Again, Is It Possible to Be "Good"?

Part 2: Looking past simple trolley problems to the bigger challenges in our world

For Rewind Wednesday, I introduced a famous essay on moral praxis in the modern world: Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972). I know, I know: philosophical exercises like this one can be tedious affairs; who, save other academics, really enjoys wrestling with the idea that they might be “bad people” if they don’t redirect their money from luxuries to international aid for famine and disease relief?

But I raised the thought-experiment to make a bigger point, which I gestured at in Part 1 by noting that Singer’s essay has a very narrow notion of moral agency and its actors. His piece treats government as merely a larger version of the individual actor—an entity with bigger pockets for donation, and not a system with many more levers that could be pulled in the name of social equity—and it regards only those of financial means as humans capable of demonstrating moral virtue or vice.

Singer doesn’t hide these weaknesses, either; he openly discusses the tension between philosophy and political theory, and he admits to targeting his fellow philosophers—or academics in general—as people who have more moral “capital” to spend.

And fair enough: he chose his audience, and tried to speak to it as well as he could.

But one other element from Singer’s essay is worth mentioning here, for all readers to consider, before paid subscribers and I explore a bigger question.

Singer famously draws the following comparison to explain why there is a moral imperative to donate to those in need halfway across the world:

[I]f it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it. An application of this principle would be as follows: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. The uncontroversial appearance of the principle just stated is deceptive. If it were acted upon, even in its qualified form, our lives, our society, and our world would be fundamentally changed. For the principle takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position.

This section of Singer’s paper has been discussed ad nauseam since its publication, with a plethora of scholars in the last half-century wearying the question of how similar the situation of a drowning child in one’s vicinity truly is to that of a child dying of treatable malnutrition or disease in another country. (And also, among a particularly “special” subset, the difference between “ought” and “must”.)

But therein lies the semantic danger that thought-experiments like this one create: the presentation of a single anecdote to support the argument invites the idea that, if only this one example could be “cracked”, the whole of Singer’s claim would fall apart, and people of means would no longer need to worry about whether buying luxury goods when they could be donating more to NGOs makes them bad people.

And so, people fixate on the drowning child example, and dig down into the minutiae of the argument, more often than they step back and look at the bigger picture.

This kind of semantic debate permeates a great deal of academic discourse, along with media and activist debate on a range of other subjects. It’s why I refuse to play word games around the nightmare in Gaza, or around nationalist movements in the US and Europe—not because I’m “afraid” to use certain terms for what’s happening, but because I recognize how easily language is weaponized (especially by those in positions of academic, political, and media power) to derail the conversation entirely.

It is so easy for war- and hatemongers to latch on to a word they’ve decided is unacceptable, and either dismiss the whole of your argument from its presence, or else drag you into an argument over semantics that wastes time, energy, and resources. I’ve seen it done around the words “fascism” and “Nazi”. I’ve seen it done around the terms “apartheid” and “genocide”. I’ve seen it done around “whiteness” and “racism”. And I will not play those games. I write (among other things) about histories of racism, genocide, apartheid, and fascism, so that we can all see more plainly the shape of past transgressions that haunt so very many current events.

People acting in good faith will show up for those conversations.

People who just want to play “gotcha!” politics will scamper off to try to derail conversations elsewhere.

(But I also certainly don’t criticize those whose activism involves a more express use of such terms. We’re just “doing the work” in different ways. It takes a village, etc.!)

Meanwhile, the paragraph that follows Singer’s example of the drowning child includes, to my mind, a much more provocative claim—and yet, it’s a claim I don’t see discussed anywhere near as much, because the academic world especially has “captured” this conversation in a way that keeps us stuck on individual action.

Here’s what Singer goes on to say:

I do not think I need to say much in defense of the refusal to take proximity and distance into account. The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away. If we accept any principle of impartiality, universalizability, equality, or whatever, we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from us (or we are far away from him). Admittedly, it is possible that we are in a better position to judge what needs to be done to help a person near to us than one far away, and perhaps also to provide the assistance we judge to be necessary. If this were the case, it would be a reason for helping those near to us first. This may once have been a justification for being more concerned with the poor in one’s own town than with famine victims in India. Unfortunately for those who like to keep their moral responsibilities limited, instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation. From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a “global village” has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation. Expert observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed in famine-prone areas, can direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block. There would seem, therefore, to be no possible justification for discriminating on geographical grounds.

Essentially, Singer argues that there was a time when individuals could get away with not doing more for people internationally—but that time has passed, and this new global economy has utterly transformed our moral calculus. Even showing an interest in the local poor isn’t good enough anymore: not when there are far worse levels of poverty to be addressed overseas, as well.

So this is where we come to my core question and musing. As I wrote on Wednesday:

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?

Folks who won’t be joining us below the fold: I hope you’re having a good weekend, and minding your hearts amid the mad depravity of current world events.

Everyone else: Let’s dive in.