Is It Possible to Be "Good" in Our World?

Part I: Looking at an old argument from Peter Singer, as a warm-up

I’m trying to get better at writing briefly, even though I quite enjoy a long, chewy read myself. In this case, I’m cheating a little: I want to set up an argument today, by reflecting on an essay published some fifty years ago, and using that essay to get us all on the same page. However, tomorrow’s piece will mostly be for paid subscribers, which might be considered deeply unethical on principle: How, if this is an important moral issue, do I justify putting any part of my analysis of it beyond a paywall?

I won’t try to justify it, though. You and I both know the surface reason—that I have to try to “add value” for subscribers, if I want to “grow this platform” in a way that might one day provide me for financial income—but it’s a flimsy reason, because I’ve broken the self-created rule in the past, and probably will again.

However, part of the conclusion I’m going to draw tomorrow is that it’s not really possible for us to be “good”—that is, morally impeccable—in the modern world.

And when seen in that light, my choice to put part of my argument behind paywall is kind of a bittersweet binding of theory and praxis, no?

The impossibility of being good doesn’t mean we don’t strive to do better, mind you.

It simply means recognizing that moral philosophy sometimes cannot go much further than outlining hard limits to our species’ ability to be “moral” at all.

Enough abstraction, though—

Many people in the last fifty years have been greatly bothered by Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972), because the argument itself is fairly sound. It is difficult to come up with compelling counters to its core premise, and yet, that premise essentially says that most humans in affluent cultures are “bad” people—immoral people—because they spend money on luxuries instead of using that money to answer their obligation to worldly suffering.

And that’s an uncomfortable thing to hear, isn’t it? That we’re all bad people unless we’re giving most of our money away? It also creates an unsettling, if implicit moral division between people of means and people who are suffering. The former group, in Singer’s essay, is automatically immoral for buying a fancy coffee or new clothes instead of donating to a robust global non-profit. Meanwhile, the latter group—the needy—can at best be said to be incapable of exercising either moral virtue or moral vice: their lack of means denies them the chance to make any “moral” choice at all.

Many people, upon hearing Singer’s argument, thus bristle at the imputation placed on them as Westerners: the idea that, even if their lives are not perfect and also contain complex bodies of suffering, they are still bad people—can’t be escaped!—if not always focusing on what they can do financially to alleviate suffering elsewhere.

But my core premise, in today’s set-up and tomorrow’s follow-through, is that this argument says something much more profound about the nature of morality itself.

And to save anyone from frustration if they won’t be joining us tomorrow, the gist is this: I ultimately conclude that morality as a concept is falsely contained within the individual in the first place. Even if there is such a thing as a “moral actor”, the conditions that create the possibility for moral action are inescapably contextual—and that means that, when faced with “trolley problems” of this type (philosophical would-you-do-its), we are by and large being sidetracked from the greater concern.

Here’s a brief reflection on Singer, then, to get us started in considering what I mean.

Famine, affluence, and morality

There was already a major famine weighing on the conscience of the world when Peter Singer first published his (in)famous essay in 1972, and the world was on the cusp of a long series of others, too. In preceding years, the Nigerian Civil War (also, the Biafran War) had caused horrific suffering, and this blended into growing suffering across the Sahel region, in part from drought triggered by natural climate cycles, and also in parts of Asia. In the early 1970s, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Madagascar Mali, Mauritania, and Sudan would endure deep losses, while global food scarcity also afflicted people in the Soviet Union and India.

And although some of this suffering was environmental, and some created by military conflict, the US, Canada, and Australia also contributed to the problem by subsidizing farmers not to grow grain, which drove up the global price of these products.

Such foreign policy concerns aren’t directly addressed in Singer’s paper, but I’m not raising the omission as a “gotcha”. Rather, it’s simply important to remember that philosophers and fiction-writers are similar in this regard: we decide on the “rules” of our universe, and we shape our stories within those confines. In this case, and in many papers like it, the core argument doesn’t concern itself with second-degree actions—even though Singer certainly starts by establishing a worldly context for his remarks:

As I write this, in November I97I, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. The suffering and death that are occurring there now are not inevitable, not unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond the capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to very small proportions. The decisions and actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any significant way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to relief funds; they have not written to their parliamentary representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing the refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs. At the government level, no government has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the refugees to survive for more than a few days. Britain, for instance, has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given $14,750,000. For comparative purposes, Britain's share of the nonrecoverable development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project is already in excess of $275,000,000, and on present estimates will reach $440,000,000. The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as highly as it values the lives of the nine million refugees. Australia is another country which, on a per capita basis, is well up in the “aid to Bengal” table. Australia's aid, however, amounts to less than onetwelfth of the cost of Sydney's new opera house. The total amount given, from all sources, now stands at about $65,000,000. The estimated cost of keeping the refugees alive for one year is $464,000,000. Most of the refugees have now been in the camps for more than six months. The World Bank has said that India needs a minimum of $300,000,000 in assistance from other countries before the end of the year. It seems obvious that assistance on this scale will not be forthcoming. India will be forced to choose between letting the refugees starve or diverting funds from her own development program, which will mean that more of her own people will starve in the future.

I’ve given you the first paragraph in full, because I find it fascinating how much Singer does mention a broader context before deciding that the most important focus, when discussing moral action, is the individual human actor of financial means.

And when subsequent philosophers struggle with his argument, they usually do so by accepting this leap, across the opening paragraph, from the systemic to the personal.

They then focus on Singer’s core assertions: namely, that

• “suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad”

• “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it”

• items above and beyond the necessities of life have no relevant moral value here (an implicit claim, more or less, but essential to the argument)

• therefore, we have a moral responsibility to give money we would have spent on luxuries to organizations that can use it to address hunger, disease, and other forms of worldly suffering.

This last point is best articulated in the following paragraph:

The outcome of this argument is that our traditional moral categories are upset. The traditional distinction between duty and charity cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place we normally draw it. Giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund is regarded as an act of charity in our society. The bodies which collect money are known as “charities.” These organizations see themselves in this way-if you send them a check, you will be thanked for your “generosity.” Because giving money is regarded as an act of charity, it is not thought that there is anything wrong with not giving. The charitable man may be praised, but the man who is not charitable is not condemned. People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look “well-dressed” we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called “supererogatory”—an act which it would be good to do, but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so.

You can see now, maybe, why Singer’s article made so many bristle. It is a direct confrontation—challenging the individual, and the individual’s whole way of life.

And as one might expect from a thoughtful philosophical argument, much of the rest of the paper most certainly anticipates objections, including an argument of extremes (i.e., by that logic, shouldn’t we give away most everything?) that Singer answers by outlining a “moderate” position one could take on donation instead.

But my own interest lies in the limited scope of Singer’s discussion of the systemic problem. Later in the piece, he again returns to the matter of government action—but always in a way that mirrors the actions of the individual, the same way that some people erroneously compare a household budget with the budget of a state (say, when talking about issues of relevance to the deficit and debt). As Singer writes:

I do not, of course, want to dispute the contention that governments of affluent nations should be giving many times the amount of genuine, no-strings-attached aid that they are giving now. I agree, too, that giving privately is not enough, and that we ought to be campaigning actively for entirely new standards for both public and private contributions to famine relief. Indeed, I would sympathize with someone who thought that campaigning was more important than giving oneself, although I doubt whether preaching what one does not practice would be very effective. Unfortunately, for many people the idea that “it's the government's responsibility” is a reason for not giving which does not appear to entail any political action either.

You see the omission, don’t you?

Even when discussing the government, and other such broader systems, Singer’s main point is to use these larger apparatuses as a backdrop for talking about individual action. The government is just a person with bigger pockets, under this logic—and not, in fact, a much more proactive participant in the creation of a world that has so many sites of military instability and food distribution issues in the first place.

To be fair to Singer, though, this argument emerged early in his career, and he would expand upon many elements of it across a storied career. Moreover, he’s perfectly honest about his unease around politics in the paper itself. Last week, we discussed some of the tensions that exist between philosophy and political theory, when reflecting on Hannah Arendt in interview. This paper manifests some of those tensions well, when Singer notes near the end of his essay:

It is sometimes said, though less often now than it used to be, that philosophers have no special role to play in public affairs, since most public issues depend primarily on an assessment of facts. On questions of fact, it is said, philosophers as such have no special expertise, and so it has been possible to engage in philosophy without committing oneself to any position on major public issues. No doubt there are some issues of social policy and foreign policy about which it can truly be said that a really expert assessment of the facts is required before taking sides or acting, but the issue of famine is surely not one of these. The facts about the existence of suffering are beyond dispute. Nor, I think, is it disputed that we can do something about it, either through orthodox methods of famine relief or through population control or both. This is therefore an issue on which philosophers are competent to take a position. The issue is one which faces everyone who has more money than he needs to support himself and his dependents, or who is in a position to take some sort of political action. These categories must include practically every teacher and student of philosophy in the universities of the Western world. If philosophy is to deal with matters that are relevant to both teachers and students, this is an issue that philosophers should discuss.

So, I do not hold it against Singer that he posed his argument in the manner that he did. I see the audience of academics he was trying to reach, and the parameters of his discipline that shaped his assumptions around topics of relevance to morality.

As a humanist, too, I almost by definition have to endorse any thinking about the human actor as an essential agent of moral action.

But where I diverge from Singer’s comments in this breakout essay is in thinking that “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” only serves as an argument about moral action.

I think Singer’s premises are fairly strong. I think his case is compelling.

And I think that his focus on the individual of means, as a moral failure whenever they spend money on non-essentials in a starving, suffering world, can easily distract us from a larger and more unnerving question—the sort of question that can only emerge when thinking about the systems that exacerbate natural inequity in the first place:

Is it possible to be “good” in our world?

Or are the moral tests that some of us face, and which necessarily reduce other human beings to mere lumps of testing material, an important sign that the very concept of individual morality breaks down when applied to humanity at its current scale?

That’s the question we’ll take up again tomorrow, for paid subscribers.

I hope you “enjoyed” our brief wander through Singer’s initial argument, either way.

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Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.

ML