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Affluence and Ethics

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mwkruse
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Wall Street Journal: Affluence and Ethics by William Easterly

Suppose you see a small child drowning in a pond. If you save him you will ruin your expensive suit. Do you save him? Of course you do. Now think about the world's extremely poor children who are going to die unless you give enough to a charity designed to help them, such as Unicef or Oxfam. Do you save them? Not often enough. In "The Life You Can Save," Peter Singer argues that the two situations are ethically equivalent. Such immediacy is compassionate and inspirational — you want to give more after reading Mr. Singer.

Unfortunately, there are several differences between these two situations. The most important is that you know exactly what to do to save the child, whereas it is not at all clear that you (or anyone else) knows exactly what to do to save the lives of poor children or how to get them out of extreme poverty. Another difference is that you are the one acting directly to save the drowning child, whereas there are multiple intermediaries between you and the poor child — an international charity, an official aid agency, a government, a local aid worker.

Mr. Singer is aware of these problems. He is aware, too, of the complicated roots of poverty: the lack of a political voice for the poor; their victimization by policemen, soldiers, gangs and corrupt bureaucrats; the weak or biased enforcement of their contract and property rights — not to mention outright expropriation and theft. He cites cases like Angola, where a corrupt government earns $30 billion annually in oil revenues — equivalent to $2,500 per citizen — and yet the life expectancy of Angolans is 41 years. Is it really so clear how to rescue a person from poverty in this situation?

Mr. Singer is also aware of faulty intermediaries in between us and the poor. …

…Yet Mr. Singer never confronts what all of this bad news means for his argument. He keeps repeating his signature equivalence between directly saving a drowning victim and indirectly saving distant poor people as if problems did not exist. …

… Mr. Singer is a compelling moral voice seeking far more compassion for those who have the least. But why has so little changed, despite decades of effort and billions spent? There is plenty of blame to go around — more than "The Life You Can Save" admits.

Comments

2 responses to “Affluence and Ethics”

  1. ZZMike Avatar
    ZZMike

    I’m extremely skeptical about anything Mr Singer says about ethics.
    In his first example, few would doubt the relative values of suit and child, nor the difference between replacing either. The second example (UNICEF or Oxfam) is trickier, because we see no immediate result of our gift. The connection to the drowning child is immediate (and it happens far more frequently that we might imagine). The connection to the starving “end user” in a far-off land is tenuous, and the chain of events and people linking start to finish is much longer. Each link of that long chain must siphon off some of the goods (otherwise they, too, go to the end of the line), and by the time the goods reach the end user, there are far les than what started.
    Then there’s the larger problem (like Angola, but more widespread) where government officials and others in positions of power (both legal and extralegal) take their cut.
    Someone recently defined foreign aid as taking money from poor people in Country A and giving it to rich people in Country B.

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  2. Michael W. Kruse Avatar
    Michael W. Kruse

    Frankly, I find some of Singer’s stuff a bit flaky but he does have a following. As Easterly says, and you are highlighting, the moral comparison is bogus.
    “… aid as taking money from poor people in Country A and giving it to rich people in Country B.”
    Easterly has written a lot on aid and his big concern is that there be feedback loops on the impact money has. Aid can a positive impact but aid givers have got to demand accountability. We don’t. And that is why so little and often so much harm is done.

    Reply

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