Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need

"Yes. I should first disclose that he is my co-podcaster on Philosophy Bites . He’s quietly becoming a specialist commentator on thought experiments in philosophy. He previously wrote a book called Would You Kill the Fat Man ? —I advised him against that title—about the so-called ‘trolley problem.’ The title comes from a variant of the trolley problem—the thought experiment in which you have to decide whether you would allow a runaway train, or trolley, to run over five people on the track, or divert it to kill only one. In the variant you are standing on a bridge with a very large person, and the train is running towards five people below, and you could push this person off the bridge, and the weight of that person would stop the train but kill him in the process. Would you push him over the bridge? Many people say no, despite being happy to switch points towards a person on a track. The thought experiment is meant to suggest that there’s more than just a question of sacrificing one person to save five going on here. Anyway, that’s where the title of David’s previous book came from. Death in a Shallow Pond is also about a single thought experiment, Peter Singer ’s famous thought experiment about a child apparently drowning in a shallow pool of water while nobody else is around. You’re walking past—would you jump in to save the child, at minimal risk to yourself? It’s a shallow pond, but you happen to be wearing very expensive shoes, and they will be ruined in the process. Most people say, yes, of course I’d save the drowning child, if there was nobody else around, even if it ruined my shoes, why do you even ask? But Peter Singer says, aha, then why don’t you give the value of the shoes you would be prepared to sacrifice for this child to save a child dying in sub-Saharan Africa for not having access to clean water or basic medicines? Consistency seems to demand that you should. There are all kinds of arguments about whether that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw, but Singer’s suggestion is that you’re inconsistent in your principles if you wouldn’t give the money. He discussed many of the objections and psychological aspects of that thought experiment, trying to seal off objections. David has now put the various responses to Peter Singer under his microscope. He tells an interesting, accessible story. He’s also more sympathetic to Peter Singer’s overall consequenialist utilitarian outlook in relation to these cases than I am. I should say, in passing, that he included a devastating counterargument that I previously raised with Singer. By this argument, if the shoes you were wearing were valuable enough, then you should walk past the drowning child and auction your shoes without getting them wet, and save five other children with the proceeds instead. The fact that Singer concedes that under certain circumstances that would be right should be sufficient to undermine this thought experiment, but Dave clearly didn’t as, as he only put my objection in a footnote. A lot of people have said that. They’re an area in which philosophers can demonstrate their creativity in fascinating and sometimes entertaining ways. Often they’re like short stories, pared back to the bones. The idea is that they eliminate the irrelevant aspects of the kind of case you are discussing so that you can then tweak features,and run different versions. In reality, the richer details of life are what makes moral reasoning complicated and difficult. Thought experiments attract the kind of philosopher who likes chess problems and crossword puzzles and can sometimes get so far removed from real life that discussing them becomes an end itself without obvious applications. They can also have a strong rhetorical element. Philosophers assume, when they put forward a thought experiment, they can somehow intuit the reasonable response to that thought experiment. They often assume a universality of response. But experimental psychologists have shown that some sorts of thought experiments produce cultural differences of response —between different age and social class groups. So that element is slightly worrying too. I also have a perhaps idiosyncratic worry about some of these thought experiments. They often involve drowning people, running them over in trams, torturing people. They’re presented as imagined schematic scenarios, but I think that shows a lack of imagination—they are so reduced that they allow us to make jokes about torture, or wiping out humanity, trivialise these things. If you really thought about the reality of torture and the rest, you wouldn’t use an abstract example using, or at least you wouldn’t relish the details in the way some thought-experiment-driven philosophers do. It feels wrong to be glib about extreme situations of suffering like this, and at worst reveals a lack of moral imagination. Sorry, I don’t want to bog this conversation down. I’m at risk of ranting. But one more quick thing: if philosophers remove too many details, it starts to become a kind of geometrical exercise, rather than something that connects in an important way with the messiness of real-life moral decision-making. There’s a big question about whether you can reduce moral reasoning to that kind of simulation, a simplistic set of rules. Some philosophers think you can. Others, the ones I prefer, move backwards and forwards between thought experiments and real examples. David Edmonds does this to some degree. Jonathan Glover is a very good example of a moral philosopher who takes this approach, particularly in his books Causing Death and Saving Lives , and his book Humanity focuses on historical examples. When you’re dealing with actual complex human beings in far messier situations you might get a very different response. And that response might be the best one available given the specifics of the situation. I’m not sure that the thought experiments help us so much in those sorts of cases. There is a place for thought experiments in philosophy, and they have featured throughout its histroy, but I don’t believe they should provide the last word. Plenty of philosophers disagree with this, of course. And some make a career of constructing more and more elaborate thought experiments and not much else."