Peter Singer

The Obligation to Assist

The path from the library at my university to the humanities lecture theatre passes a shallow ornamental pond.  Suppose that on my way to give a lecture I notice that a small child has fallen in and is in danger of drowning.  Would anyone deny that I ought to wade in and pull the child out?  This will mean getting my clothes muddy and either canceling my lecture or delaying it until I can find something dry to change into; but compared with the avoidable death of a child this is insignificant.

    A plausible principle that would support the judgment that I ought to pull the child out is this: if it is in my our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, we ought to so do it.  This principle seems uncontroversial....

    Nevertheless the uncontroversial appearance of the principle that we ought to prevent what is bad when we can do so without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance is deceptive.    If it were taken seriously and acted upon, our lives and our world would be fundamentally changed.  For the principle applies, not just to rare situations in which one can save a child from a pond, but to the everyday situation in which we can assist those living in absolute poverty.  In saying this I assume that absolute poverty, with its hunger and malnutrition, lack of shelter, illiteracy, disease, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy, is a bad thing.  And I assume that it is within the power of the affluent to reduce absolute poverty, without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance. If these two assumptions and the principle we have been discussing are correct, we have an obligation to help those in absolute poverty that is no less strong than our obligation to rescue a drowning child from a pond.  Not to help would be wrong, whether or not it is intrinsically equivalent to killing.  Helping is not, as conventionally thought, a charitable act that is praiseworthy to do, but not wrong to omit; it is something that everyone ought to do....

    I have left the notion of moral significance unexamined in order to show that the argument does not depend on any specific values or ethical principles....[The affluence of those of us living in the First World] means that we have income we can dispose of without giving up the basic necessities of life, and we can use this income to reduce absolute poverty.  Just how much we think ourselves obligated to give up will depend on what we consider to be of comparable moral significance to the poverty we could prevent: stylish clothes, expensive dinners, a sophisticated stereo system, overseas holidays, a (second?) car, a large house, private schools for our children, and so on.  

Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Harry Browne

A Plea for Selfishness

    It's often said that it would be a better world if everyone were unselfish.  But would it be?

    If it were somehow possible for everyone to give up his own happiness, what would be the result?  Let's carry it to its logical conclusion and see what we find.

    To visualize it, let's imagine that happiness is symbolized by a big red rubber ball.  I have that ball in my hands - meaning that I hold the ability to be happy.  But since I'm not going to be selfish, I quickly pass the ball to you.  I've given up my happiness for you.

    What will you do?  Since you're not selfish either, you won't keep the ball; you'll quickly pass it on to your next-door neighbor.  But he doesn't want to be selfish either, so he passes it to his wife, who likewise gives it to her children.

    The children have been taught the virtue of unselfishness, so they pass it to playmates, who pass it to parents, who pass it to neighbors, and on and on and on.

    I think we can stop the analogy at this point and ask what's been accomplished by all this effort.  Who's better off for these demonstrations of pure unselfishness?

    How would it be a better world if everyone acted that way?  Whom would we be unselfish for?  There would have to be a selfish person who would receive, accept, and enjoy the benefits of our unselfishness for there to be any purpose to it.  But that selfish person (the object of our generosity) would be living by lower standards than we do.

    For a more practical example, what is achieved by the parent who "sacrifices" himself for his children, who in turn are expected to sacrifice themselves for their children, etc.?  The unselfish concept is a merry-go-round that has no ultimate purpose.  No one's self-interest is enhanced by the continual relaying of gifts from one person to another to another.

    Perhaps most people have never carried the concept of unselfishness to this logical conclusion.  If they did, they might reconsider their pleas for an unselfish world.

Harry Browne, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (New York: MacMillan, 1973)