© Uwe Steinhoff 2013 Uwe Steinhoff Drowning the Shallow Pond Analogy: A Critique of Garrett Cullity's Attempt to Rescue It Abstract: Garrett Cullity concedes that saving a drowning child from a shallow pond at little cost to oneself is not actually analogous to giving money to a poverty relief organization like Oxfam. The question then arises whether this objection is fatal to Peters Singer's argument for a duty of assistance or whether it can be saved anyway. Cullity argues that not saving the drowning child and not giving money to organizations like Oxfam are still morally analogous, that is, not giving money to organizations like Oxfam is morally nearly as bad as letting the child drown. I argue that Cullity's two arguments for this conclusion, an argument from "transitivity" and an argument from collective responsibility, fail. Key words: collective responsibility; Garrett Cullity; duty of assistance; shallow pond analogy; Peter Singer Several authors have correctly pointed out that Singer's analogy between saving a drowning child from a shallow pond at little cost to oneself is not actually analogous to giving money to a poverty relief organization like Oxfam.1 The question then arises whether this objection is fatal to Singer's argument or whether (and perhaps somewhat surprisingly) it can be saved anyway. The most sustained and sophisticated attempt to show that it can in fact be saved has been made by Garrett Cullity. He contends that the two omissions – not saving the 2 drowning child and not giving money to organizations like Oxfam – are still morally analogous, that is, not giving money to organizations like Oxfam is morally nearly as bad as letting the child drown or, if not that, at least "the reasons we have for thinking that it can be wrong to let someone die right in front of you are equally reasons for thinking that it is wrong to contribute nothing to aid agencies in order to address the life-threatening need of people far away."2 I argue that Cullity's line of reasoning in support of this conclusion is unpersuasive. Thus, the shallow pond analogy still fails to establish a duty of assistance towards the global poor. Peter Singer provides the following argument for why we should spend a lot of effort in helping the poor: 1. Premise: "... suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad." 2. Premise: "... if it is within our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it." An alleged application of this principle is: "... 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 ..."3 3. Premise: Not contributing to aid agencies (which help, for example, people that are starving) is like not helping the drowning child.4 Conclusion: "... I and everyone else in similar circumstances ought to give as much as possible, that is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one would begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and one's 3 dependents-perhaps even beyond this point to the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more one would cause oneself and one's dependents as much suffering as one would prevent in Bengal."5 Singer claims that the principle stated in the second premise is "uncontroversial," but later admits that it actually is not. While in his original article on "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" he deals with some objections to this second premise, he does not mention the fact that many authors have argued that persons may (within certain limits) favor their own interests. For example, the survival of ten people is arguably morally more important than the survival of one person. However, I am not obliged to give my organs away to save ten other people. I am entitled to give my own survival precedence (again, within limits). Neither Singer nor any other utilitarian, for that matter, provides anywhere an even remotely plausible argument for why this common sense conception of our moral obligations is mistaken. Thus, with his second premise Singer pretty much seems to beg the question. However, even if this is granted, and along with it the common sense conception according to which a person is entitled to favor her own interests within certain limits, still the question would arise: what limits? This is why the shallow pond analogy is so important: If not contributing to aid agencies is indeed analogous to not saving the drowning child, then our moral intuitions with regard to saving it (which, of course, say that we should save it) suggest that we are also morally required to contribute to aid agencies – whether or not the moral requirement of doing so or the moral requirement of saving the drowning child are applications of the dubious (in fact, I think, clearly false) principle in Singer's second premise.6 So the decisive question is whether the analogy stands. 4 In his article "The Life-Saving Analogy" and his book The Moral Demands of Affluence Garrett Cullity examines this question thoroughly and comes to the conclusion that the analogy does not stand because Singer's argument by analogy ... maintains that an affluent person's contributions to aid agencies will avert threats to people's lives. However, this claim is false.7 Cullity adduces two reasons for why it is false. First, most non-government agencies are not "providing life-saving aid, but rather preventing the need for it. It is not so much saving a drowning person as funding a swimming education program."8 This argument, however, as Cullity makes clear, does not apply to genuine famine disaster relief. Interestingly, in his later book Cullity claims, as an alleged conclusion of a preceding discussion, that contributions to aid agencies taken collectively ... do avert threats to people's lives. And this means that the life-saving analogy will still remain defensible as a claim about our collective action of contributing to aid agencies: this is morally analogous to the direct saving of life.9 However, since Cullity himself makes a distinction between averting or preventing threats to a person's life on the one hand (he seems to use the two expressions synonymously here,10 which is not particularly helpful) and saving life on the other, averting and preventing threats is clearly not analogous to saving life. Of course, he does not say that it is analogous, he says that it is morally analogous – by which he means that not contributing is morally nearly as bad as letting the child drown or, if not that, at least "the reasons we have for think- 5 ing that it can be wrong to let someone die right in front of you are equally reasons for thinking that it is wrong to contribute nothing to aid agencies in order to address the life-threatening need of people far away."11 Whether this is so, however, remains to be seen. That it is so, in any case, can certainly not be established with the live-saving analogy itself, since – morally analogous or not – it is certainly not analogous to the contribution to aid agencies other than rescue agencies. Incidentally, all Cullity does, in his reply to the first objection, is to refute the following rather silly argument (which, to my knowledge, no serious philosopher has ever made): 1. Premise: Tackling the causes of poverty is better than merely addressing its life-threatening effects and therefore, if anything, we ought to support long-term development work rather than relief work. 2. Premise: "But supporting long-term development work, although it might be a good thing to do, is not morally required: it is like funding a fire safety programme rather than rescuing someone from a fire." Conclusion: "And if supporting development work is preferable to supporting relief work but is not morally required, then supporting relief work cannot be morally required either."12 However, while Cullity correctly shows that the conclusion clearly does not follow from these premises, such a demonstration does not yet show that giving to long-term development agencies (whether "collectively" or not) is analogous to rescuing a child from drowning or from a fire. To show that would require an independent argument, which Cullity does not offer. That is not surprising: after all, giving to long-term development agencies is indeed not analogous to rescuing a child from drowning or from a fire. 6 The second objection,13 that is, the second reason why the life-saving analogy is wrong, also applies to relief or rescue agencies. Cullity calls it the imperceptibility objection: [The] extra food bought with my money will not be used to feed one extra person. It will be sent to a food distribution camp, and shared among the hungry people there. ... their each receiving a thousandth of a food ration more or less each day will not make much difference.14 Obviously, in the shallow pond case the passer-by can make a perceptible difference, so the two cases are disanalogous. Cullity tries to generalize this second objection in the following way: If my contributions to an aid agency will not themselves substantially help anyone, how can my not making them violate such a right [not to be hungry] ...?15 However, the assumption underlying this generalization is, in my view, clearly wrong. My not shooting Smith in the head will not help him if ten others are shooting him in the head. My not shooting him (or my shooting him, for that matter) would not make any difference: he would surely be dead in either case. However, it is obvious (under normal circumstances, for there might be certain exceptional cases which, however, are not relevant in the present context) that from this it does not follow that I would not violate his right to life if I shot him in the head while ten others are doing the same.16 To be sure, one might argue that this is a case of harming, not of helping; and that if one does not make a difference to somebody's situation one cannot be said to help him. It is not completely clear, however, that, conversely, one can say that one is harming someone if one does not make a difference to his situation. Still, it might be true that the case of omissions is different from the case of positive acts. 7 Be that as it may, Cullity himself provides two answers to the question as to why the individual should contribute to the aid agency even if his contribution will not make (much of) a difference. The first, not taken up as clearly in the later book, is the argument from transitivity: 1. Premise: An earmarking agency, that is, one in which "each donation is used to buy a particular parcel of food, which is allocated to a particular needy individual ... would clearly circumvent the imperceptibility objection ..."17 2. Premise: "... it would be uniquely wrong [that is, it would be the only wrong course of action given (only) those two alternatives] to keep one's money to oneself, rather than contributing to an earmarking agency, if these were one's only alternatives." 3. Premise: "... it would be uniquely wrong to choose to have earmarking agencies rather than nonearmarking ones ..."18 To favor an earmarking agency is wrong, even "perverse," according to Cullity, because the nonearmarking ones can help more people [call this the efficiency argument].19 4. Premise: The relation "'worse than' is a paradigm for a transitive relation," meaning: if A is worse than B and B is worse than C, then – this is transitivity – A must be worse than C. Conclusion: "... it must be wrong to keep one's money to oneself instead of contributing to a nonearmarking agency."20 And he further concludes: "Noncontribution to aid agencies is not a failure to save life. However, I have shown that noncontribution remains morally analogous to the failure to save life: a Life-Saving Argument remains intact."21 8 The most natural interpretation of this argument seems to go like this: (a) to give nothing is worse than giving to an earmarking agency; (b) to give to an earmarking agency is worse than giving to a nonearmarking one; hence, due to transitivity: (c) to give nothing is worse than giving to a nonearmarking agency. However, with its premise (b) this argument simply begs the question against the imperceptibility objection. It is also not the argument Cullity actually makes. Rather, his premises and conclusion come with the qualifier "given only alternatives A and B"22. Thus, the argument, it seems, would have to be formulated like this: Given only the following two alternatives, to give nothing is worse than giving to an earmarking agency; given only the following two alternatives, to give to an earmarking agency is worse than giving to a nonearmarking one; hence, due to transitivity: given only the following two alternatives, to give nothing is worse than giving to a nonearmarking agency. However, firstly, the second premise of this argument still begs the question. Secondly, the second premise is also wrong, as I will show in a moment. Thirdly, the argument is, moreover, also logically invalid, that is, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. The reason for this is precisely the qualifier "given only alternatives A and B." Transitivity does not work under these conditions, at least not without further assumptions, which would need to be spelled out and defended. Cullity has since acknowledged this latter point,23 which is why the transitivity argument no longer plays any important role in his book.24 Incidentally, if this second argument is the one Cullity actually wanted to provide,25 he has expressed himself very misleadingly. After all, in premise (3) he talks about choosing to have earmarking agencies rather than nonearmarking ones, not about giving to earmarking agencies. But then the actual argument 9 seems to be this one: Given only the following two alternatives, to give nothing is worse than giving to an earmarking agency; given only the following two alternatives, to give to an earmarking agency is worse than choosing to have a nonearmarking one; hence, due to transitivity: given only the following two alternatives, to give nothing is worse than choosing to have a nonearmarking agency. Yet, this argument is wrong for the reasons the second argument (the one with the qualifier about given alternatives) is wrong too. It is also wrong for additional reasons and, in addition, completely misses the point it officially targets. First, giving to an earmarking agency is not worse than choosing to have a nonearmarking one. By choosing to have certain agencies I have not yet contributed anything to their functioning; in particular, I have not yet given them any money with which to help anyone. Actually giving to an earmarking agency is therefore the better course of action. Second, even if the conclusion were correct (which, for the reason just stated, it is not) that giving nothing is worse than choosing to have a nonearmarking agency, it would nevertheless be irrelevant. (Incidentally, the relevant conclusion "To give nothing is worse than giving to a nonearmarking agency" would obviously not even follow if we deleted the qualifiers "given only these two alternatives.") The question is whether giving nothing is worse than giving to a nonearmarking agency. And finally, and most importantly, even if that were worse, it certainly does not demonstrate that "noncontribution remains morally analogous to the failure to save life." Spitting in someone's face might be worse than spitting at his shoes, but that does not show that spitting in someone's face is like letting a child drown in a shallow pond. 10 After all, the issue is the analogy with saving life. But then talking unspecifically about earmarking agencies that help needy people is not quite enough. Rather, we have to consider earmarking agencies that help people whose life is in immediate danger, that is, for example, who are drowning right now. We have to consider life-saving agencies. And, further, we have to consider, not "having" them, but contributing to them. Once we do that, however, we get a completely different picture than the one suggested by the transitivity argument. In fact, Cullity himself admits: If you could either easily rescue someone from a fire or fund a fire safety programme, then obviously it would be wrong to do nothing. But, more than that, surely a stronger claim is obvious: it would be wrong not to rescue the person. It would be perverse in such a situation to let the person die and fund a safety programme instead.26 Yes, it would. But then, obviously, the third premise of the transitivity argument (the second in my interpretations), if it is interpreted in a way that is relevant to the question, namely in a way that makes it a premise about contributing to agencies, not about "having" them, is mistaken if applied to life-saving agencies. Ironically, Cullity's earlier claim about perversion is perverse according to his own later insight. It follows that so far he has failed to establish a "moral analogy" between not contributing to aid agencies and letting the child in the shallow pond die. Cullity has a second reply to the imperceptibility objection. This second reply appeals to the notion of collective responsibility. Let me already note here, somewhat mischievously perhaps, but also quite realistically, that once you try to save the shallow pond analogy with an appeal to collective responsibility, the 11 clear lake has been exchanged for extraordinarily muddy waters, as it were, and all the simplistic beauty of Singer's original argument has gone for good. Now it is no longer the child who is downing, but the theorist of a duty to assist – at the very least, he is up to the neck in it. But let us have a closer look. Cullity's argument goes like this, using now a different analogy: If someone is drowning in front of you and me, and can be rescued only by using a winch mechanism that requires two people to operate, then it is obvious that we are morally required to help him ... Why? Because he desperately needs this help, and we could provide it at small cost to ourselves. The explanation of the requirement of beneficence is the same as before: the only difference is that the subject of the requirement is the two of us collectively, rather than one person individually. The reasons for imposing requirements of beneficence on individuals clearly apply equally to groups. This is not yet a reply to someone who emphasizes the insignificant effect of my contributions to aid agencies. But it is a claim that someone with this view cannot sensibly oppose. Clearly, our collective actions can have a significant effect in helping other people; and this is the basis of collective requirements to do so ... Given this, the [imperceptibility] objection will have to take the following form. The wrongness of a collective action does not entail the wrongness of the actions of any member of the group that is collectively acting wrongly.27 Cullity actually accepts that this last sentence is right in principle, but claims that in the winch version of the shallow pond example failing to contribute is 12 wrong anyway. To wit, his reply to the objection in this form is "that failing to contribute towards meeting the collective moral requirements is unfair" of the individual.28 Before moving on, let us take stock here. One of the first things to say about the argument so far is that it certainly does not show that not contributing to the aid agency is "morally analogous" to not saving a drowning child. It only shows that there are significant moral disanalogies. After all, what supposedly happens in the original shallow pond example is that a person in a fancy suit lets a poor, helpless child drown in order not to muddy his cloths. Thus, by not helping the child he is violating an important duty of beneficence towards the child or violates its right to life. In Cullity's collective version of the example, however, a person in a fancy suit is only violating a clearly much less important duty of fairness towards, perhaps, another person in a fancy suit. He violates no duty towards persons in need of being helped or rescued at all. At best the group does. Interestingly (and inconsistently), while Cullity insists that he has "not replaced an argument from beneficence with an argument from fairness"29, he actually acknowledges both disanalogies (individual vs. group responsibility and duty of beneficence vs. duty of fairness) – though he does not draw the correct conclusion, namely that the live-saving analogy is by now out of the picture. Regarding the beneficence/fairness distinction he clearly states: ... I have maintained that we stand under a collective moral requirement of beneficence to help needy people through aid agencies, and there is an individual moral requirement of fairness upon each of us to contribute towards meeting that collective requirement.30 As regards the second disanalogy, namely that the individual duty to save 13 you is a more important duty than the individual duty of fairness to contribute to a collective effort to save you, he no less clearly states that "the direct reason of beneficence for rescuing you ... overrides the reason of fairness for contributing to the collective action."31 Or to repeat a quote I have already adduced above: If you could either easily rescue someone from a fire or fund a fire safety programme, then obviously it would be wrong to do nothing. But, more than that, surely a stronger claim is obvious: it would be wrong not to rescue the person. It would be perverse in such a situation to let the person die and fund a safety programme instead.32 Thus, individually not contributing to an aid agency is clearly and definitely not "morally analogous" to not saving a drowning child or a child in immediate danger of being burnt in a fire – and this is confirmed by Cullity's very own observations. There is still no sight of any relevant analogy. However, Cullity's argument from fairness could still succeed in showing that the individual has a duty to contribute, namely a (weak) duty of fairness. Does it? No, it does not. Let us go back to Cullity's statement that one "cannot sensibly oppose" that the "reasons for imposing requirements of beneficence on individuals clearly apply equally to groups." Actually, the question here is not at all what requirements one can "impose" on someone, but what moral requirements someone (or something) actually has. And the reasons why groups are not subject to any moral requirements is the same as the reason why tomatoes or stones are not subject to such requirements: tomatoes, stones and groups are not morally responsible agents; in particular, they cannot think. 14 Of course, it is perfectly fine to say that a group has decided this or done that if this is understood as simply shorthand for saying that the individuals who constitute the group have made certain decisions. But if this is not what is meant, it is not entirely clear to me what is meant. For example, if by saying that the subject of the requirement is the two of us collectively Cullity only means to say, in this case, that we both have an obligation to cooperate with each other to save the drowning person, then I have not many qualms with it (for now, that is). At least it is an assertion I understand. However, if this is not what he means, I have to reject his claim as unintelligible. At least he would have to explain what exactly it is what he means. On my understanding, incidentally, the duty of each of the two persons to co-operate with the other one (leaving libertarian objections aside for the moment) is not a duty of fairness owed to that other potential helper but rather one owed to the drowning person. Thus, my understanding of the claim about "collective" responsibility is certainly closer to Singer's original example than Cullity's. Thus, I quite simply, and quite reasonably at that, reject the claim that we can first identify a moral duty of a collective to do something and then simply "fairly distribute" that duty among the individual members of the collective. This tactic does not succeed for the simple reason that collectives do not have moral duties (which, by the way, does not exclude the possibility of justifiably assigning or imposing upon them certain behavioral duties, or of blaming them33). But let us set these very fundamental objections aside for the sake of argument and return to the fairness argument. 15 It is somewhat ironic that in the light of Cullity's own averments about the duty of fairness, the obligations of the agents in the winch example cannot have anything to do with such a duty. After all, according to Cullity the unfairness he is talking about consists in the free rider's "arrogating privileges to herself" in that ... she relies on others to contribute to what we ought collectively to be doing, without contributing herself. ... That collective imperative is being met, but she is leaving the work of meeting it to others.34 However, in the winch example she cannot do anything of that sort. After all, ex hypothesi the winch can only be successfully operated with her help. At least if she knows that, she cannot "rely" on others to do the job, and even if she does not know that, the collective imperative will not be met if she does not help, too. My own explanation of the winch situation, in contrast, does not face any such problems. A better example for Cullity's purposes, provided by himself, then, might be the following one: There are three people drowning, and three bystanders, including me. We can rescue them, but only by using a winch mechanism that can be operated by a minimum of two people or, more easily, by three. Two things seem obvious here. First, we should winch them out. ... [Second:] Even if the other two bystanders could operate the winch and save all the drowning people by working harder without me, I should not simply leave the job to them.35 What is actually obvious here, however, is that what Cullity claims to be obvious isn't obvious at all. If I pass by and see that the two bystanders have everything under control, are even singing a merry tune while operating the winch, 16 why should I not just attend to my own affairs? Even if they want me to help – people might want a lot of things, but that does not mean that I act unfairly in not giving it to them. After all, I am not needed here. Similarly, am I really unfair when I desist from helping three rescue swimmers who are already jumping into the water to save the drowning child and who, due to the fact that I am just watching or moving on, will reach the shore two nanoseconds later than they would have had with my help? To answer "yes" defies common sense. Even if it were, however, unfair, strictly speaking, it would hardly be worth mentioning. And it might not even be immoral, not even strictly speaking. If I can save someone from a dire fate only by cheating while I am playing chess with a friend, then this unfairness would certainly wrong my friend, but it wrongs him justifiably. It seems, however – even without necessarily sharing Bernard Williams' ideas about Gauguin – that I might well be morally justified in inflicting a "microwrong" on a person if I thereby bestow a considerable benefit on a person I especially care for (like myself). After all, the reason why a permission not to save the drowning child in the shallow pond example is counterintuitive is that the little benefit to myself of not helping is completely outweighed by the dramatic harm to the child. However, the benefit of arriving on time at the cinema and watching the movie I was looking forward to is certainly not clearly outweighed by the fact that then the rescue swimmers will reach the shore a nanosecond later or by the fact that the people at the winch will burn a nanocalorie more. The shallow pond analogy is drowning for good reasons.36 NOTES 17 1 For example Michael McKinsey, "Obligations to the Starving," Noûs 15(3) (1981), pp. 309-323; David Schmidtz, "Islands in a Sea of Obligation: Limits of the Duty Rescue," Law and Philosophy 19 (2000), pp. 683-705; and, of course, Cullity himself in the texts of his I will be referring to here. 2 Garrett Cullity, "The Life-Saving Analogy," in William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette (eds.), World Hunger and Morality (Second Edition) (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 27. 3 Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1(3) (1972), pp. 229-43, here p. 231. 4 Ibid., p. 231f. 5 Ibid., p. 234. 6 In his Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Penguin, London and New York 2007, pp. 160-1, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that they are not. 7 Cullity, "The Life-Saving Analogy," p. 53. 8 Ibid. 9 Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 68-9. 10 Ibid, p. 66, second paragraph. 11 Cullity, "The Life-Saving Analogy," p. 27. 12 Ibid., p. 56. 13 Next to the differences between rescue and prevention and between perceptibility and imperceptibility there are at least two other potentially relevant disanalogies between the shallow pond case and giving to Oxfam or similar organizations, namely nearness/distance and (relative) certainty/(relative) uncertainty regarding the beneficial consequences of one's actions. Cullity does 18 not deal with these latter two disanalogies too seriously, as James R. Otteson notes in his review of Cullity's book. See Otteson, "Garret Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence," Journal of Value Inquiry, published online (Online First) on 6 November 2010. 14 Cullity, "The Life-Saving Analogy," p. 54. 15 Ibid., p. 55. 16 Cf. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 70. In his book, Cullity is aware of such objections; see Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence, p. 62. 17 Cullity, "The Life-Saving Analogy," p. 56 18 Ibid., p. 57. 19 Ibid., p. 56. 20 Ibid., p. 57. 21 Ibid., p. 58. 22 Ibid., p. 56-7. 23 Garrett Cullity, "Pooled Beneficence," in Michal J. Almeida (ed.), Imperceptible Harms and Benefits (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), p. 123, at 7-10. 24 Cullity (personal communication). 25 This is what Cullity conveyed in a personal communication. 26 Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence, p. 57. 27 Ibid., p. 61. 28 Ibid., p. 62. 29 Ibid., p. 65. 30 Ibid., p. 19 31 Ibid. p. 67. 32 Ibid., p. 57. 33 That it can be justifiable to hold someone responsible although he actually is not responsible is also pointed out by Virginia Held, "Group Responsibility for Ethnic Conflict," The Journal of Ethics 6 (2002), pp. 157-78, at p. 160, n. 9 (she is reporting and endorsing a suggestion of Philip Pettit's there), and by David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 84. 34 Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence, pp. 63-4. 35 Ibid., p. 76. 36 I thank the participants of the Workshop on the Principle of Assistance, 8 10 September 2010, CAPPE, Canberra (Kiola Campus) for their useful comments. In particular I have to thank Garrett Cullity, who also provided very helpful written comments.