies.

However,  at no point in the paper does Singer claim or imply that this is the thesis of FAM. That we ‘[spend] on trivia rather than [give] to famine relief,’ for Singer, is demonstrative of our ‘way of life’ that ‘needs to be altered.’ Nevertheless, giving to famine relief will not necessarily always be the best or required use of our time and money. Towards the end of the paper, Singer describes a kind of consideration that might affect whether donating to aid agencies is the best use of our money:

[L]ooking at the matter purely from the point of view of overseas aid, there must be a limit to the extent to which we should deliberately slow down our economy; for it might be the case that if we gave away, say, forty percent of the Gross National Product, we would slow down the economy so much that in absolute terms we would be giving less than if we gave twenty-five percent of the much larger GNP that we would have if we limited our contribution to this smaller percentage. (Singer, 1972: 241-242)

Even in this scenario, however, we could still (e.g.,) be conscious consumers, or engage in activism, and so we would still likely be under an obligation to make sacrifices in order to help those in need. In light of this, I take the thesis of FAM to be the more broad one, crudely, that we ought to be doing (much) more than we are (to help those suffering and dying from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care). I will refer to this as ‘Singer’s thesis.’ ‘Singer’s argument,’ then, can be formulated as follows:

(1) In Drowning Child, you ought to save the child because you are in a position to help someone in need at a relatively small cost to yourself.

(2) We are in a position to help people in need at relatively small costs to ourselves.

(3) Therefore, we ought to be taking on (more) relatively small costs in order to help those in need; (3+) we ought to be doing more than we are.[1]

A ‘relatively small cost’ is a cost that is low in moral significance compared to that of what is morally at stake in one’s action/inaction. I understand that the reader will likely find the notion of a ‘relatively small’ or a ‘comparatively small’ cost vague and imprecise. On this I can only say that it is up to the agent to calculate which costs constitute ‘small’ ones, relatively speaking. Nevertheless, over the course of this essay, I give examples of these ‘relatively small costs’ that we are in a position to take on to help those in need.

In response to Singer’s argument, people often have one of two types of strong objection. What I call ‘objections from disanalogy’ claim that Drowning Child is disanalogous to the situation in which we find ourselves as people in a position to help those in need. There are morally-relevant differences between the former and the latter which make for a likely difference in obligation between the scenarios; we cannot conclude that we ought to be doing more than we are, because the analogy on which this claim relies fails. ‘Objections from ignorance,’ on the other hand, deny that there is clearly anything more that we can be doing to help those in need at all. On this picture, for all we know, what we are doing is just as good for those in need as what we might do.

In (1), I will outline and respond to the strongest and most common objections from disanalogy. Specifically, these are Timmerman’s disanalogy from anomaly, Kamm’s disanalogy from proximity, and Murphy’s disanalogy from compliance. Whereas the first of these disanalogies is significant and perhaps ought to be taken into account, I will argue, the others are not, and in any case none of these undermine Singer’s argument. Then, in (2), I will discuss the objections from ignorance in the form that they often come, and in particular I will respond to Brennan’s ‘ignorance from economic uncertainty objection.’

By the end of this essay, I hope to have shown that neither of these sets of objections succeed in undermining the claim that we ought to be doing (much) more than we are to help those in need, as argued for by Singer.

As a point of clarification: none of the philosophers mentioned in this essay necessarily disagree with the claim that we ought to be doing more than we are. Nevertheless, their arguments have and will be used to try to absolve us of responsibility to do so.

1. Objections from Disanalogy

Perhaps our intuitions in Drowning Child suffice to undermine ‘common-sense morality,’ but is the case sufficiently similar to the situation in which we find ourselves for us to draw conclusions about our obligations in the latter? In this section, I consider and respond to three potential ‘objections from disanalogy’ to Singer’s argument.

1.1. Disanalogy from Anomaly

In Drowning Child, it is plausibly assumed that the circumstances generating the obligation to help are anomalous and rarely occur. In the situations in which we find ourselves, however, these circumstances are (indeed exceptionally) common. In Drowning Child, it is at least left open whether you found yourself in a similar situation yesterday or even ever before, whereas we are almost always in a position to effectively help at little cost to ourselves those in need across the world in contemporary society.[2]