1C Agenda 9-13-18: Extreme Altruism, Do-Gooders and Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative Lesson

Homework for #4 and #5 for September 18:

Homework #4: Read “This Is Your Brain on Gluten” by James Hamblin and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why author David Perlmutter is engaging in false claims to promote his ideas and bestselling books.

Homework #5: Read Alexandra Sifferlin's "The Weight Loss Trap" and explain why it is so difficult to lose weight and keep it off.

We will also read Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence."

Extreme Altruism, Do-Gooders and Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative Lesson

Essay #2 Due 9-27-18

Minimum of 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.

Option A

In the context of the Netflix documentary Dirty Money, Episode #2, "Payday," write an argumentative essay that answers the question: Were Scott Tucker and his associates fairly prosecuted or did the government overreach its powers and exact unjust punishment on these allegedly greedy businessmen? Be sure to have a counterargument section. For your sources, you can use the documentary, the Vulture review, and the Atlantic review.

Option B

In the context of James Hamblin’s “This Is Your Brain on Gluten,” write an essay that addresses the claim that David Perlmutter is engaging in flawed critical thinking to persuade his readers to follow overreaching promises about his nutrition regiment.

Option C

In the context of Alexandra Sifferlin's "The Weight Loss Trap" and Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence," develop a thesis that addresses the claim that going on a diet is too futile and harmful and that we should give up on the idea of dieting altogether.

Option D

In the context of Jason Brennan’s “Can epistocracy, or knowledge-based voting, fix democracy?”, support, defend, or complicate the claim that an epistocracy is superior to democracy as we currently know it.

Option E

Addressing the complexities and moral contradictions contained in Larissa MacFarquhar’s YouTube presentation “Understanding Extreme Altruism” ( a thumbnail sketch of her book Strangers Drowning), develop an argumentative thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative as he lays it out in “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle. ” Singer’s Drowning Child analogy is also used in his essay “What Should a Billionaire Give--and What Should You?”

Summary of Peter Singer's Argument

Singer's argument is that we should use our money to fulfill our most basic survival needs, but give the rest away to charity; otherwise, we are guilty of hurting those in need of our charity. For example, buying a 15K luxury watch is money we could have given to help hungry children. A more moral position would be to buy a 10-dollar Casio and give the 15K to a charity.

Why buy a 40K car when we could buy a used 20K car and give the remaining 20K to charity. To fail to do so is to be guilty of hurting the hungry and ailing, according to Peter Singer's logic.

Peter Singer Vs. Conventional Morality

Most people don't embrace Peter Singer's charity doctrine. Most people love family and show some decency to the world. But Peter Singer, in the words of Larissa MacFarquhar, is a do-gooder, someone whose focus veers away from immediate family and to the problems of the world.

The do-gooder says, "I have no morality unless I devote my life to addressing the world's suffering." This sounds noble because most of us sedate and comfort ourselves on a life of consumerism, working hard so we can accumulate better and better stuff as measure of our life quality.

However, if we study the do-gooder, we find that the dichotomy between the do-gooder and the consumer is not so black and white, and that there are complications that challenge Peter Singer's do-gooder vision.

Complication of the Analogy Between Drowning Children and Charity

Does Comparison Between Drowning Child and Charity Hold Up?

One. A nearby drowning child is not the same as geopolitical causes of mass suffering and starvation.

Two. Diving into a pond is simpler than a charity that may be rife with inefficiency, corruption, and unintended consequences.

Three. Charity may be a band-aid that actually prevents us from getting to root causes of suffering. Perhaps government policy, not charity, is the answer.

Four. Good intentions don't necessarily have positive outcomes.

Five. Slippery Slope brings us to animals.

Barnard College philosophy professor How Darmstadter writes the following:

Another awkward consequence of Singer’s principles, as noted by the late Bernard Williams, is a zero tolerance policy for lions. Lions prey on zebra, wildebeest and other large herbivores. These prey animals presumably suffer in their deaths. We could end all their suffering by eliminating the lions. Sure, the lions would suffer, but the overall amount of suffering would much decrease. The same argument holds for other carnivores – tigers, crocodiles, owls, weasels, and the others of that bloodstained lot. In each case, a one-time destruction of the species would reduce the suffering of untold generations of herbivores, and the world would be a kinder, gentler place. (We could perhaps keep a few representatives of each carnivore species alive in protected habitats, where we would feed them veggie burgers.)

Singer tries to argue that we shouldn’t eliminate carnivores because “our record of interfering in ecological systems is not good.” But this is disingenuous. Messing with nature – especially our natures – is what Singer is all about. Ignoring the suffering of the zebra and the wildebeest is akin, in Singerland, to ignoring the drowning child. We know we can do something, and if we fail to do it, the suffering of the beasts that are preyed upon – and on Singer’s account they must suffer in enormous numbers – will be upon our heads.

When an argument reaches an unpalatable conclusion, we can reject some of the premises, we can look for some misstep in our reasoning, or we can decide that the conclusion is correct after all. Singer often takes that third path, denying that seemingly unacceptable consequences are really unacceptable. Thus, he really believes that you shouldn’t give your own children extraordinary advantages. (He doesn’t seem to take seriously the argument that we should eliminate carnivores, but his counterargument is weak.) Yet for most of us, Singer’s acceptance of uncomfortable ethical results, or the feebleness of his attempts to escape them, must make us cautious. How could such appealing principles and direct arguments get us to such problematic conclusions? What has gone wrong?

Six. Drowning child is over simplistic analogy.

Professor Darmstadter writes:

It’s a rare day when you encounter a child drowning in a pool, but you do see people who obviously need help in other ways, and you usually hurry to their aid. A man trips on the sidewalk, and complete strangers immediately help him to his feet. If he’s seriously hurt, someone will call an ambulance.

For most of us, seeing someone trip on the sidewalk is not an everyday occurrence. But suppose instead that we all fell several times a day, so that in your normal morning constitutional you would see people going down like ten pins. Would you feel that you must help them all? Or suppose you’re in downtown Minneapolis on one of the nastier days of winter. The temperature is Arctic, and the wind howling. Nearly everyone is suffering – but you don’t start handing out gloves, scarves, and parkas. If you’re driving across town in heated comfort, you’re unlikely to stop and offer strangers a lift, although all the walkers are suffering. (Of course, if you see someone who appears disoriented by the cold, you may guide him to shelter.) Our helpfulness extends to the outliers of suffering, not to the typical.

Finally, that child in the pool. Everyone knows what you should do. But suppose that later that day you encounter a second drowning child. Again, we would want you to take the plunge. But a third? A fiftieth? Suppose you encountered a hundred such children every day. Perhaps at some point you’ll think ‘Why does this all fall on me?’ and walk on by, pretending you don’t hear the child’s screams. Or perhaps you’ll just spend more time away from pools.

There is another difference between your obligations to the drowning child and your obligations to suffering humanity. Singer’s example assumes that you are the only person who can help the child. Would your obligation be different if there were hundreds of people observing the child? Now ‘Why does this all fall on me?’ seems a sensible question. Someone has to plunge in to the pool – but shouldn’t it be someone who knows the child, or who can get to the child fastest, or who’s wearing cheaper clothing? So it makes sense that you may want to make charitable contributions to alleviate suffering – indeed, feel morally compelled to do so – yet feel that you can stop at the point when you feel it’s time that others pitch in. Moral rules can’t generally be applied in an unlimited accumulation: they are meant to work in the situations we normally deal with, and they can be overwhelmed by numbers and by questions about the obligations of other people. The upshot is that you can grant Singer his basic principle about an obligation to alleviate suffering, yet still reject his limitless conclusions.

Seven. One situation has a clear endpoint and the other does not.

When you save a drowning child, there is a clear endpoint or end game. You have saved a drowning child. However, giving to charity is an ongoing project with complications on the way: money distribution, credibility of the charity needing to be monitored, good intentions having positive outcomes, etc.

Eight. An analogy does not have to be perfect to be valid.

Defending or Refuting the Do-Gooder

Based on book Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar (LM).

Essay Topic

Sources for Your Essay

“The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle. ”

“What Should a Billionaire Give--and What Should You?”

LM’s video “Understanding Extreme Altruism”

Study Questions

One. LM raises the question of choosing to save our mother, a single person, or two people instead. What issues does this question raise?

Demands of religion: To share one’s love with the whole world, with the strangers of the world, as much as one’s family

Limits of empathy

Limits of altruism

Limits of utilitarianism (greatest good for greatest number of people)

Visceral familial love vs. more abstract love for humanity

Contradiction of personal love vs. abstract love: “If you’re going to care the same about everybody, you’re going to care less about your mother. You’re not going to be able to care the same about everybody as you care about your children.”

There is caring as a feeling and caring as a kind of duty that is divorced from feeling.

Caring about everyone in the world the same way we care about our family and loved ones is impossible. It would make life intolerable.

Religious purity may be impossible. One may have to choose between family and the world’s strangers.

Two. What is LM’s notion of the do-gooder?

“I mean a person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible. I mean a person who’s drawn to moral goodness for its own sake. I mean someone who pushes himself to moral extremity, who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable. I mean the kind of do-gooder who makes people uneasy.”

Perhaps, some would claim, Peter Singer is a do-gooder.

Some other characteristics of the do-gooder:

Strong sense of duty that represses base impulses, consumerism, luxuries, fine eating, pleasure seeking, etc.

Workaholic, stays focused on the mission at hand

“Certain rigidity and a focused narrowness to the way he lives”

There is an apparent austere, spartan, joyless brutality to the do-gooder’s existence that suits him well but is off-putting, even repellant, to non-do-gooders.

In some ways, the do-gooder is more free than other people: He is free of vanity, greed, consumerism, self-indulgence, and other vices.

Normal people help others who have “an organic connection” to their lives: family, friends, people they encounter on the job, in their circle of activities. The needs of others come to them.

Do-gooders, on the other hand, have a more abstract notion of duty: They feel compelled to help people on a large scale, people whose faces the do-gooder may never see. The needs of others don’t come to the do-gooder. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to seek them out and to address their problems. He obsesses over finding a system that will allow him to scale his mission.

Normal people don’t provoke discomfort in us, but do-gooders make us very uncomfortable.

The very word “do-gooder” has derogatory, negative connotations.

The do-gooder has no life outside his good deeds. His good deeds are his life.

The do-gooder is equated with an ambulance chaser.

The do-gooder’s life is one long reproach of our relatively selfish one.

Three. What philosophical questions does the do-gooder’s life raise?

Should we live a normal life or a saintly life?

And is a saintly life even possible?

And who gets to define it?

And what is the cost of such a life?

Is such a saintly life as morally pure as one might assume at first glance? Does the saint have an unnatural devotion to duty while not having love? Can we feel ambivalent watching the do-gooder address the needs of strangers while neglecting his immediate family?

Should we abandon the family to devote all of ourselves to our cause? Jesus, Gandhi, Buddha, and Saint Francis all believed that one should do so if necessary.

Four. What is George Orwell’s argument against the do-gooder’s quest for moral perfection?

Writing about Gandhi, Orwell wrote: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection . . .”; rather, what one seeks is the far greater and far less perfect human love. To love fully is to be imperfect. To aim for perfection is to live a life without love.

Yet Orwell admired Gandhi.

Five. What else than selfishness stifles our urge to help strangers?

LH observes that in a world where sacrifice on the scale of war sacrifice no longer exists, we have focused on the needs of our family, so that the idea of helping strangers, resulting in compromising our resources for our family, seems unnatural.

Six. Is selfishness the natural condition of humans?

Yes and no. According to Carl Jung, we have 4 Stages of Life.

Number One is the Athlete, the stage where we’re stuck in our narcissistic prison, absorbed by how we look, and how what the world thinks of us.

Number Two is the Warrior, the stage where we use our discipline and talents to conquer the world, so to speak, to makes lots of money so we can buy lots of cool stuff. Like the Athlete, the Warrior stage is ego-driven.

Number Three is the Philosopher Stage. We get sick of buying stuff and we get sick of our own ego. We evolve into to hungering for the spiritual world. We turn away from our ego, and we try to live a life of meaning, a life that makes a difference for others, and a life that may leave in indelible footprint, so that even after we die our legacy lives on.

Number Four is the Spirit Stage. This is the complete turning away from ego. Materialism loses its meaning and value.

But do Jung’s 4 Stages of Life still apply to America, which may be in a state of unbridled consumerism?

We may live in a country that has replaced Jung’s Four Stages of Life with the Four Stages of Consumerism. They are as follows:

The Chuck E. Cheese Stage, where you learn to enjoy a casino-like atmosphere at an early age that will influence your consumer habits for the rest of your life.

The Dave & Buster’s Stage, where you realize that there’s a place that’s like Chuck E. Cheese on steroids.

The Las Vegas Stage, where you realize there is an Adults-Only version of Dave & Buster’s.

The Botox Stage, where you sit in a pedicure salon getting botox injections while binge-watching Netflix programs before undergoing a painless death. You’re then buried in a gold coffin while donning a diamond-studded Rolex.

Seven. What are some possible causes of being a do-gooder?

One. You’re frustrated with mainstream life. You’ve played by the rules, by society’s script, and you feel empty, disenchanted, and disillusioned. As a result, you desire a greater purpose.

Two. You’re on the rebound from an epic relationship failure, and you need to lose yourself in an all-consuming activity that requires all of your sacrifice.

Three. The tribe (family, friends, religious community) that used to give you comfort and belonging now seems alien to you, and you need to get away from them by finding some new lifestyle that requires all of your efforts and sacrifice. You may even engage in this new sacrificial, do-gooder enterprise to (on an unconscious level) punish parents, siblings, ex-romantic interests, etc.

Four. You are naturally idealistic, and you find you must become a vegan, a human rights activist, or a caretaker of the world’s suffering masses to alleviate the worm of guilt that burrows into your haunted conscience.

Five. You may be so dysfunctional that you can only define yourself through the self-abnegation and self-erasure that results from all-consuming lifestyle of complete sacrifice.

Six. Overwhelmed by the guilt of your past life of embracing reckless self-indulgence, using other people for your own pleasure and ego-gratification, and stealing from the decency, trust, and goodwill of others, you seek to redeem yourself with a Grand Life of Atonement, which can only be brought about by complete sacrifice.

Seven. You are, in a perverse and ironic way, selfish. Your “devotion to others” is actually a selfish display of self-aggrandizement that affords you the opportunity to rub people’s noses in your goodness.

People who are giving in a selfish way have a way of smothering others to death with their false love. This theme is demonstrated in a Chekhov short story called “The Darling.”

Eight. What is Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative and how does it support the do-gooder’s extreme lifestyle?

Peter Singer writes in many essays about the Drowning Child Moral Imperative. One such widely available essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” provides us with the following:

If you walk past a child drowning in a body of water, you are morally obliged to stop what you’re doing and to save the child’s life.

Children all over the world are dying, from malaria, hunger, violence, etc.

You have the money to give to the appropriate charities that will save as many children as you possibly can.

Therefore, you must only spend your money on bare necessities. The rest of your money must go to the appropriate child-saving charities; otherwise, you are guilty of letting drowning children die.

It does not matter that you can not see these children. It does not matter that you do not know these children. What matter is that you are morally obliged to spend as much money as you can on helping to save as many children’s lives as possible.

For example, if I buy a $6K luxury watch, a Breitling Super Avenger, or a $15K Rolex Deep Sea Dweller when I could have just as well have bought a $10 Casio watch, all that money I spent on bling for my wrist, all that discretionary income I used to adorn my body with Power Jewelry, could have gone to save the lives of thirty-five children.

According to Peter Singer’s argument, I am responsible for those 35 deaths. Those dead children are on my soul. I will be judged someday by a Higher Authority, and the reckoning I will have to endure won’t be a pretty one.

According to LH, many do-gooders have been influenced by Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative.

We are not only commanded, according Singer’s edict, to give as much money as possible; we are commanded to distribute the money in a way that as many lives as possible are saved.

I can give you a personal example of this.

In 1990, my grandfather, a socialist who believed justice for all people could only be achieved be achieved by replacing capitalism with socialism, was walking with me down Hollywood Blvd. I encountered a homeless man, and he asked for some money, upon which I escorted him inside a restaurant and bought him a cheeseburger and a drink. My grandfather criticized me because I was not “targeting the larger issue of systemic injustice.” In other words, according to my grandfather’s logic, my helping one homeless person was a feeble Band-Aid that failed to get to the root of the larger problem.

I politely argued with him, explaining that I wanted to help alleviate the homeless person’s hunger in the immediate situation, and I was not waiting for some Pie in the Sky Grand Political Revolution to assuage the world’s suffering.

I was annoyed by my grandfather’s argument. To his credit, we were in an Italian restaurant in San Pedro, around 1995, when out of the blue he brought up my 1990 good deed, and he apologized for criticizing me.

But I use that personal story of an example, of the do-gooder’s utilitarian purpose to help as many people as possible, even if it means ignoring the suffering that immediately surrounds us.

Not Only Your Money But Time Is Demanded of Peter Singer

If we accept Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative, then not only is money a valuable resource that can save lives. So is our time.

If we’re looking at watches and cars and shoes on the Internet, if we’re texting back and forth about gossip with friends, if we’re binge-watching content on Netflix, if we’re playing games at Dave & Buster’s, we are wasting time that could have been served to save the world’s drowning children. We are guilty of letting them die.

Nietzsche’s Anti-Do-Gooder Screed: Morality for the Weak

LH writes, “To him, the Christian idea of goodness--humility, compassion, devotion to others at the expense of oneself--was a morality for the insignificant and the weak.” Such a belief “emasculates the strong.” Nietzsche believed that “Greatness could thrive only if it was selfish.” Here is another adage: “Happiness was not interesting: human greatness should be the goal of life” (109).

Counterarguments

Some refute Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative.

It is too extreme.

It is not realistic.

It is not practical.

It relies on a faulty comparison ( a child dies of hunger 5,000 miles away is not the same as a child drowning in a shallow pond two feet from me)

It is stupid because it demands that I use resources that are needed for my family.

It is downright evil because it “violates your duty to yourself” (67).

It is evil because it placing inhumane demands on your life: “To require a person to think of himself as a tool for the general good could be seen as the equivalent of kidnapping a person off the street and harvesting his organs to save three or four lives” (67)

Selfishness is the natural state of affairs. It’s part of our DNA. Read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

Responding to Counterarguments

For one, LH cites philosopher Bernard Williams who, though hating utilitarianism, argues that “duties to oneself” is a load of crock, a smokescreen designed to justify selfishness. A moral life, Williams argues, requires sacrifice, even if it means abandoning the people we love.

For two, saying that do-gooders’ tendency to favor strangers over family is a violation of natural human instinct fails to account that a lot of human instinct is rank and downright brutal and evil.

For three, living for family at the exclusion of helping people in the outside world is a very limited, lowly evolved form of morality, which is not part of a cosmopolitan mindset.

For four, to abandon helping strangers could be part of an either/or fallacy: Either we’re selfish pigs or we partake in the overwhelming and impossible quest to help a suffering world. A healthy morality system might exist somewhere in-between, a golden mean, if you will, in which we find balance between healthy self-interest and healthy charity for others.

For five, history is rife with heroes, such as Viktor Frankl, Martin Luther King, and others, whose lives of self-sacrifice are admirable and inspirational.

Conclusion

In conclusion, not all do-gooders are the same. Some have worthy goals such as Civil Rights; others have unworthy, misguided goals such as Prohibition. We have to look at Do-Gooders’ goals and moral character individually and do a granular analysis.

LM’s video

Sample Thesis Statements

My family struggles just to keep a roof over our heads and put food in our bellies, so Peter Singer's charity imperative does not apply to us. However, if we were members of the privileged class I would still reject Singer's No Luxury Give All philosophy because such a philosophy ignores human selfishness, is too punitive to scale to helpful proportions, appeals to crazy types, as evidenced in Larissa MacFarquhar's chronicles, and ignores the root problem of human suffering: government-led structural inequality. What is needed is not the self-punitive ascetic (abstaining from pleasures) lifestyle prescribed by Singer, but a life of balance in which the life of pleasure is balanced by a reasonable degree of altruism.

Society has brainwashed to worship at the altar of Consumerism and Self-Indulgence as we are slaves to a lifestyle script that has us go to college, get as a good a job as we can, and make us much money as we can so we can accumulate lots of expensive crap to prove to the world that we are successful and worthy of high esteem and veneration. Peter Singer proves this is a life os selfish bull crap. A secularist and an atheist, Peter Singer ironically has come to the Christian place of rejecting the trappings of this world and defining one's life through self-sacrifice, compassion, and giving, and his Drowning Child model makes such a spiritual journey compelling and convincing.

Life is a Darwinian struggle in which the strong thrive and the weak must die. We must not violate the natural order. Our DNA hard-wires us to be selfish, to fight for our plot of land. We are like super developed lobsters jockeying for the best real estate. To submit to Peter Singer's No Luxury Give All philosophy is to violate our nature, to wreak havoc from "good intentions," to help multiply suffering even further, to pander to the crazies observed by Larissa MacFarquhar, and to diminish motivation for human greatness.