by Tim Sommers
In October of 1987, 18-month-old Jessica McClure Morales – forever after to be known as “Baby Jessica” – fell into a well in her aunt’s backyard in Midland Texas. She was lodged 22 feet down in the 8 inch well casing with one leg bent above her head. Over the next 58 hours an ever-expanding crew of rescuers worked to free her, eventually deciding to drill an entirely new, parallel shaft with a cross-cut into the well where Jessica was jammed.
Unfortunately, they soon realized that the well was surrounded on all sides by solid rock. Jack hammers barely dented it. If they could drill at all, it would not be quickly. A mining engineer showed up on the scene with a solution in the form of a new technology: waterjet cutting. Throughout the process of creating a parallel shaft, the rescuers could hear Baby Jessica singing the “Winne-the-Poo” song.
When the shaft and cross-tunnel were complete, the rescuers considered sending in a roofer, Ron Short, who had been born without a collarbone and could collapse his shoulders to get through tight spaces. But in the end, it was EMT Robert O’Donnell who crawled down and freed Jessica from her pinned position and then passed her back through the cross-cut to EMT Steve Forbes. Forbes then passed Baby Jessica to firefighters who carried her to an ambulance.
It’s basically impossible to discern, at this point, how much was spent on the rescue of Baby Jessica, but we do know that a trust fund was set up at the time that received 1.2 million dollars in donations, which is approximately equivalent to 3 million dollars today. At least on one estimate, 3 million dollars donated to fight malaria today would save 750 lives, 749 more than 1.
Was the rescue of Baby Jessica unique? Specific to a certain time or place?
In the summer of 2018, a Thai football team – 12 players and their young coach – were trapped in the Tham Nang Non cave system in Chiang Rai province by rising waters. The cave was a tourist spot and not considered especially dangerous. Rain was not predicted before they entered the cave. But the rain came anyway. All 13 members of the team were able to avoid drowning immediately by sheltering on a mound in a chamber two-and-a-half miles from the cave entrance.
They were ultimately rescued after nearly eighteen days* via a combination of pumping water out of the cave and sending divers into it. The divers ultimately carried the team out, one member at a time, by sedating, partially binding them, and dragging them out totally submerged under water for three hours each.
Pumping one hundred and thirty million liters of water out of the cave and onto the rice paddies of local villagers destroyed their crop. Two rescuers lost their lives, one drowning in the cave, the other dying later from a blood infection contracted in the cave. The rescue effort in toto involved about ten thousand people including participants from dozens of other countries, one thousand soldiers, nine hundred police officers, and ten helicopters.
It’s hard to quantify all that, but one person who has tried, Jye Sawtell-Rickson, says that it costs at least fifty-thousand dollars per person, and maybe as much as five times that. GiveWell estimates that by sending Vitamin A supplements to impoverished people one could save 200 children for that amount, rather than 13.
I am not against rescues like this. And one thing we should note right away is that these situations always involve a lot of people just showing up and volunteering. But they could have shown up and volunteered at the local food bank instead. I am not interested in the private/public distinction here. Rather, there is something going on that I don’t fully understand, and I think it leads back to very basic philosophical questions.
I mean, the same year that Jessica McClure was dubbed “everybody’s baby”, President Ronald Reagan cut 20 billion dollars from Social Security (support for retired, disabled, and surviving partners thereof), Medicaid (health care for the poor and disabled), Food Stamps (aid to the hungry (now called SNAP)), and federal education programs. His approval rate was around 49% at the time, so it is very likely that some of the people who sent money to a trust fund for Baby Jessica also supported taking educational opportunities, health care, and food away from their fellow citizens.
What’s so special about rescue cases that make people so generous?
Way back in 1987, not long after Baby Jessica was pulled out of that well, one of my teachers made the following argument. He said these rescues are a kind of secular ritual, the equivalent of a religious ritual, sanctifying human life. They are meant to prove something, at least symbolically, that is disproved in practice every day; namely, that every life is so precious that it has no price, that there’s no limit on what should be done to save even one single person.
That’s an interesting take, but a simpler place to start is that these rescues are great stories. (I highly recommend the (purportedly) most accurate movie about the Thai Cave rescue, 13 Lives.) People show up at rescues, or watch them from a distance and donate, because they are compelled by interesting and likeable characters, hair-raising events, and high stakes.
For example, if you didn’t tear up a bit when you heard that Baby Jessica was singing the “Winne-the-Poo” song while they were drilling towards her, you have a heart of stone or I am a terrible writer or both. On the other hand, I included the part about the guy with no collar bone, as has every single account of the event I have ever read, even though he was, in fact, no part of the actual rescue at all. Why include him? Because it’s interesting, that’s why. Or, maybe, even something more basic than interesting. Maybe, it’s what makes something salient in the psychological sense.
Consider this crazy case. Bréag Quick was waiting at a tram station in Dublin when they noticed that five people were stuck on the tracks and a tram was coming. One of the victims indicated that Bréag had just enough time to throw a switch redirecting the tram onto a second track where, unfortunately, it would run over a sixth tram employee obliviously working on the tracks. Okay, yes, that’s just the trolley problem again – and you are probably sick of hearing about it. But bear with me. All I want to note is that I have heard and presented the trolley many, many times and the vast majority of people (20 to 1 or better) think you should switch the trolley, that you should save 5 by killing 1 because 5 > 1.
How do we get from the singular preciousness of every life to strictly numerical weightings? Choose whatever course of action saves the most lives or every individual life is sacred and to be saved at all costs?
Tired of the trolley problem? What if, at the same time the 13 members of that Thai soccer team were trapped in that cave, there were also 1300 school children trapped in another cave nearby under nearly identical circumstances. What portion, if any, of the resources deployed in the rescue, should be diverted to save the 1300 lives?
Too impersonal? If you are swimming and you see a child drowning that you could easily save, presumably, you have an obligation to save them. But what if you see one child drowning off to one side and two children drowning in the other direction. Suppose you could save the one or save the two, but you can’t save all three. Are you morally obligated to save the two? Suppose you save the one, should you be condemned by people – even though you just saved a child’s life! – because you could have saved two? What if the one child is your child?
Philosophers use the generic phrase “special relations” to denote that we have people – mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, extended family, romantic partners, friends, etc. – who we have special regard for and that this raises a whole other bunch of problems. Maybe, in rescue cases it’s most relevant like this. Do we develop a weaker, but real, special relation during some of these rescues with, say, Baby Jessica?
This is only the beginning of a very rich topic, so I will start next time from the argument I am about to give. This argument is explicit or implicit in the work of all the classical utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick) – and many more contemporary ones. See if you can see what, if anything, is wrong with it. (And, yes, maximizing welfare is not the same as saving the maximum number of lives, but we will get into that later.)
(1) Everyone’s welfare is equally valuable.
(2) Everyone’s welfare is intrinsically valuable.
(3) We should always prefer more of what is intrinsically valuable to less.
(4) Therefore, we should always maximize welfare.
*For reasons I can’t figure, there is disagreement about how many days the team was in the cave. Some say 15 days, some 17 days, and some say 18.