Yes Peter Singer, Geography is Morally Relevant

A Critique of the "Drowning Child" Thought-Experiment

Photo by Bradyn Trollip on Unsplash

TL;DR: Our free will gives us responsibility for our actions. That responsibility doesn’t extend out into infinity but up until the freedom of others. My responsibility ends where your freedom begins. Proximity helps determine where that point is.

Now that the easy issues of moral motivation and free will are addressed as a basis for contractualism, it’s time to do some real writing. Sure, any idiot can just build up a moral theory. But it takes a very special person to write the 1,796th critique of utilitarianism. So that’s what this post will be.

One of the most culturally-impactful thought experiments is the “Drowning Child Scenario.”

I’m sure you are familiar with it, but here it is: You see a child drowning in a pond. You can save the child, but there’s a cost. You will ruin your valuable (let’s say $500 suit). Do you save the child?

If you save the drowning child, then congratulations! You are an upstanding, right-minded person who has successfully satisfied your moral duty. And congratulations again on accepting your newly-discovered duty to the world’s poor.

Since you have found yourself obligated to save the child for the price of $500, then you must be equally obligated to donate that same amount to international charities to save children in poor countries. So long as geography is not morally relevant, then the moral duty owed to the drowning child extends to all children who are at risk of death.

As you can tell by the title, I’ll be arguing that our moral duties don’t extend that far. Donating to international charities is still a good thing to do. It’s just not an ethical duty per se.

How Geography is Legally Relevant

We can discover our moral duties by first examining our legal duties. If our moral duties can inform us of what our legal duties should be, then our legal duties might shed some light on our moral duties.

If you want to sue someone in the US for their wrongdoing, you must be able to show how that person caused you harm.

And the law requires you to prove two types of causation to prove that the person caused you harm: Actual cause and proximate cause.

Actual cause, or “but-for” cause, is any cause within the chain of causation of an event. “But for X, Y would not have happened, so X is a but-for cause of Y.”

If your boss violates the terms of your employment contract and fires you without cause, your boss is not the only but-for cause of your harm. But so are your boss’s parents and their parents before them and so on. All of their free actions played a causal role in your firing.

While it’s easy to show “but for” cause, that doesn’t mean you can sue everyone along the chain of causation back until the dawn of man. To have a chance at winning your suit, you need to show that someone was the proximate cause of a wrong.

Proximate cause, meanwhile, is a cause that is sufficiently related to an injury.

Example: If I drive through a stop sign, I’m liable for any immediate resulting accident. I am responsible because a car accident is the type of event which can occur from reckless driving and my action was close enough to the accident for it to be sufficiently related to the resulting injuries.

However, if I drive through a stop sign and through a complicated series of events, someone on the other side of the country gets a heart attack, I am not responsible.

Authorities could trace the source of the heart attack by going through the chain of causation and may arbitrarily stop with my poor driving (they could have gone further and blamed the inventor of texting). However, they don’t have a case. I was not the proximate cause, although I was a “but-for” cause.

Why am I not responsible? Because my traffic violation was not the proximate cause of the heart attack. Plenty of free choices stood between my reckless driving and the man’s heart attack.

And how can we determine the proximate cause? Several factors can help, including: intention, voluntary actions, whether the effect could be expected, time, and geographical proximity. A traffic violation in one part of the country isn’t responsible for a biological death on the other side of the country, but it can be responsible for a resulting accident in the vicinity.

Imagine that another driver witness a three-car pileup caused by my disobedience to traffic laws. The driver is able to stop. But the driver then thinks: “Wow, the Contractualist, who initially caused this accident, will sure owe me a lot in damages if I drive straight into the pile-up. He will be responsible for my harm too.”

No I will not be! My liability ends whenever someone is free to break the chain of responsibility. Although if the accident happens far too quickly for the incoming driver to react, I remain liable.

How Geography is Morally Relevant

So geography helps determine our legal responsibilities. But is the proximate cause just an instance of the law being practical instead of moral? No, our legal rules must rely on moral principles for them to be more than arbitrary commands.

And if moral principles cannot serve as justifiable restrictions on freedom, then they aren’t moral principles. Just preferences.

I hope the above reasoning helps explains why geography should be considered in our moral duties. But if not, I hope John Stuart Mill’s argument for the moral consequences of free speech can serve as another example.

This SEP entry on freedom of speech states how Mill:

suggests that it is acceptable to claim that corn dealers starve the poor if such a view is expressed in print. It is not acceptable to make such statements to an angry mob, ready to explode, that has gathered outside the house of the corn dealer. The difference between the two is that the latter is an expression “such as to constitute…a positive instigation to some mischievous act,” (1978, 53), namely, to place the rights, and possibly the life, of the corn dealer in danger.

What is the difference between criticizing a corn dealer in print versus outside his home with an angry mob? Proximity.

Even if the outcome in both scenarios turns out to be the same, being present in front of the corn dealer’s house and witnessing the danger that the dealer is exposed to creates moral responsibility as a result of geography.

It is this moral responsibility of speech that justifies the legal crime of incitement, one of the few free speech exceptions.

We cannot be responsible for everything that results in the chain of causation; only for those results which are proximally related to our actions.

If you save a butterfly and, through a series of complex events, indirectly cause WWIII, you are not responsible for WWIII—Hitler 2.0 is.

However, if you kill a butterfly and save us from WWIII, that butterfly’s death is still on you. The chain of causation does not add or subtract any points, even if your malicious actions prevented the apocalypse.

Our Spheres of Freedom and Responsibility

Everyone has their own personal sphere of freedom that sets the bounds of their responsibilities. Their actions may spill over to others in some abstract way, but if it leaves their spheres then that is the duty of other spheres.

We cannot hold the world liable for the countless mild inconveniences we face. Nor do we owe the world for all the conveniences we’ve received. We are only responsible for our personal sphere. The extent of this sphere is determined by factors like voluntary actions, our intent when performing those actions, time, and geographical proximity.

The harms of the child on the other side of the world are primarily the responsibility of the child’s family, community, and nation. It is not your fault that a government is oppressing its people or a country is engaged in civil strife (although the victims are justified in acting out of necessity). The moral responsibility for the victims rests with those freely doing the harm.

We can create legal duties to support international action and humanitarian aid, but those duties must be established through reason and dialogue, not just assumed and imposed.

Legal responsibility also needs to be justified for the law to be fair. Because of our moral duty to save the drowning child, duty to rescue laws can be reasonable (see Scanlon’s Rescue Principle).

But we cannot be reasonably liable for all the harm resulting from not donating to international charities. The world’s poor cannot sue you for damages only because of your non-action, even though your non-action was the but-for cause of their harm.

You can think of another person’s freedom as the limits of your responsibility. Choosing to insert yourself between these proximate responsibilities might actually undermine these responsibilities (see Angus Deaton’s critique of EA).

This article is not saying that donating to GiveWell isn’t good. Donating to effective causes is ethical, but only in the broad sense, like how appreciating nature or readings books is ethical. It is not ethical in the narrow sense that determines our duties to one another.

You, dear reader, are not responsible for the harm of people on the other side of the world, in distant galaxies, or in alternate universes. We each have our own spheres of freedom and responsibility that set our moral duties. And we act in accordance with those duties by tending to our garden.