Perversions of the shallow pond

 I ask you to imagine that you are walking through a park on your way to work.  You’ve just treated yourself to a nice new Armani suit and some Gucci loafers.  You’re feeling pretty darn good about yourself and have got quite a strut going on when as you pass by a pond you notice a small child trying ineffectually to doggy paddle, completely submerged in the pond.  Instantly your old lifeguard training from when you were 16 kicks into gear as you recognise the drowning victim.  But you hesitate. You’re Peter Singer.  You make a snap judgment – that child is obviously under 2 years old.  You turn away to ponder the fate of actual creatures who deserve your moral care, like chickens


I ask you to imagine that you are walking through a park on your way to work. You’ve just treated yourself to a nice new Armani suit and some Gucci loafers.  You’re feeling pretty darn good about yourself and have got quite a strut going on when as you pass by a pond you notice a small child trying ineffectually to doggy paddle, completely submerged in the pond.  Instantly your old lifeguard training from when you were 16 kicks into gear as you recognise that this child is drowning.  But you hesitate. After all, you’re Bill Gates (does Bill Gates wear Gucci loafers?).  You earn $380 per second.  You’re the world’s most generous man.  You’re going to give away almost all of your wealth to charity to people who really know how to do good.   

How long will it take to save that child? One minute? That’s $22,800 worth of your time.  You could save almost 7 people with that money.  You take one glance at the drowning child as you start to run away, eager to make up for lost time.  While your heart tells you that you ought to help them, your brain tells you you’d have to be a moral monster to jump in to save that child. And you didn’t become Bill Gates by sacrificing your calculated rationality to your silly emotions. 


I ask you to imagine that you are walking through a park on your way to work.   You’ve just treated yourself to a nice new Armani suit and some Gucci loafers.  You’re feeling pretty darn good about yourself and have got quite a strut going on when as you pass by a pond you notice a small child trying ineffectually to doggy paddle, completely submerged in the pond.  Instantly your old lifeguard training from when you were 16 kicks into gear as you recognise that this child is drowning.  But you hesitate. After all, you’re Lionel Messi, and you’re on your way to a charity auction, where your shoes are to be auctioned off to support vaccination efforts in underdeveloped countries. Your shoes could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars and save hundreds of lives, but if you jump in that pool now to save the drowning child, they’d be ruined and won’t fetch nearly as much at the charity. Your heart aches for the drowning child, but your brain tells you that you’d have to be a moral monster to sacrifice the lives of thousands just to save one life who’d just have been so lucky as to have his peril occur physically close to you. You shed a tear, but you walk away, confident you’ve done the right thing. 


I ask you to imagine that you are walking through a park on your way to work.  You’ve just treated yourself to a nice new Armani suit and some Gucci loafers.  You’re feeling pretty darn good about yourself and have got quite a strut going on when as you pass by a pond you notice a small child trying ineffectually to doggy paddle, completely submerged in the pond.  Instantly your old lifeguard training from when you were 16 kicks into gear as you recognise that this child is drowning.  But you hesitate. After all, you’re Toby Ord.  The world’s foremost philosopher of existential risk.  You are working on how to stop future generations from destroying the future for even more distant generations of humans and our conscious non-human non-biological offspring.  The future of quadrillions of conscious creatures lies, in small part in your hands. Even though the part you play is so tiny, and the boy would be so easy to save, the sheer magnitude of the impact of the problems you’re working on means that the reward in lives saved for even the slightest percentage decrease in the probability of existential risks outweighs the single boy in terms of lives saved by several orders of magnitude.  Seeing as the future depends if only in a small part on you, you’d have to be a moral monster not to let someone else deal with the pressing issues of today. 


I ask you to imagine that you are walking through a park on your way to work. You’ve just treated yourself to a nice new Armani suit and some Gucci loafers.  You’re feeling pretty darn good about yourself and have got quite a strut going on when as you pass by a pond you notice a small child trying ineffectually to doggy paddle, completely submerged in the pond.  Instantly your old lifeguard training from when you were 16 kicks into gear as you recognise that this child is drowning.  But you hesitate. After all, you’re Peter Singer again.  You’re the world’s most important living philosopher.  Every second you’re at work, there’s a decent change that you’ll be on your way to convincing someone important that non-human animals are moral patients. Every person you convince could mean the alleviation of suffering and premature death for thousands if not millions of non-human animals.  As you see the boy struggling, you cannot help but giggle as you see the irony in the situation, but you continue on your way to work.  The moral risk in stopping to help is just to great. 

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