Thursday, March 22, 2007

Morality games, continued

I've just noticed that below the post from The Valve that I discussed in my previous post, there is a very thoughtful comment on it, by "Sam C."

He describes the Peter Singer article well, and rightly points out another thought experiment Peter Singer has encouraged:

Suppose that as you were walking to work today, you passed a child drowning in a shallow pond. Should you wade in and save her, even at the cost of ruining your suit? Of course. But for much less than the cost of a suit, you really could save a child who is now dying. The only difference between the cases is that the second child is far away, probably in sub-Saharan Africa. We think very badly of the person who walks past the drowning child to save his suit; but we don't think badly of the person who buys a suit instead of giving the money to UNICEF. What could make the moral difference? Surely not just distance. Singer argues that nothing makes such a difference.

Tough pill to swallow, huh? Sam clearly took some of the same classes I did, and has probably read Peter Unger's forceful and disturbing book "Living High and Letting Die." (I always get him confused with Peter Singer.)

Ultimately, all this leads to 1) a debate about the validity of emotion or intuition in morality, as against reason, and 2) a conflict between deontology (in essence, morality is a system of "don't" rules) and consequentialism (morality is the bringing about of the best outcomes). But I'll spare you more, and link to a fantastic little ditty that Sam has brought to my attention. It's a bunch of in jokes, but it's a scream. How did I miss this?

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:51 AM

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