Alastair Norcross in iai:
A little over fifty years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer published an article that changed the way philosophers think and talk about the morality of helping others. In it, he appealed to a hypothetical example to motivate his claims. Here’s a version of it: On our way to give a lecture, we come across a small child, drowning in a shallow pond. No one else is in sight, and the child will be dead within minutes without our help.
We all agree that we should save the child. That’s easy. A bit of mud and water on our clothes, a bit of bother finding someone to give the child to, perhaps having to miss the lecture we were about to give, perhaps even having to forgo our lecture fee. But none of that could excuse our failure to save the child. Pretty much everyone agrees with this. Why? Because pretty much everyone cares about others, at least to some extent. That is, very few people are purely egotistical. Even if we are highly self-obsessed, and some of us certainly are, we also think that others matter too. We think it would be bad if that child were to drown in the pond. And if we could save the child, especially without a great deal of sacrifice on our own part, it would be bad not to. Not just bad, we might think, but wrong too. This much is fairly uncontroversial.
More here.
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