We should stop worrying about what’s right or wrong, or about reaching moral perfection. Instead, University of Colorado at Boulder philosopher, Alastair Norcross argues we should focus on how we can do better and avoid doing worse. Figures like Peter Singer make ethical demands of us that can be overwhelming. We must remember that every small step toward better counts.

A little over fifty years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer published an article that changed the way philosophers think and talk about the morality of helping others. In it, he appealed to a hypothetical example to motivate his claims. Here’s a version of it: On our way to give a lecture, we come across a small child, drowning in a shallow pond. No one else is in sight, and the child will be dead within minutes without our help.

We all agree that we should save the child. That’s easy. A bit of mud and water on our clothes, a bit of bother finding someone to give the child to, perhaps having to miss the lecture we were about to give, perhaps even having to forgo our lecture fee. But none of that could excuse our failure to save the child. Pretty much everyone agrees with this. Why? Because pretty much everyone cares about others, at least to some extent. That is, very few people are purely egotistical. Even if we are highly self-obsessed, and some of us certainly are, we also think that others matter too. We think it would be bad if that child were to drown in the pond. And if we could save the child, especially without a great deal of sacrifice on our own part, it would be bad not to. Not just bad, we might think, but wrong too. This much is fairly uncontroversial.

___

No matter how many we save, there are always more who need saving.

___

But then, of course, we notice that there are children drowning all over the world, most of them not literally drowning, but dying nonetheless, and death is death, whether from drowning, starvation, dehydration, or any number of other easily preventable but depressingly common causes. We may not be in close physical proximity to many of them, but we are in close causal proximity. With our credit cards and a few clicks on a website, or dialing a number on our phones, we can save a dying child, without getting wet or muddy or late for a lecture. It is easier to save those children, and, one may argue, the failure to do so is even more wrong. Singer’s version of right and wrong starts to feel like an overwhelming responsibility, and we need a different way to frame it.

SUGGESTED VIEWING Challenging Peter Singer's ethics With Peter Singer

Perhaps we try to claim that these real children are different from the hypothetical drowning child in the pond. Relevantly different, that is. But how could that be? Most of them are thousands of miles away from us, but how could that make a moral difference? It couldn’t. Or perhaps we’ll try to claim that it’s not the physical distance, but the social distance that matters. The drowning child in the pond is a fellow citizen, or at least fellow resident, of the same country as us.

But that can’t make a moral difference either. What if the original child in the pond scenario took place in a distant country that we were visiting as a guest lecturer? As a last desperate attempt to drive a moral wedge between the hypothetical child in the pond and the millions of real children dying of easily preventable causes every year, we point out that these children live in countries with a low standard of living and life expectancy. If we save them, they’ll probably only have a short and miserable life anyway, so what’s the point?

___

Perhaps it’s because the world is a truly and irredeemably shitty place.

___

There are at least three problems with this desperate attempt. One, to the extent that it’s true that the standard of living and life expectancy are low, that’s at least in part due to the fact that we are using this reasoning to avoid helping them. Two, it’s actually not true that the standard of living and life expectancy are so low as to make it not worthwhile to save them. And three, as an illustration of this, just imagine the pond scenario taking place in one of these countries with a low standard of living and life expectancy. Again, we are there to give a guest lecture. Now imagine that we leave the child to drown, and attempt to justify our behavior to its parents a bit later by claiming that the child would probably have had a short and miserable life anyway, so there was no point in saving it.

SUGGESTED VIEWING Moral facts and moral fantasy With Ruth Chang, Simon Blackburn, Joanna Kavenna

So, after the failure of all attempts to distinguish morally between the child in Singer’s pond and the actual dying children in the world, we give in and click those buttons on the computer, or phone CARE or UNICEF or OXFAM, or whichever charity our concerned empirically-minded friends tell us will actually do a lot of good, and give them a credit card number. That was easy.

___

This level of sacrifice is simply too much to demand of us.

___

But wait, there’s more. We’ve saved a dying child, or several dying children, but there are always more children to be saved. More than twenty thousand children under the age of five die every day from easily preventable causes. No matter how many we save, there are always more who need saving. It’s as if Singer’s pond is crammed full with drowning children. Every time we pull one, or several, out, we see that there are still many more about to drown. In fact, in the time it takes us to save a child, several more have somehow found their way into the pond. WTF, as my students say in their endless texts. Why is this? Not the text thing. That’s because the younger generation has no literary sense. Perhaps it’s because the world is a truly and irredeemably shitty place. It’s simply a depressing fact of nature that we can’t save them all. There’s so much suffering in the world, and not enough people who can prevent it—and certainly no supremely powerful benevolent being.

But this isn’t quite right, is it? There are plenty of resources in the world, and plenty of people with enough affluence to spare a reasonable chunk of their resources to take care of the basic needs of everyone many times over. But most affluent people are doing very little, if anything, to help others. Where does that leave those of us who want to help?

According to some approaches to morality, it can seem that doing anything less than the very best we can would be wrong. A popular moral theory, maximizing utilitarianism, tells us that we must always make the choice, amongst our options, that would lead to the largest net balance of well-being. No matter how many children we have already saved, if we still have disposable resources, not needed for our basic survival, we should save yet more. After all, if we don’t need those resources for our own survival, how could whatever else we would do with them be more important than the lives of those we can save?

___

Most of us can do a bit more than we already are, without feeling overburdened.

___

But it can seem that this level of sacrifice is simply too much to demand of us. How can it be reasonable to say that someone who devotes large portions of their disposable resources, maybe even over half of them, would still be acting wrongly, because there is yet more that they could be doing, especially when most people give almost nothing? In fact, when faced with such a demanding version of morality, it wouldn’t be surprising for people to conclude that they should give up on morality altogether. If it’s really that difficult to satisfy the demands of morality, why should we care about morality in the first place?

But, of course, most of us do care about morality. We care about the suffering of others, and are motivated to do at least something about it. Is there an approach that can offer positive guidance to those of us who want to do something to help, without telling us that we are moral failures if we don’t do the very most we can?

SUGGESTED VIEWING Morality and prejudice With Tommy J. Curry, Michael Huemer, Melis Erdur, Barry C. Smith

Luckily, yes, there is. The version of utilitarianism which I have developed and defended in various articles and a recent book, scalar utilitarianism, dispenses with the notions of right and wrong (or rather explains them as contextually determined social constructs), and focuses on judgments of better and worse.

When we consider something like the hypothetical pond scenario, we all (or almost all) agree that it would be much better if the child is saved than if it drowns. If we are the ones in a position to save it, the fact that it would be much better for us to save it than to walk on by and ignore it will almost certainly motivate us to save it.

___

Don’t ask what is right or wrong. Ask instead how you can do better and avoid doing worse.

___

Even though we probably won’t be in that exact situation, when we focus on our more obvious opportunities to do better by helping others, we can be effective agents of change. Instead of lamenting the fact that we aren’t doing even more than we are, we can focus on the relatively easy opportunities to help. Most of us can do a bit more than we already are, without feeling overburdened.

We can also look for opportunities to make a positive difference that might not even come as a net cost. For example, changing what we eat, to reduce (or even eliminate) animal products from our diets, will help reduce unnecessary animal suffering, cut down on climate warming emissions, reduce overburdening the water supply, and improve our own health. It’s a win-win-win-win!.

Scalar utilitarianism offers us a way to live morally well without the impossible burden of being morally perfect. Every small step toward better counts. When we ask ourselves if we could, relatively easily, be doing more to help others, including animals, the answer will probably be an obvious yes. There’s simply no need to get into the depressing weeds of overly demanding moral theories. Don’t ask what is right or wrong. Ask instead how you can do better and avoid doing worse.