You are at a water park, kids playing and enjoying, all of a sudden you see a child drowning a few feet away, as an adult you will rush to rescue him, for sure. Every conscious being will do the same. On the other hand, while scrolling social media you come across many videos of children dying of hunger or disease on another continent, for whom a modest donation could be life saviour, but it rarely produces the same jolt of urgency.
Peter Singer, an Austrian philosopher, who have worked a lot on applied ethics, has addressed this asymmetry in human decision making. He argued that, if distance and unfamiliarity are morally irrelevant, then why does our urge to offer help, change with the difference in proximity? He highlighted that suffering is suffering, no matter what geographical region the person belongs to. Rational beings deserve equal respect regardless of who they are. On moral grounds, one should treat everyone, whether nearest or dearest ones or strangers, equally. The human race is divided by different history, race and geography, but moral obligation transcends all the boundaries and divisions.
This conclusion, however, has never sat well with moral philosophy, and psychology provides an explanation for that. Human empathy is not an unbiased mechanism but a survival mechanism that has been developed over time of human evolution. Empathy is the wrong moral compass, as Paul Bloom pointed out, because for him empathy shifts its focus to the vivid, the nearby, the identifiable, while leaving the distant people in need of help, in the dark. It’s the same effect as the “identifiable victim” effect.
Let’s take two donation appeals, one from an organization working for special children welfare, and one for a special child named Ali. Bloom through his research explained that one named child elicited far more donations than the number of millions of victims. Our moral attention is not proportionate to the importance, it is proportionate to the vividness, to the identifiable one. There are reasons, of course, to have some reservations about this partial behavior, as Samuel Scheffler and Bernard Williams make clear in their defense of it, which hold that special relationships, with family, community, perhaps nation, are not moral sins but a source of meaning and coherence in a life.
People may regard someone without special attachments, loving each and every human exactly the same, as some moral hero. But for William and Scheffler’s ideology, he is a person who has lost the essence of life itself. The issue is not whether it is allowed to be partial, but how much can be pushed before it’s a rationalisation of indifference? In everyday encounters, such as a stranger asking for help on the street, the question that arises is: “Does a life have a claim on us because of the relation it has to us or only because of its capacity to suffer?”
The answer is that we human beings cannot be truly unlimited in our circle of moral obligations, but we can expand the circle we already have. Effective altruism’s emphasis on impartial calculation and psychology’s description of the limits of empathy are not really contradictory but complementary. Owing to strangers might not be an obligation, but a learning exercise, an ongoing challenge to determine who is close enough to feel the moral obligation.