Against The Drowning Child Argument
There is an argument commonly known as the Drowning Child Argument, which goes something as follows: Imagine that you’re walking across a shallow pond and you notice that a small child has fallen in, and is in danger of drowning…Of course, you think you must rush in to save the child. Then you remember that you’re wearing your favorite, quite expensive, pair of shoes and they’ll get ruined if you…
It is kind of annoying for the drowning child thought experiment that most people don’t have $3500 shoes. (I sometimes ask people to imagine they’re going to ruin their most expensive suit, or dress–for a lot of people this is pretty expensive.) But I feel like the important function of the thought experiment is
- establish that people have an intuition that it is obligatory to save the life of a person dying in front of you, even at nontrivial cost to yourself
- ask why that intuition doesn’t extend to cases where the person is somewhere else and you can’t actually see them
Why do most people who say “yes you should save the child” not donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities? If it turns out most people don’t actually think it’s obligatory to save the drowning child when you specify that it is a person of their income, wearing $3500 shoes for some reason, then that seems like an important flaw in the thought experiment. But I would guess the reason for most people is that kids saved by AMF are far away and don’t really seem real compared to the kid right in front of you.
Weirdly, “spend a month of every year going on quests to save children” sounds way more demanding and daunting to me than “give 10% of your income.”