37

4. FOUNDATIONS AND ARGUMENTS: IMPARTIALITY

AND OUR DUTIES TO THE POOR

So far we have focused on identifying moral factors and principles.

However, moral philosophy is not only concerned with asserting moral
principle but providing rational support for those principles. In philosophy,
we refer to the kind of reasoning that lends rational support to a thesis as a
philosophical argument. Our focus in this chapter will be on reconstructing
and evaluating an author’s argument for a given thesis.
In everyday English, we often use the word “argument” to refer to
something inherently combative, like two fans arguing about which hockey
team has a more entertaining style of play or two political pundits arguing
about which candidate will be worse for the economy. This is not what
philosophers mean when we talk about arguments. A philosophical argument
is a line of reasoning aimed at providing rational support for or against a
specific thesis. Our objective in studying the next reading is to understand
the structure of the argument in addition to understanding the content of
the view.

4.1. Singer on our Obligations to the Poor

In 1971, Peter Singer published the article, “Famine, Affluence, and

Morality” which had a profound impact not only on moral philosophy but
also on how people in affluent nations view the extent of our
responsibilities and obligations toward those living in conditions of
extreme poverty. Singer’s writings over the decades also inspired the
“effective altruism” movement, which advocates using our resources in
ways that maximally contribute to increasing well-being in the world.

Peter Singer, “Famine Affluence and Morality”

As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East

Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. The suffering
and death that are occurring there now are not inevitable, not
unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty,
a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million
people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond the
38

capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce

any further suffering to very small proportions. The decisions
and actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering.
Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary
decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few
exceptions, not responded to the situation in any significant
way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to
relief funds; they have not written to their parliamentary
representatives demanding increased government assistance;
they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts,
or done anything else directed toward providing the refugees
with the means to satisfy their essential needs. At the
government level, no government has given the sort of massive
aid that would enable the refugees to survive for more than a
few days…
What are the moral implications of a situation like this? In what
follows, I shall argue that the way people in relatively affluent
countries react to a situation like that in Bengal cannot be
justified; indeed, the whole way we look at moral issues—our
moral conceptual scheme—needs to be altered, and with it, the
way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society.
In arguing for this conclusion I will not, of course, claim to be
morally neutral. I shall, however, try to argue for the moral
position that I take, so that anyone who accepts certain
assumptions, to be made explicit, will, I hope, accept my
conclusion.
I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack
of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. I think most people
will agree about this, although one may reach the same view by
different routes. I shall not argue for this view. People can hold
all sorts of eccentric positions, and perhaps from some of them
it would not follow that death by starvation is in itself bad. It is
difficult, perhaps impossible, to refute such positions, and so for
brevity I will henceforth take this assumption as accepted. Those
who disagree need read no further.
My next point is this: if it is in our power to prevent something
bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of
comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it. By
“without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance”
I mean without causing anything else comparably bad to
happen, or doing something that is wrong in itself, or failing to
promote some moral good, comparable in significance to the bad
thing that we can prevent. This principle seems almost as
uncontroversial as the last one. It requires us only to prevent
what is bad, and not to promote what is good, and it requires
this of us only when we can do it without sacrificing anything
 39

that is, from the moral point of view, comparably important. I

could even, as far as the application of my argument to the
Bengal emergency is concerned, qualify the point so as to make
it: if 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.
…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)…
…The fact that there are millions of other people in the same
position, in respect to the Bengali refugees, as I am, does not
make the situation significantly different from a situation in
which I am the only person who can prevent something very bad
from occurring. Again, of course, I admit that there is a
psychological difference between the cases; one feels less guilty
about doing nothing if one can point to others, similarly placed,
who have also done nothing. Yet this can make no real difference
to our moral obligations. Should I consider that I am less obliged
to pull the drowning child out of the pond if on looking around
I see other people, no further away than I am, who have also
noticed the child but are doing nothing? One has only to ask this
question to see the absurdity of the view that numbers lessen
obligation. It is a view that is an ideal excuse for inactivity;
unfortunately most of the major evils – poverty, overpopulation,
pollution – are problems in which everyone is almost equally
involved.
…
40

If my argument so far has been sound, neither our distance from

a preventable evil nor the number of other people who, in
respect to that evil, are in the same situation as we are, lessens
our obligation to mitigate or prevent that evil. I shall therefore
take as established the principle I asserted earlier. As I have
already said, I need to assert it only in its qualified form: if it is
in our power to prevent something very bad from happening,
without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we
ought, morally, to do it.
The outcome of this argument is that our traditional moral
categories are upset. The traditional distinction between duty
and charity cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place we
normally draw it. Giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund is
regarded as an act of charity in our society. The bodies which
collect money are known as “charities.” These organizations see
themselves in this way—if you send them a check, you will be
thanked for your “generosity.” Because giving money is
regarded as an act of charity, it is not thought that there is
anything wrong with not giving. The charitable man may be
praised, but the man who is not charitable is not condemned.
People do not feel in any way ashamed or guilty about spending
money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine
relief. (Indeed, the alternative does not occur to them.) This way
of looking at the matter cannot be justified. When we buy new
clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look “well-dressed”
we are not providing for any important need. We would not be
sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear
our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing
so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It
follows from what I have said earlier that we ought to give
money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not
need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable, or generous.
Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have
called “supererogatory” —an act which it would be good to do,
but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give the
money away, and it is wrong not to do so.

The first step in analyzing an argument is identifying the conclusion. The

conclusion of an argument is the specific thesis or claim that one is trying
to support.
In general, good philosophic writing provides an explicit statement of this
thesis, for example by using phrases such as “I will argue that…” or “The
primary thesis of this paper is that…” In the above selection, Singer uses
the former:
 41

I shall argue that the way people in relatively affluent countries react
to a situation like that in Bengal cannot be justified; indeed, the
whole way we look at moral issues—our moral conceptual scheme—
needs to be altered, and with it, the way of life that has come to be
taken for granted in our society
In this statement, Singer tells us that his overall goal in the paper is to
challenge our conceptual scheme. But what, specifically, does he mean by
this?
In the last paragraph of the excerpt Singer says that one implication of his
argument is that “the traditional distinction between duty and charity
cannot be drawn, or at least, not in the place we normally draw it.” This
tells us two things. First, it tells us that the specific acts that Singer has in
mind are those that are normally considered to be acts of charity, like
donating something of value to organizations which help to reduce the
amount of suffering and death that occurs due to a lack of food, shelter, or
medical supplies. Second, it tells us that Singer conceives of the ultimate
moral status of these acts in terms of rightness and wrongness rather than in
terms of the virtue of charity. Putting these together, we get the following
characterization of the relevant conclusion:

Singer’s Thesis: It is morally wrong for anyone with the means to

purchase luxury items not to donate to organizations that help to
reduce suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical
supplies.

Now that we have a clear sense of the conclusion, the next step is to identify
the premises. The premises of a philosophical argument are the claims – the
facts and principles – that are put forward in support of the conclusion.
When the conclusion of an argument is a claim about the moral status of an
action, the premises typically consist of the moral factors and moral
principles that determine that moral status.
To identify the moral factors, we can begin where Singer does, “with the
assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical
care are bad.” In saying that suffering and death are bad, Singer is saying
that they are morally relevant. This means that facts connecting a given
action to this kind of suffering and death are moral factors. Singer then
states that his “next point” is that “if it is in our power to prevent something
bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable
moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” This expresses a moral
principle which gives considerable weight to the first factor. Thus, even if
we give some moral weight to our materialistic desires, we end up with the
following list:

F1. Donating money to certain organizations contributing to reducing

the number of people who suffer and die from lack of food, shelter,
and medical care.
42

F2. Donating money to certain organizations reduces the amount of

unnecessary, luxury items one is able to purchase.

P1. If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening,

without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral
importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

I will refer to P1 as “Singer’s Principle.” This principle tells us that F1

outweighs F2 in a way that creates a moral obligation to donate money to
organizations that help reduce the amount of suffering and death caused
by extreme poverty. But should we accept Singer’s Principle?
In various writings, Singer non only asserts his thesis and supporting
principle, but provides arguments for that claims. In the next section, we
will analyze that argument.

4.2. Singer’s Argument by Analogy

The strategy Singer uses to defend his moral principle is an argument by

analogy. We have already seen an example of this strategy in Chapter 2
when we looked at Alistair Norcross’s example of FRED’S BASEMENT. In the
above selection, Singer introduces us to the example we can call SHALLOW
POND. In moral philosophy, most arguments by analogy involve an attempt
to establish a controversial moral claim (e.g. that eating meat is wrong, or
that donating to charity is obligatory) by showing that the controversial
case is alike in all morally relevant respects to a case that most people will
agree has the claimed moral status (e.g. that torturing puppies is wrong or
that it is obligatory to save the child in the pond).
There are different ways of understanding the details of exactly how
arguments by analogy work. For this course, we will understand this type
of argument as involving two key claims:

EXPLANATORY POWER OF MORAL PRINCIPLE: The moral status of the

uncontroversial case is best explained by moral principle P.

SAMENESS OF MORAL FACTORS: The moral factors involved in the two

cases are instances of the same general type; hence, they interact as
prescribed by principle P in both cases.

The uncontroversial case is used to provide support for the relevant moral
principle by claiming that it provides a compelling explanation and
justification for the moral status in the uncontroversial case. Provided that
the factors in the controversial case are morally analogous to those in the
uncontroversial case, this principle will apply in the controversial case as
well thereby justifying the more controversial claim about moral status.
 43

To illustrate, we can look at how this applies to the argument from SHALLOW
POND to SINGER’S THESIS. The relevant facts in SHALLOW POND are:

F3. If I do not wade into the pond and rescue the child, the child will
die from drowning.

F4. If I do wade into the pond, my clothes will get muddy.

Singer takes it to be uncontroversial that F3 overrides F4 in a way that

makes it morally wrong not to wade into the pond to rescue the child. This
is what I’m calling the uncontroversial case. The controversial case here is
that regarding the wrongness of the consumer behaviour of most people in
affluent societies. (To have a label, I’ll call this AFFLUENT CONSUMPTION.)
The crucial steps of the argument are to: (1) characterize the general type of
factors involved in SHALLOW POND, (2) formulate a principle that explains
the moral wrongness of not rescuing the child by reference to those general
types, and (3) show that AFFLUENT CONSUMPTION also involves factors of
those general type. Beginning with the first task, we can characterize factors
F3 and F4 as instances of the following general type of factor:

MAJOR BENEFIT: IfI do X, I will bring about something of great value

(or prevent something very bad from happening).

MINOR COST: If I do X, I will be disadvantaged in some comparatively

minor way.

(Note: “X” is a variable that can stand for just about anything, including
failures or inaction, such as “not wading into the pool” or “not donating to
charity.”) The next step is to formulate a principle that applies to the general
factors, which is where Singer’s Principle comes in. Recall that Singer’s
Principle states that “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from
happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral
importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” That is, the key claim here is that
a compelling explanation for the obligation is that: saving the child’s life is
of tremendous moral value, while the dirtiness of one’s clothes is of
comparatively minor moral value.
Turning to AFFLUENT CONSUMPTION, we can describe the relevant factors as:

F5. If I do not donate to organizations that effectively reduce suffering

and death due to extreme poverty, then more people will suffer and
die from extreme poverty.

F6. If I do donate to such organizations then I will have less money to

spend on luxury items.
44

Given that suffering and death due to extreme poverty is very bad (morally
speaking), and luxury items are of comparatively less value (morally
speaking), it follow that F5 and F6 are also instances of MAJOR BENEFIT and
MINOR COST. This means that when Singer’s Principle is applied to
AFFLUENT CONSUMPTION, it follows that F5 overrides F6 in a way that makes
it wrong to not donate to organizations that
Singer has developed this basic argument in several ways over the ensuing
decades. In the following article, which was written for the New York Times
Magazine (and thus intended for a general, non-academic, audience), Singer
presents other analogies to support his principle.

Singer, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”

In the Brazilian film “Central Station,” Dora is a retired

schoolteacher who makes ends meet by sitting at the station
writing letters for illiterate people. Suddenly she has an
opportunity to pocket $1,000. All she has to do is persuade a
homeless 9-year-old boy to follow her to an address she has been
given. (She is told he will be adopted by wealthy foreigners.) She
delivers the boy, gets the money, spends some of it on a
television set and settles down to enjoy her new acquisition. Her
neighbor spoils the fun, however, by telling her that the boy was
too old to be adopted—he will be killed and his organs sold for
transplantation. Perhaps Dora knew this all along, but after her
neighbor’s plain speaking, she spends a troubled night. In the
morning Dora resolves to take the boy back.
Suppose Dora had told her neighbor that it is a tough world,
other people have nice new TV’s too, and if selling the kid is the
only way she can get one, well, he was only a street kid. She
would then have become, in the eyes of the audience, a monster.
She redeems herself only by being prepared to bear considerable
risks to save the boy.
At the end of the movie, in cinemas in the affluent nations of the
world, people who would have been quick to condemn Dora if
she had not rescued the boy go home to places far more
comfortable than her apartment. In fact, the average family in
the United States spends almost one-third of its income on things
that are no more necessary to them than Dora's new TV was to
her. Going out to nice restaurants, buying new clothes because
the old ones are no longer stylish, vacationing at beach resorts—
so much of our income is spent on things not essential to the
preservation of our lives and health. Donated to one of a number
 45

of charitable agencies, that money could mean the difference

between life and death for children in need.
All of which raises a question: In the end, what is the ethical
distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to
organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and
upgrades to a better one—knowing that the money could be
donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of
kids in need?
…
In his 1996 book, Living High and Letting Die, the New York
University philosopher Peter Unger presented an ingenious
series of imaginary examples designed to probe our intuitions
about whether it is wrong to live well without giving substantial
amounts of money to help people who are hungry,
malnourished or dying from easily treatable illnesses like
diarrhea. Here’s my paraphrase of one of these examples:
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. In addition to the
pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows
that its rising market value means that he will always 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 running down the
railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small
figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He
can't stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the
danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down
the siding where his Bugatti is parked. Then nobody will be
killed—but the train will destroy his Bugatti. Thinking of his joy
in owning the car and the financial security it represents, Bob
decides not to throw the switch. The child is killed. For many
years to come, Bob enjoys owning his Bugatti and the financial
security it represents.
Bob's conduct, most of us will immediately respond, was
gravely wrong. Unger agrees. But then he reminds us that we,
too, have opportunities to save the lives of children. We can give
to organizations like UNICEF or Oxfam America…
If you still think that it was very wrong of Bob not to throw the
switch that would have diverted the train and saved the child's
life, then it is hard to see how you could deny that it is also very
wrong not to send money to one of the organizations listed
above…
46

We seem to lack a sound basis for drawing a clear moral line

between Bob's situation and that of any reader of this article with
$200 to spare who does not donate it to an overseas aid agency.
These readers seem to be acting at least as badly as Bob was
acting when he chose to let the runaway train hurtle toward the
unsuspecting child. In the light of this conclusion, I trust that
many readers will reach for the phone and donate that $200.
Perhaps you should do it before reading further.
Now that you have distinguished yourself morally from people
who put their vintage cars ahead of a child's life, how about
treating yourself and your partner to dinner at your favorite
restaurant? But wait. The money you will spend at the restaurant
could also help save the lives of children overseas! True, you
weren’t planning to blow $200 tonight, but if you were to give
up dining out just for one month, you would easily save that
amount. And what is one month’s dining out, compared to a
child’s life? There's the rub. Since there are a lot of desperately
needy children in the world, there will always be another child
whose life you could save for another $200. Are you therefore
obliged to keep giving until you have nothing left? At what point
can you stop?
Hypothetical examples can easily become farcical. Consider Bob.
How far past losing the Bugatti should he go? Imagine that Bob
had got his foot stuck in the track of the siding, and if he diverted
the train, then before it rammed the car it would also amputate
his big toe. Should he still throw the switch? What if it would
amputate his foot? His entire leg?
As absurd as the Bugatti scenario gets when pushed to extremes,
the point it raises is a serious one: only when the sacrifices
become very significant indeed would most people be prepared
to say that Bob does nothing wrong when he decides not to
throw the switch. Of course, most people could be wrong; we
can’t decide moral issues by taking opinion polls. But consider
for yourself the level of sacrifice that you would demand of Bob,
and then think about how much money you would have to give
away in order to make a sacrifice that is roughly equal to that.
It’s almost certainly much, much more than $200. For most
middle-class Americans, it could easily be more like $200,000.
…
Now, evolutionary psychologists tell us that human nature just
isn’t sufficiently altruistic to make it plausible that many people
will sacrifice so much for strangers. On the facts of human
nature, they might be right, but they would be wrong to draw a
moral conclusion from those facts. If it is the case that we ought
to do things that, predictably, most of us won't do, then let’s face
that fact head-on. Then, if we value the life of a child more than
 47

going to fancy restaurants, the next time we dine out we will

know that we could have done something better with our
money. If that makes living a morally decent life extremely
arduous, well, then that is the way things are. If we don’t do it,
then we should at least know that we are failing to live a morally
decent life—not because it is good to wallow in guilt but because
knowing where we should be going is the first step toward
heading in that direction.
When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood
by that railway switch, he must have thought how
extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in
which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and
the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not unlucky at all.
We are all in that situation.

Here we have two slightly more developed examples, which we can call
DORA AND THE KID and BOB’S BUGATTI. In the first scenario, we have a case
similar in stakes to SHALLOW POND: a child’s life versus a television set. In
the second case, the cost is considerably higher in both fiscal and emotional
terms: a prized Bugatti. Singer’s moral judgment is that, even in this case,
we would judge Bob to be morally obligated to sacrifice the Bugatti for the
child’s life.
Putting all of these cases together, they seem to provide strong support for
Singer’s Principle. Each case seems to be involve instances of PREVENT
GREAT HARM and PAY MINOR COST. And in each case, the person seems to
have an obligation to do the thing that prevents the great moral harm. Most
importantly, Singer’s Principle seems to provide a compelling explanation
for that obligation.
So, are you convinced that you did something morally wrong when you
bought that Chestnut Praline Latte from Starbucks? After all, if you just
forgo one of those lattes every week, over the course of a year, you could
save multiple lives by donating that money to the right kind of charity.
Maybe some of you are convinced, but I suspect many of you are not. But
why not? The task of a moral philosophy is not simply to assert opinions,
but to engage in rational discourse. It is not enough to disagree with
someone; it is important to provide reasons that rationally support one’s
view. If one wants to rationally reject Singer’s argument, one needs to
provide a compelling counter-argument.
A counter-argument is an argument directed at another argument. It is an
attempt to articulate the way in which an argument or piece of reasoning
fails to rationally establish its intended conclusion.
Recall that a key component of the argument by analogy is the claim that
the moral factors are of the same type. Thus, one way to break the analogy
is to identify a distinct type of moral factor.
48

Singer himself identifies one relevant way in which Dora’s situation is

different from Bob’s, namely that Bob “did not mislead the child or initiate
the chain of events imperiling him.” Thus, one could explain the
wrongfulness of Dora’s action by appealing to a different principle, which
recognizes a distinct type of moral factor:

CAUSAL EFFICACY:By doing x, one causally contributes to something

very bad happening.

Because DORA AND THE KID involves a different type of factor, Dora’s
obligation can be explained by a different moral principle.

P2. It is morally wrong to causally contribute to bringing about a great

moral harm.

Since the factors in AFFLUENT CONSUMPTION to not involve CAUSAL EFFICACY,

P2 cannot apply. Thus, DORA AND THE KID fails to establish an analogy in
support of Singer’s Thesis. However, there is still SHALLOW POND and BOB’S
BUGATTI to consider. If one wants to rationally avoid SINGER’S THESIS, one
must find another type of moral factor that could differentiate those two
cases from the situation of most people living in affluent countries.

A Deontic Counter-Argument

Shelly Kagan, who introduced us to the concept of a moral factor in Chapter

1, proposes that we distinguish between the goodness of results and the
rightness of rescuing a person:
It might be suggested that what we have at work in the case of the
drowning child is not mere goodness of results but rather a new
factor altogether-the ability to directly rescue someone in immediate
danger. Now, obviously, cases of rescue involve the opportunity to
do good. But according to this alternative view, the mere fact that
some act will have good results typically provides at best relatively
weak reasons for doing that act. In contrast, in those special cases
where we have the opportunity to directly rescue someone near to
us in immediate need, we have extremely strong moral reason to do
so. That some such distinction strikes us as intuitively plausible is
revealed in the fact, already noted, that we normally take ourselves
to be under no obligation to contribute to famine relief, whereas we
would take ourselves to be under a weighty obligation to save the
drowning child.
Rather than formulating the relevant factor in terms of the badness of the
results, we should think in terms of the obligatoriness of direct acts of rescue.

ACTIVE RESCUE: To do x is to perform a direct act of rescue.

 49

To explain the moral obligation in SHALLOW POND, we can reject Singer’s

Principle and instead appeal to:

P3. One is obligated to perform a direct act of rescue, provided doing

so does not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance.

The same principle would also seem to apply to BOB’S BUGATTI, and
distinguish them from the consumer behaviour of most people in affluent
nations.
We could call P3 the “Deontic Principle,” because it takes the act of rescue
to function as a constraint. In contrast Singer’s Principle expresses a
utilitarian principle that weighs goodness. An example might help to
clarify the difference between formulating the principle in deontological
versus utilitarian terms.
Reconsider BOB’S BUGATTI, but now imagine that Bob chose to save his
Bugatti. Further imagine that the Bugatti continued to increase in value
(and at a rate greater than inflation) over the course of Bob’s life, and that
in his will Bob directed that the Bugatti be sold at auction and the money
donated to an organization that helps to save the lives of thousands of
people who would have otherwise died from extreme poverty. It would
seem that Singer’s Principle would hold that Bob did the morally right thing
in saving his Bugatti. If you agree, then you should accept Singer’s
Principle. If you think that Bob should still have sacrificed his car to save
the child’s life, then you should accept the Deontic Principle.
Both of these principles – Singer’s Principle and the Deontic Principle – are
“impartial.” This mean that they are obligations that everyone has to
everyone else; there is no specific person, group, or entity to which one has
the obligation. In the first excerpt Singer appeals to the concept of a
“principle of impartiality, universalizability, [or] equality” in defending the
idea that the nearness or remoteness of the person’s life should not matter,
morally speaking. There are good reasons for thinking that morality is
impartial. For example, we expect judges to be impartial and equitable
when administering justice. However, there are also reasons to question
whether morality in fact demands impartiality in all cases.

4.3. Partiality I: A Test Case

Recall the Game of Thrones scene from Chapter 1 in which

Maester Aemond says that “Love is the death of duty.” This
aphorism might apply to Singer’s Principle as well. For,
love engenders partiality toward one’s loved ones, and that
partiality stands at odds with the impartiality demanded by
“Love is the
Singer’s Principle. In these next two sections we challenge Death of Duty”
this idea. Is love something that competes with duty? Or is
50

love itself an important source of moral motivation? Does love create certain
special obligations to our loved ones?
To begin, we will look at a different fictional scenario, this time from a
contemporary setting. The scenario comes from
an episode called “Charity Case” of the
television show, House M.D. (2004 – 2012). The
episode begins with the central character,
Benjamin Byrd, collapsing after having made an
anonymous one-million-dollar donation to a
charity that helps struggling people to find
work and get back on their feet. Benjamin is
taken to the Hospital where the show’s
namesake, Dr. Gregory House, works. We see Benjamin in a hospital bed
being attended to by two of Dr. House’s associates, Dr. Jessica Adams and
Dr. Chi Park:

Benjamin: Is an ultrasound really necessary? I'm feeling much

better now.

Adams: Oh, a sudden collapse at your age can

indicate a deterioration of the heart muscle. Pretty
serious condition.

Park: It can also just be dehydration. Next time,

you could probably drop the undercover act.

Benjamin: I walk in a suit,

and they're gonna put
their best foot forward.
Also, I don't own a suit.

Adams: You give away

millions and you don't
own a suit?

Benjamin: I gave those

away too. One day, I was
writing a check to my landscaper, and it suddenly hit me —
$6,000 to take out plants and put in different plants. So I can look
at them. Shouldn't I use that money to do something important?
 51

Adams: And by money, you mean all your money.

Benjamin: I started with 10 million, and I couldn't think of a

reason not to give 20. Or 40. I figure I could live off $25,000 a
year. One-room apartment. Bus pass, thrift stores. Bare
necessities. I still have my software company. And when I make
more, I'll give that way too.

The character Benjamin is worth at least tens of millions, if not billions, of

dollars. But he lives a bare subsistence existence and donates the rest to
charity. This is precisely the kind of existence that Peter Singer argues is
what we morally ought to be striving toward.
Now, the premise of the episode is that Dr. House treats Benjamin’s extreme
altruism as a symptom of some illness in order to justify running a variety
of tests as part of a plan to get Benjamin to donate to the hospital. (The
punchline is that it turns out that his altruism was in fact caused by an
underlying neurological issue and goes away once treated.)
After being diagnosed with long QT syndrome (a heart disorder that causes
irregular heartbeats), Benjamin has the following conversation with Dr.
Park in which they engage in a discussion about whether one has special
obligations to one’s children:

Benjamin: Is long QT bad?

Park: It's a tough thing to control. Is there someone you want me

to call?

Benjamin: There's someone I would like to call. She's the same

person who won't take my calls. My wife. When I started giving
away the money, I hoped she'd want to do it with me. She didn't.
I miss them. I have two little boys. Having a family doesn't exempt
me from social responsibility.

Park: But family comes first.

Benjamin: Should it? I know that sounds weird, but… someone

who's related to you, does that empirically make them more
special? More deserving than anyone else?
52

Park: Yes, it gives you a responsibility.

Benjamin: My boys have a roof over their heads. They're not

starving. I pay court-ordered child support, and, frankly, it's more
than they need. I love them more than anything, I just… I can't
justify buying video games and private schools when other
people's children are starving. I hope, one day, they'll understand
that.

In this dialogue, Benjamin advocates for a principle of impartiality by

denying that being personally related to or being in a personal relationship
with someone makes you owe any more to them.
Later in the episode, we see Benjamin apply this principle of impartiality to
even his own life. When he finds out that a patient in the hospital will die
imminently if she does not receive an organ transplant, Benjamin
volunteers to donate one of his kidneys. The Hospital’s Dean of Medicine,
Dr. Foreman, interviews Benjamin in order to decide whether to allow him
to donate his kidney.

Foreman: Why do you wanna give away your kidney?

Benjamin: There are 70,000 people in this country on the active

waiting list for a kidney, and less than 10,000 dead people a year
to give them one.

House: Yeah. If only we could kill 60,000 more people a year, all
would be golden.

Benjamin: I'll give you your

money.

House: See? Crazy.

Foreman: Being a live donor

has risks.

Benjamin: I looked it up. The risk is 1 in 4,000 I could die during

surgery, which means, if I don't donate, I'm valuing my life at
4,000 times someone else's. It's not like I want to be cut open and
 53

have a part of me taken out. But I've got two, and this woman has
none. She'll die without it.

Later in the episode, we met his wife, when she gets in a conversation with
the character Thirteen over what it means to be in a loving relationship.

Thirteen: Can I help you?

Woman: I'm his wife. We're separated. I heard

he was sick. I just… wanted to see him. He's
giving a kidney to someone he's never met?

Thirteen: He wants to, yeah. I know he's talked

about you. He's been alone all this time. I'm
sure it would mean a lot to him to see you.

Woman: I wanted to spend my life with him, but… I need to feel

like he loves me more than other people. Like he loves our kids
more. Maybe that's selfish… I should go.

Is it selfish to think that part of what it means to be in a committed, loving

relationship is that the other person puts your interests above others? Or
does a loving relationship itself generate moral obligations?
While the philosophical tradition in Europe and North America (since at
least the seventeen hundreds) has conceived of morality as essentially
impartial, many prominent moral philosophers have challenged this
understanding over the past several decades.

4.4. Partiality II: Relationships and Special Obligations

In the movie The Incredibles, the main villain, Syndrome, has unleashed a
massive robot that is rampaging across the city causing massive destruction
and chaos. The character Frozone, a friend of the Incredibles family, sees
what is happening and attempts to come to the aid of the Incredibles and
the city of Metroville, but has trouble finding his “super-suit,” leading to
this memorable dialogue:
54

In this dialogue Frozone takes his primary duty to be that of promoting the
impartial “greater good” of Metroville, while Honey claims that Frozone
has what philosopher’s call special obligations to her in virtue of the fact that
she is his wife. She is his greatest good.
To put this in more philosophical terms, we can turn again to Shelly
Kagan’s Normative Ethics:

Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics

Some moral constraints are general in the following sense: they

represent obligations that everyone has to everyone else. Each of
us is required to refrain from harming anyone else, each of us is
required to refrain from lying to anyone else, and each of us is
required to keep all our promises, regardless of who we have
made them to…
In contrast to this kind of generality, other obligations seem
more restricted, in terms of who owes what to whom. For
example, intuitively at least, I seem to have certain special
obligations to my children, or to my students, or to my friends.
No doubt, others often have similar obligations: you to your
children, say, or Linda to hers. But my obligation is to my
children, while yours is to yours. Thus who we have the
 55

obligations to varies from person to person. (I don’t have the

same obligations to your children that you do.) Similarly, in
many cases, which special obligations we have varies from
person to person as well. Rhonda is a doctor, and so has special
obligations to her patients; I am not a doctor, and so have no
special medical obligations at all. I am, however, a teacher and a
parent, and so have special obligations to my students and my
children; but Ari is neither a teacher nor a parent, and so does
not have any of the relevant parental or academic obligations.
Thus, unlike general obligations which (special circumstances
aside) everyone owes equally to everyone else, these special
obligations are owed only by certain specific individuals to
certain other specific individuals. In effect, for a general
obligation each person has the relevant obligation to every other
person—unless special circumstances have cancelled or
overridden that obligation. In contrast, for the various special
obligations, a given person has the relevant obligation to another
given person only if special circumstances have created or
generated it.
Perhaps it will be helpful to state these points even more
abstractly. Whether a given agent has a particular special
obligation to a given person depends on whether the relevant
special circumstances obtain with regard to that given agent and
that given person, that is, whether the agent stands in the
relevant special relationship to the person (where this isn’t true
in general). Since (typically) the agent won’t stand in the relevant
relationship to all other people, she won't have the particular
special obligation in question toward all others, but only to some
specific individuals at best, and perhaps to none at all. Similarly,
since it won’t (typically) be the case for any given person that all
agents stand in the relevant relationship to that person, not
everyone will owe the person the particular special treatment in
question; at best only certain specific agents will owe it to him,
and perhaps no one will owe it at all. Put still another way: if a
given agent has a particular special obligation to a given person,
this will be an “exception” from the norm; other agents won’t
necessarily be similarly obligated to the person in question
(indeed, they may not be similarly obligated to anyone else at
all), and other people won’t have similar treatment owed to
them by the given agent…
Generally…the special obligations that we are likely to find
plausible involve fairly small numbers. A parent, for example,
has special parental obligations only to the few children that are
his or her own; and a given child is owed this special treatment
only by his or her own parents. Still, it should be noted, in some
cases the numbers involved are quite large. For example, if – as
many believe – there are special obligations toward one’s fellow
56

citizens, then hundreds of millions of Americans owe them

equally to hundreds of millions of their fellow Americans.
Nonetheless these obligations are still special rather than
general: I owe them only to my fellow Americans, not to all the
billions of inhabitants of the earth; and only other Americans
owe them to me.)

There is considerable intuitive support for this core idea that morality
sometimes recommends partiality over impartiality—that it is morally right
to care more about my own children than other people’s children and to
attach greater weight to the interests and well-being of my loved-ones over
those of others.
If right, then this means we have to recognize a distinct type of partial moral
factor:

PARTIAL BENEFIT: By spending a certain amount of money M on my

children, I can increase their well-being by amount X.

This type of moral factor will often compete with the following type of
moral factor that Singer recognizes.

IMPARTIAL BENEFIT: By donating amount M to certain organizations,

I can increase overall well-being in the world by an amount far
greater than X.

How should we weigh these factors? Does it matter what precisely I am

spending the money on for my children? What about private school
tuition? A non-life-threatening medical procedure? Nicer clothes? Video
games?
To answer these questions would require a more detailed analysis of the
relevant moral principles than we can get into for this course. For now, it
will suffice to simply introduce the concept of special obligations and to
show how they can conflict with the demands of impartial morality.
One final thought before closing this chapter is that we can recognize a
variety of different categories of special obligations:

• Filial duty: the duty that children owe to their parents. For example,
as medical advances make it possible for people live longer, there is
an ever-increasing population of elderly persons in need of care. It is
often held that adult children have a special obligation to care for
their aging parents.

• Parental obligations: the special obligations that parents owe to

their children, especially early in life before children become adults.
 57

• Professional/role obligations: the kinds of obligations one has in

virtue of a given profession or role. For examples, teachers have
special obligations to their students and doctors have special
obligations to their patients.

• Duties to compatriots: the duties one owes to members of the same

community, e.g. the same city, province, or country. If such duties
exist it provides for treating the well-being of one’s compatriots as
more important than those of strangers, e.g. by giving more to local
food banks than to international organizations.

Accepting that there are special obligations does not commit one to
recognizing all types of special obligations. For example, the idea our moral
obligations to our fellow citizens is greater than our obligations to people
of other countries is quite controversial in moral philosophy and political
theory, even among those who are willing to accept that we have special
obligations to our close friends and family members. Whether we have any
special obligations, and if so, which ones, is for you to decide.