On Morality
“Helping is not, as conventionally thought, a charitable act that is praiseworthy to do but not wrong to omit. It is something that everyone ought to do.” — Peter Singer
Introduction
Imagine you are walking past a pond on your way to work. Suddenly, you see that in the water there is a young girl who is drowning. You could easily wade in and pull her out, your clothes would be ruined, you would be late to the bank, but these are trivial and justifiable costs against a child’s life. Almost no one would hesitate. Almost no one would say you had done anything beyond what morality demands. Here, Singer and societal intuition correlate.
Now change the scenario. The child is not in a pond no longer, she is in a village seven thousand miles away, starving slowly to death because her family cannot afford grain. You could help her just as easily, Singer argues - through a modest donation, a few minutes of your time - and the moral arithmetic would still be the same: a trivial sacrifice against a human life. Distance, as he insists, is morally irrelevant. If helping the drowning girl is obligatory, then helping the distant child must be equally so. From this foundation, Singer constructs the imperative captured in the quote above: helping is not charity, but duty, and failing to help is not merely ungenerous but wrong.
It is some of the most powerful moral argument ever conjured. Even so, I believe that there exists a fault line in Singer’s framework that goes even deeper than the question of distance. That fault line is partiality - the moral significance of our particular relationships, our situated knowledge, and the psychological mechanisms that enables us to experience, understand and feel emotions. In the following paragraphs, I will argue that Singer’s imperative, that obligation is universal and impartial, is fundamental inconceivable on the very moral grounds it is attempting to address. The argument will be developed in three stages: the epistemic asymmetry between proximate and distant helping; next, defending the psychological mechanisms that happen due to the information given priorly - something Singer would dismiss - by justifying their moral implications; and lastly, by drawing on Bernard Williams to show how the moral framework Singer argues is fundamentally unjustifiable due to the impossible impartiality it demands in situations of deep personal attachment.
Understanding Singer
Singer’s quote can be distilled into three claims:
Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad.
If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.
By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.
Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong (Singer 1972: 231–3; Singer 2009: 15–16).
The line of argument here effectively transform helping from a praiseworthy generosity into a binding moral duty. And crucially, Singer’s broader philosophical work makes clear that this duty is impartial: it does not matter whether the person who needs help is your neighbor or a stranger on another continent, your daughter or someone else’s. Any suffering is suffering, and so any alleviation is worthy, no matter the subject.
And it is that exact impartiality that I wish to challenge.
The Epistemic Argument
Let us return to the two children - the girl drowning before your eyes and the child starving across the world. Singer claims that the moral obligation to help is practically identical. The basic epistemic position against this has been dependent on the geography and distance which is a point that Singer have rigorously retorted, and perhaps effectively as well. My position aims to address other epistemic categories rather than just the geography and uncertainty of said distance.
When you see the girl in the pond, you possess immediate, rich, first-hand knowledge of her situation. You can see that she is drowning. You can see the depth of the water, her inability to rectify herself from the situation, and the sheer emotional desperation that she shows. This inherently compels one to act to rectify the girl from her unfortunate situation and, with the epistemic conditions available, would likely bring about an excellent result.
The distant child’s case is fundamentally different - not because her suffering is any less real, but because the person’s epistemic knowledge of it is drastically impoverished. One may know abstractly that the child suffering, but there is no more information about their circumstances, not the visceral feeling that one may get from seeing suffering that is realer than anything their imagination can conjure. In addition to that, the epistemic conditions are not ideal in this situation, possibly leading to more harm being done rather than alike the situation of the girl in the pond as you are acting with far less information in practically every category.
This is not to say we have no obligation to the starving child, rather, this is to say that the differences between the two cases is morally relevant in a way Singer’s framework does not adequately knowledge. When Singer flattens these situations, he is effectively arguing for the separation of moral obligation and moral action, but the information, or lack thereof, prompts psychological mechanisms and visceral feelings that we cannot ignore.
In Defense of Psychological Mechanisms
At this point, one can anticipate Singer’s reply. He might attack the problem of the practicality of the human’s psychological mechanisms, arguing that these mechanisms are unreliable and ineffective moral tools due to their evolutionary backgrounds. And so the reason that we feel a stronger pull toward the drowning girl than the distant child is actually morally arbitrary. They are mere artifacts of our evolutionary history, calibrated for small tribal groups rather than a globalized world in which we have the power to affect lives thousands of miles away. And so he might argue that the rational thing to do is to override these instincts and act on the nature of impartial reason.
This is a seductive argument, but I believe it is wrong by definition: psychological mechanisms are, by definition, what constitutes our morality in the first place, rather than roadblocks to achieving it. I will demonstrate so promptly.
Consider the following case - A building is on fire. Inside are two children—your own daughter and a stranger’s child. You can only save one. Who do you save?
Almost universally, people would not only understand but expect one to save their own child. Furthermore, they might even find it deeply troubling—perhaps even morally abhorrent—if you paused to perform an impartial calculation, weighing the two children’s future expected utility before deciding. The overwhelming intuition, shared across cultures and historical periods, is that you are not merely permitted to prioritizes your child but obligated to do so, because the bond between parent and child generates a special duty that no impartial calculus can and should override.
Singer’s framework, however, cannot accommodate this intuition. From his point of view, the values of these two children’s lives are the same, and the mere fact that one of them happens to be yours should carry no more moral significance than the color of her eyes. Alike the situation with psychological mechanisms, you should also ignore the biological implications in this one too, as Singer would claim. If you can only save one, you should—in theory—flip a coin. The psychological agony you feel at the thought of abandoning your daughter is, on this account, just another evolutionary mechanism: powerful, perhaps, but morally irrelevant.
This is precisely where Singer’s framework begins to fall apart due to how our humanistic mechanisms conjure the love, loyalty, and fierce protectiveness that means to be a parent. These are not obstacles to our moral reasoning but what effectively constitutes them: that humans are not interchangeable units of welfare but particular persons standing in particular relationships, and that these relationships generate genuine moral obligations that an impartial framework cannot capture.
Williams, “One Thought Too Many”
It is here where Bernard William’s famous critique becomes decisive. Williams argues that if a man standing before his drowning wife and a drowning stranger must first consult his moral theory to determine whom to save—if he must think, “It is permissible to save my wife because impartial morality, properly calculated, allows for some degree of agent-relative preference”—then he has had, as Williams puts it, “one thought too many.”
This argument attacks the very structure of Singer’s framework. Williams is pointing out that Singer’s framework of impartial deliberation fails in the most basic situation that makes up our moral life and morality. Our deepest moral commitments - our children, partner, family - are not conclusions we arrive through calculation but rather ground where our moral reasoning begins. A theory that asks us to treat them as mere inputs and values to weigh against other competition is one that, in of itself, has misunderstood morality.
For me, the point can be pressed even further. The framework does not only undervalue partiality in moral implications but is entirely incompatible because of it. This matters massively due to partiality not being an incidental feature of our closest relationships but a constitutive factor. To be a parent does not just have evolutionary or genetical implications, but also because it just is, in part, to regard your child’s welfare as carrying a weight that no impartial calculus could assign it. To be a friend just is to show up for this person in ways you would not for a stranger. Removing this partiality would fundamentally destroy the relationship itself - imagine a parent who only allocated her care to where it did the most aggregate good rather than the child in front of her - that is not parenthood at all, that is a being that has based its own life on utilitarianism caretaking.
Singer’s imperative, then, does not merely ask us to override our humanistic tendencies but asks us to inhabit a moral world where the relationships that structure human life are, at bottom, illusions—sentimental attachments to be overridden whenever impartial reason demands it. But he misunderstands that those relationships are not luxuries laid on top of morality but part of morality’s grounds. In cutting into the partial nature of relationships, Singer has, effectively, amputated the very legs that his framework stands upon.
Conclusion
None of this is to say that Singer is entire wrong. In fact, I agree with him that the conventional view of helping as mere charity is too comfortable, convenient and allows itself to too easily be used as an excuse to indifference to suffering we could alleviate. He is right that distance alone does not justify ignorance of obligation. And he is also right that we have become far too complacent with our own moral activities and the suffering of strangers.
But he is still wrong to conclude that his framework is a universal, impartial imperative. Morality is not mere math where everyone’s suffering carries a quantifiable coefficient. It derives from lived practice, shaped by relationships, knowledge, proximity and such. The psychological mechanisms that make us rush to save a drowning girl while hesitating over a distant donation are not irrational biases to be corrected but are moral responses grounded in the epistemic realities of our situation and the relational bonds that precipitate our deepest moral obligations.
To insist, as Singer does, that we ought to always help, and a failure to do so is always wrong, is to demand a kind of moral sainthood that is not only impractical but incoherent as it asks us to abandon what constitutes our morality in the first place - our partiality. And as Williams reminds us, a morality that requires us to think our way out of loving our own children is not a morality worth having. Perhaps the argument is not to unfailingly help, but to help well, to help effectively with what we know, to whom we are, and to the particular human beings whose lives are entangled with our own.