The Shallow Pond and the Life You Can Save

In 1971, during the height of the East Pakistan refugee crisis, the philosopher Peter Singer published an essay called Famine, Affluence, and Morality in which the ‘Shallow Pond’ thought experiment  – one of philosophy’s most profound thought experiments – made its appearance.

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. Children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool, though, and it’s early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.

As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown.

Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. What should you do?

The answer to this question is a no-brainer: unless one is a psychopath, the child will be rescued. But Singer’s follow-up takes it to an intellectually and morally mind-boggling level. What if the child isn’t right before your eyes? What if you are told that, at every moment, somewhere in the world, a person’s suffering could be eased with a small, almost insignificant effort or contribution from you? In Singer’s words:

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

When Marx died in 1883, the Russian Revolution was still three decades in the future. Little did he know that his ideas would change the world for good. Singer, on the other hand, is one of the few thinkers who has managed to see his ideas transform the world we live in, in profound ways. The philanthropy movement (think Bill Gates, Warren Buffet) and the Effective Altruism (EA) movement also owe a lot to Singer’s ideas.

Effective Altruism (EA), if you’re unfamiliar with it, is a somewhat controversial philosophy that tries to assign a kind of mathematical value to helping decisions, guiding us on which of many possible causes we should support. If I have thousand rupees, should I buy a birthday cake for my daughter, contribute to a charity to buy a malaria net to prevent deaths in Africa, or fund the eye-checkup of an old destitute? The EA movement would answer this by introducing the concept of Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY). So, from the three options, the malaria net would win hands down because it prevents more years of suffering. (Helping an older person with eyesight, while morally good, ranks lower on the QALY scale.) On a similar note, if two children are to be rescued from a burning building and if one of the children is blind, then the EA philosophy would encourage you to save the non-blind child because of well, QALY. It’s precisely in these kinds of situations that EA starts to lose me.

Secondly, a lot of poverty and suffering in the world is also driven by bad economics. The plight of women in Afghanistan today can be traced to the Saudi Wahabi movement, the Cold War, the fall of the USSR, the ISI, 9/11. Bush, Biden etc. But for EA evangelists, all that matters is the suffering you could alleviate by sacrificing a vacation. Something does seem off when moral arguments are made in such a vacuum that fails to consider the complexity of politics, economics, institutions, culture, religion, and human folly. The politics of philanthropy is also a fraught issue and I had penned some thoughts on it earlier)

Despite these and other criticisms, the EA movement has shifted the discourse towards informing how much the commoner can do towards improving the world. The Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, one of the evangelists of the movement is worth reading. His Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future are nice introductions to the movement. For instance, one argument that stuck with me was that one should always choose a product made in a sweatshop of the Third World instead of buying Fairtrade. Labour-intensive industries are a natural step for countries transitioning to middle-income economies. Hence, supporting them is morally better than making rich farmers marginally better off. So again, moral mathematics at work! If you want another example: Choosing to become a hedge fund manager and giving away most of your salary is morally better than choosing to become a doctor and serve in a remote African village. (This again can be arrived at by mathematical calculations).

Also check out the website 80,000 hours promoted by MacAskill. (80,000 hours is the typical time that an average person spends in a career. The site helps you choose careers using the EA lens.)

The movement’s biggest setback came with the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried. Until his conviction in the crypto scandal, he was the poster boy of EA — a billionaire “in it to make billions just so he could give it away,” driving a Corolla, eating vegan food, and sharing an apartment with nine people. (Never mind that it later emerged he had donated only a few million while living in a polycule inside a gated mansion, next to a marina full of luxury yachts).

Singer’s work and his inspiration for the EA movement should not be dismissed offhand. Singer has argued that if the top 1% of the world contributed 10% of their salaries, the following could be achieved in 2 years with 3.6 trillion dollars:

• $258 B – End extreme poverty for at least a year
• $297 B – Build the systems we need to prevent pandemics
• $662 B – 2x all clean energy R&D funding
• $6 B – 4x philanthropic funding for nuclear security
• $1.5 B – Dramatically increase funding for AI safety
• $1.22 T – Clean water & sanitation for all
• $341 B – End hunger & malnutrition
• $175 B – Dramatically expand access to reproductive care
• $219 B – Massively suppress malaria, tuberculosis and HIV
• $53 B – Massively suppress or eradicate most NTDs
• $222 B – Halve factory farming

Giving What We Can and The Life You Can Save lists a set of charities that have been screened on the basis of their impact (limited overheads 😊). Do check it out if you want to save a life. (Bjorn Borg had a similar list of what could be achieved with $36 billion a year; though his analysis was to bolster his argument of climate change being an alarmist movement. Blogged about it here…)

To sum up: A drowning child is the same child, whether in your backyard or a thousand miles away. If you can save a life, whether next door or across the world, you must act. And for this alone, Singer should be revered. (Will write someday on his contributions to animal rights).

PS: Dave Edmonds’ ‘Death in a Shallow Pond‘ is an accessible book summarizing the various offshoots of the Shallow Pond argument and summarizes most of the criticisms of the movement.

A 90 second YT summary of the Shallow Pond experiment:

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