Peter Singer makes a convincing case for all ordinary people being evil. Maybe he’s right.

Analyzing: Drowning child nearby vs Africa famine charity digitally (opp. cost: $500 in both)

Potential Toothpicks to Singer’s conclusion:

1. Proximity to child (no, in the case of individual blackmail you’d make the same choice)

2. Others’ existence when they don’t in Singer’s experiment (maybe, maybe it decreases your moral culpability if there are other people working on it too)

3. Others’ existence + Power Asymmetry since not everyone has the same potential for help (yeah, seems so when billionaires & HNWIs are in the picture too)

4. Lack of knowledge of drowning children (maybe, if everyone knew the number of African kids dying everyday that could be saved with a reasonable donation there’d be far more engagement)

5. Lack of trust in institutions (maybe, it seems like people are wary of scams and don’t super trust the ability in institutions they aren’t familiar with, and even in the best institutions they are familiar with)

6. Personal connection asymmetry (yes, empathy for one girl > girl and sister. Empathy for a large number of unknown kids even lower. This explanation is different because it truly is a moral bug.).

7. Not conducive to personal wellbeing (maybee, I didn’t find this convincing coming from utilitarians initially but it probably is the best way to tackle Singer’s conclusion)

This might work only if there actually exist kids that truly can be SAVED via donation. Instinctively, I want to say that moral culpability for increasing the wellbeing of people beyond survival is effectively zero (note that hard utilitarianism force you to optimize for maximizing wellbeing trades with no regard to personal wellbeing with no exception. I am a rule utilitarian.). But I can reason why that’s irrational.

Imagine a child instead just being mildly inconvencied by a sprinkler in his backyard. Would a sacrifice of a $500 pair of new shoes still make sense here? It might be good, but is it warranted? I say obviously no.We intuit that saving the child drowning is morally warranted, not just morally desired. But when you dial back the suffering of the child, at what point does is it not warranted but just desired? I don’t have an easy answer to this question. Does a distinction here even mean anything? Do we draw the line where child continues to live? What if he were being tortured? I’d like to say we should sacrifice to prevent eternal torture.

Final Words & Conclusion:

There is absolutely a line to be drawn where we just need to enforce rule utilitarianism. Hard-line utilitarianism forces you to spend all your time and energy equitably distributing resources to maximize net wellbeing in the world. While a noble goal, this really cannot to be expected of the general population. It’s more useful to give society a few heuristics and rules to use instead.

So is it wrong to not donate every extra dollar above sustainance? Depends on the extent of the suffering of these children and where we draw the line on the reasonable expectation for help. This line has to be drawn in accordance with the same goal as what hard utilitarians claim to adopt - cumulative net wellbeing - just on the longest conceivable timeframe. Rule utilitarians are just smarter hard utilitarians.

To draw the line in the sand and answer more difficult, related questions such as what we ought to pick between momentary torture and $60,000 pairs of shoes, we need net happiness calculators and simulation machines. Eventually, we’ll get there.

So are ordinary people evil? Maybe post-hoc.