I Believed the Drowning Child Argument Until I Heard These Unassailable Criticisms
Now I give all my money to DEI trainings.
I used to believe Peter Singer’s drowning child argument. I would trot it out at family functions, first dates, parties, and work mixers, and I think I did a pretty good job of convincing people. One time, they didn’t even kick me out of the party, but they did make me stay in the kitchen all night.
I used to give my money to the best charities I could find, to save the most proverbial children from the most proverbial ponds. I made my daughter start a lemonade stand and threatened to set all her toys on fire if she didn’t give her earnings to Holden Karnofsky. I gathered the moldy pennies from underneath my couch cushions and used them to buy hundreds of anti-malarial bed nets for kids in Africa. Whenever I walked past a pond, I always checked to make sure there weren’t any children drowning in it, just to be on the safe side.
Then, one day, I made a terrible mistake. I raised the drowning child argument in front of the smartest person I know. Smugly, I said, “if you came across a child drowning in a pond on your way to work” (here I paused to push my glasses up the bridge of my nose) “you would wade in to save them, even if you’d ruin an expensive suit.”
My interlocutor was having none of it, and he stared at me with pity for a few seconds over what was about to come. “What if,” he objected, “the last person who claimed to save a drowning child from a pond did massive amounts of crypto fraud and had a gross polycule in the Bahamas?”
I was dumbfounded. I had never thought of that before. I felt a deep sinking feeling in my stomach as my entire worldview came crashing down before me.
“B- b- but,” I could only stammer. I wasn’t prepared to deal with someone of such great intellect.
“And what if,” he said, his lips curling into a smirk, “the child has intergenerational trauma from Western colonialism, and you’re retraumatizing the child by pulling them out of the pond, because that creates an imbalanced power dynamic wherein you implicitly assert that you have the right to decide who lives and dies?”
I slapped myself for not having thought of something so obvious. I did a racism. I did an imperialism. I did a nationalism. I did a xenophobia. This made it abundantly clear that I don’t even understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of my offenses.
I racked my brain for a worthy response, but the invincible objections just kept coming.
“What if there are multiple children drowning in the pond, and by saving some of them, you’re saying that those ones are more important than the others?”
“What if saving children from ponds makes us think that people who save children from ponds are better than people who don’t save children from ponds?”
“What if you were trying to save a child one way, but you learned later that there’s actually a better way of trying to save the child?”
“What if by saving a child, you don’t have time to try to start a communist revolution or go to a DEI training?”
This was all too much. I simply couldn’t take it any longer. I fell to my knees in despair, knowing that I had been bested in the battle of ideas, and I forsook the lie that I had staked so much of my reputation on defending. I turned my face up to the sky and exclaimed: “YOU SHOULDN’T SAVE A DROWNING CHILD IF IT MAKES SOME PEOPLE FEEL BAD!” Tears streamed down my face.
I was ashamed of having believed such an obviously faulty argument for so long. How could I have been so naive? How did I not know that my actions reinforced centuries-old racialized power dynamics and that, by saving drowning children from ponds, I was actually colonizing them and stripping them of their rights and dignity?
After a few minutes of this despair, I used my shirtsleeve to wipe the snot and tears from my face and I peered up at the wise man before me. “What can I do instead?” I asked.
“Well,” he responded. “Have you heard of The 1619 Project? We can discuss it over lunch.”
“Okay,” I mumbled and I stood up. “I hear there’s a good vegan place around the corner.”
“What?!” the man sneered and glared at me. “Don’t you know that plants can feel pain?”
You should stop writing this blog. Instead listen and learn
I like the EAs, and utilitarianism isn’t a bad heuristic for day to day mundane moral calculus. But Singer’s thought experiment is a shell game, a card trick. Here’s an alternative to his little fable:
Imagine that you live next to a pond. Every day, cruel men dump dozens children into this pond. Often these are their own children! This has been going on since before you were born. Nobody stops the men; sometimes the men jump into the pond themselves, and none of them can swim either. Whenever someone tries to save one of these children, the men find another child and throw that one in as well.
Now what do your moral intuitions tell you? That you have a moral obligation to spend every waking minute, for your entire life, trying to save some small number of these children, despite the men seemingly able to make more children to throw into the pond — and to make them in proportion to the number you save?
Perhaps that’s an admirable conclusion. Perhaps it’s admirable to be a saint, dying amongst the lepers, spending your one solitary life on this earth pushing a stone up a hill only to have it tumble back again, and again, and again, until your strength deserts you and you tumble down the hill as well, lifeless as a stone yourself. But I think that perhaps not everyone has to choose to spend their life doing this. And that you’re not a bad person for wanting to actually live.