Chapter 1: Saving a Child
On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. What should you do?
I teach a course called Practical Ethics. When we start talking about global poverty, I ask my students what they think a person should do in this situation. Predictably, they respond that you should save the child. “What about your shoes? And being late for work?” I ask them. They brush that aside. How could anyone consider a pair of shoes, or missing an hour or two at work, a good reason for not saving a child’s life?
I first told the story of the drowning child in the shallow pond in “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” one of my first articles, originally published in 1972, but still widely used in courses in ethics. In 2011, something resembling this hypothetical situation occurred in Foshan, a city in southern China. A 2-year-old girl named Wang Yue wandered away from her mother and into a small street, where she was hit by a van that did not stop. A CCTV camera captured the incident. But what followed was even more shocking. As Wang Yue lay bleeding in the street, 18 people walked or rode their bikes right past her, without stopping to help. In most cases, the camera showed clearly that they saw her, but then averted their gaze as they passed by. A second van ran over her leg before a street cleaner raised the alarm. Wang Yue was rushed to hospital, but sadly, it was too late. She died.
If you’re like most people, you are probably saying to yourself right now: “I wouldn’t have walked past that child. I would have stopped to help.” Perhaps you would have; but remember that, as we have already seen, 5.4 million children under 5 years old died in 2017, with a majority of those deaths being from preventable or treatable causes. Here is just one case, described by a man in Ghana to a researcher from the World Bank:
“Take the death of this small boy this morning, for example. The boy died of measles. We all know he could have been cured at the hospital. But the parents had no money and so the boy died a slow and painful death, not of measles but out of poverty.”
Think about something like that happening hundreds of times every day. Some children die because they don’t have enough to eat. More die from measles, malaria, and diarrhea, conditions that either don’t exist in developed nations or, if they do, are almost never fatal. The children are vulnerable to these diseases because they have no safe drinking water or sanitation, and because when they do fall ill, their parents can’t afford any medical treatment or may not even be aware that treatment is needed. Organizations like Oxfam, Against Malaria Foundation, Evidence Action, and many others are working to reduce poverty, or provide mosquito nets or safe drinking water. These efforts are reducing the toll. If these organizations had more money, they could do even more, and more lives would be saved.
Now think about your own situation. By donating a relatively small amount of money, you could save a child’s life. Maybe it would take more than the amount needed to buy a pair of shoes, but we all spend money on things we don’t really need, whether on drinks, meals out, clothing, movies, concerts, vacations, new cars, or house renovations. Is it possible that by choosing to spend your money on such things rather than contributing to an effective charity, you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved?
Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. Not only does Bob get pleasure from driving and caring for his car, he also knows that its rising market value means that he will be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement.
One day when Bob is out for a drive, he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard, is rolling down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child who appears to be absorbed in playing on the tracks. Oblivious to the runaway train, the child is in great danger. Bob can’t stop the train, and the child is too far away to hear his warning shout, but Bob can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is parked. If he does so, nobody will be killed, but the train will crash through the decaying barrier at the end of the siding and destroy his Bugatti.
Thinking of his joy in owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob decides not to throw the switch.
Philosopher Peter Unger developed this variation on the story of the drowning child to challenge us to think further about how much we believe we should sacrifice in order to save the life of a child. Unger’s story adds a factor often crucial to our thinking about real-world poverty: uncertainty about the outcome of our sacrifice. Bob cannot be certain that the child will die if he does nothing and saves his car. Perhaps at the last moment, the child will hear the train and leap to safety. In the same way, most of us can summon doubts about whether the money we give to a charity is really helping the people it is intended to help.
In my experience, people almost always respond that Bob acted badly when he did not throw the switch and destroy his most cherished and valuable possession, thereby sacrificing his hope of a financially secure retirement. We can’t take a serious risk with a child’s life, they say, merely to save a car, no matter how rare and valuable the car may be. By implication, we should also believe that with the simple act of saving money for retirement, we are acting as badly as Bob. For in saving money for retirement, we are effectively refusing to use that money to help save lives. This is a difficult implication to confront. How can it be wrong to save for a comfortable retirement? There is, at the very least, something puzzling here.
Another example devised by Unger tests the level of sacrifice we think people should make to alleviate suffering in cases when a life is not at stake:
You are driving your vintage sedan down a country lane when you are stopped by a hiker who has seriously injured his leg. He asks you to take him to the nearest hospital. If you refuse, there is a good chance that he will lose his leg. On the other hand, if you agree to take him to hospital, he is likely to bleed onto the seats, which you have recently, and expensively, restored in soft white leather.