Imagine you are walking in a park with some friends. And you hear a cry of a child and note that there is a small child drowning in a pond. You are able to swim and save, what would you do?
Imagine you and your friends have decided to walk away letting the child to die. It would be unacceptable to most of us in our society.
Now imagine a child who is dying of just malnourishment in some remote African country. And you are having enough wealth to feed yourself and your family. You can easily cut down some luxurious items that you are going to buy and spend some money on Charity organizations to help few of these children.
These are the drowning Child analogy put forward by Peter Singer in 1971 in his famous essay of "Famine, Affluence and Morality". He argued that if there is a way to reach the child in Africa, the distance has no meaning, as an excuse for us to get away from our moral obligation of saving that child. And we should be as guilty as when we haven't saved the drowning child.
It is time to stretch the limits of the above argument. Over the years there are pro, and against critics for the Singers' argument. However, we will be looking into some of the inferences.
If the argument is true, and if you have seen an advertisement from charitable organizations on TV or from your friend or in the newspaper, we ourselves are guilty in the moral court if we haven't done so. It is not about the savings that you are doing for your protection of the future. It is about your expensive shoes, luxury cars or decorative unnecessary shopping spree. After all #Minimalism has its own justification with simmers argument.
Let's imagine the child is drowning with its dog and you have the capacity to grab only one and save one, the dog is much closer to you, and you have decided to let the dog die, swim across and save the child instead. It is getting complicated.
Both the dog and the child are feeling pain and facing death. Difference is the power of expression and being in different species. Are we obliged only to our own species? What about stopping eating meat being a #vegan, it can directly cause less losses of animal life. Is it wrong to save the animal life over the human life? If it is wrong, then the child drowning in the pond has more value than a Child in Africa.
Lesser Known, Singer himself wrote a second book "Animal Liberation" to frame the ethics of treating animals, to tie it to the capacity of an animal to feel the pain. However, someone can still argue that pain is subjective and there is no universal measure of pain, hence we cannot generalize it to non-verbal animals. After all, an Ant who is drowning in your cup of hot coffee may have felt more pain than the drowning dog in our anlage.
Let's look at our Space race, recently India became the first to land on the South pole of the moon. Are our space races which burn millions of dollars really necessary expenses while still there is famine prevail in our world? If countries are considered humans, shouldn't we feel guilty as nations to burn money in space?
What is the lesson?
We could argue saving a child drowning is better than saving the African child or the dog. We could argue that driving the poverty of humanity is better than a space race. Of course, there will be no correct argument, truth seems to be relative when we change our perspective. If there is an asteroid, or a massive volcanic eruption which can drive humans into extinction, SpaceX Mars project would be our only hope. On the other hand, trying to be a vegan can lead to the death of hundreds of insects than a single cow!
So, the debate will go on between vegans and non-vegans, affluence and poverty, into the future as well.
Thank you for reading Singer’s ‘famine relief argument’ and vegans.
You may also like to read : The boy, dog and the story of mathematics.
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