You Should Save Drowning Children (Even If They’re Far Away)

This is a from my blog. It's meant a general introduction to effective charity, and it's my own rendition of Famine, Affluence, and Morality.

You’re going on a gentle stroll through the woods when you stumble upon a child drowning in a pond. You can easily wade into the pond and save the child with no harm to yourself, but you’re wearing an expensive suit that costs $5,000. If you wade into the pond, you will destroy your suit, and you don’t have enough time to take it off. Do you keep walking by or do you save the child?

Pretty much everyone agrees you should save the child.

Now, let’s imagine another scenario.

You live in one of the richest countries in the entire world and are in the world’s top 2% in terms of income. You can easily save the life of a child by donating money to one of the world’s most cost-effective charities at no harm to yourself, but the donation will cost $5,000. You can make this donation many times throughout your life. Do you pledge to donate a significant portion of your income to charity or do you keep walking by?

Almost everyone will say that, in the original case, you should do so but that, in this case, you have no obligation to do so. I think that they are wrong. If you have the opportunity to save people from dying, you should put a significant amount of your personal resources towards doing so.

In this post, I’m going to respond to some common objections to my view.

Objection #1: The child is far away

Some people will say that we don’t need to save the child because it is far away, but this seems quite absurd.

Let’s imagine that there’s a button in the middle of the pond that can save a child from drowning who is on the other side of the planet. It seems very strange to think that you have no obligation to press the button merely because the child isn’t within your sight.

And, to make the point more salient, let’s imagine that you’re drowning and that there’s a button on the other side of the world that could save you. Do you think that others have no obligation to press it since you’re far away from them?

Some people will point out that people who are closer to these people are more able to help them and to know that they’re doing so effectively, but, in this case, we can be fairly confident that, due to rigorous and extensive research, our way of helping them is still extraordinarily effective.

Objection #2: Billionaires should do something about it

Another common objection people have is that there is an obligation for someone to help the child but that the obligation rests not with you with billionaires. This view also seems quite absurd.

Let’s imagine that there’s a child drowning in the pond, but that there’s also a couple of billionaires standing around it. You notice that none of the billionaires are entering into the pond, and that, if you don’t enter the pond now, the child will drown.

It seems very bizarre to think that, merely because billionaires aren’t helping, that you also should not. After all, you probably shouldn’t be modelling your moral character on billionaires anyways.

To be clear, this objection does make sense if a billionaire would have donated to charity if you hadn’t. But, not only is this not true, it also appears that the opposite is the case. If we create a culture where the average person donates a significant amount of money to charity, billionaires are more likely to join in.

Objection #3: Governments should do something about it

Some people will say that they do believe that the child should be saved but that governments should be doing something about it instead of them.

I’m sympathetic to this view. Governments have an enormous amount of money at their disposal, and, if they collaborated, they could easily eliminate extreme poverty..

But, it’s important to remember that governments’ actions are determined by their populace.

Let’s imagine that there’s a child drowning in the pond, but that there’s also hundreds of millions of citizens who can vote to have $5,000 allocated to saving the child from drowning. They are choosing not to do so. Do you still have an obligation to save the child?

It seems like, clearly, just because people can vote to save the child, that does not mean that you don’t have an obligation to do so.

Now, it may be the case that advocating for increased foreign aid is more effective than donating your own money. In this case, my argument still holds, but, now I think you should donate a significant portion of your time advocating for foreign aid rather than donating a significant portion of your income to charity.

Objection #4: Donating a significant portion of one’s lifetime income is too demanding

Some people will agree that they should save the drowning child, but they will argue that they have no obligation to donate a significant portion of their income to charity because it is too demanding.

This view is quite interesting.

These people are essentially saying that if there were only one child in the entire world that needed to be saved by a charitable donation, they would have an obligation to do so. But, since there are millions of children that need to be saved, they have no obligation to help them at all since trying to help them all is too burdensome.

To this, I have two responses.

First, if you’d only willing to donate money to charity if there were a limited number of children needing to be saved, then you should simply donate to save the maximum number of children that you’d be willing to save.

Second, donating a significant portion of one’s lifetime income really isn’t that demanding. It can make sense to wait until you have stable employment, a good income, and strong job prospects, but, once you have these, the personal cost to oneself is quite low. I personally try to live on less than $30,000 a year, and I find that doing so has a pretty minimal effect on my quality of life. If you tried to live below a threshold similar to this, you could accumulate quite a large amount of savings to direct to charity and save tens of lives throughout your lifetime.

If you’d like to learn more about donating to effective charities, I’d recommend checking out this website.