In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to develop their own questions and conduct their very own studies in small groups. Below, Bastian Göbbels and Marina Hinkel present some results from their study on the perception of the moral obligation to help others.
The Perception of the Moral Obligation to Help Others
Bastian Göbbels and Marina Hinkel
The United Nations calculated a donation amount for development aid in the 1970s that wealthy countries could contribute to prevent the global consequences of absolute poverty – 70 cents per 100 earned dollars. In 2013, only Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, and Sweden reached this donation target. At that time, Germany was at 0.38–0.43 cents (cf. Singer 2013, 344). The bottom line is that we could contain extreme global poverty and its consequences relatively easily, but the reality is different.
Peter Singer raises the question of whether we have an obligation to help those in need and to whom we have moral obligations (by “we,” Singer means individuals in wealthy industrialized countries – including himself). Singer argues that we should, for example, prevent a certain level of absolute poverty because absolute poverty is bad, because we could prevent a level of absolute poverty without having to make comparable sacrifices, and if we can prevent something bad without having to make a comparable sacrifice, we should do so (cf. Singer 2013, 356f.). Singer reinforces the last premise by pointing out that it only requires us to prevent bad things and not to promote good things (this corresponds to the consequentialism of utilitarianism; cf. Singer 2017, 36).
Singer illustrates the principle of the obligation to help with a thought experiment about a child in a pond that is in danger of drowning. Here is how Singer himself describes the “drowning child”:
To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.
I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do. (Singer 1997, par. 1f.)
The principle should be applied equally to all cases, regardless of whether I am the only person potentially helping, e.g., by saving the child in the pond, or one of many, e.g., by donating (cf. Singer 2017, 37). Although Singer does not regard failure to help as intentional killing but as a moral challenge (cf. Singer 2013, 354), he emphasizes elsewhere that absolute poverty means a death sentence and that the diseases responsible for this are preventable (cf. Singer 2013, 341f.).
Under the premises of universalization, impartiality, and equality, the spatial aspect – distance or proximity to the person in need – should be obsolete, according to Singer. In light of globalization, with today’s improved communication and transport conditions, distance can no longer be an excuse for lack of assistance (cf. Singer 2017, 37f.). Singer concedes: “The fact that a person is physically close to us […] may increase the likelihood that we will help them, but this does not prove that we should help them rather than any other person who happens to be at a greater distance” (Singer 2017, 37).
Singer argues that there is a certain level of extreme poverty that we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance in figures. On the one hand, he uses the amount calculated by the United Nations, which would be sufficient for basic development aid: 70 cents per 100 dollars earned. According to the World Bank in 2008, this would correspond to 1.25 dollars per day for a person’s basic needs (note currency-dependent purchasing power; cf. Singer 2013, 341). In 2008, the wealthy industrialized countries donated 19–43 cents for every 100 dollars earned (cf. Singer 2013, 344).
Based on Singer’s above-outlined thoughts, we wanted to investigate how spatial and social distance or proximity, as well as personal cost, influence the perception of moral obligation. To do this, we developed a vignette in which a child needs help from our subject. Between subjects, we varied (a) whether the child needs a new kidney directly from the subject or money for the same medical purpose, (b) whether our subject is said to know the child or not, and (c) whether the child is from the same neighbourhood, the same federal state, or a far-away country from the Global South. This resulted in a total of twelve different scenarios.
As an example, here is a translation of the vignette where a child from the neighbourhood, which the subject is said to know, needs money:
Imagine the following situation: You are informed that a child you know has life-threatening problems with his only kidney and, therefore, needs a donor organ. The child lives in your neighbourhood. You could donate one-third of your monthly income for the next two years without being at risk of losing your livelihood. With your help, the child would be saved.
After reading the vignette, subjects were asked to answer two yes-or-no questions: “Would you donate your money [kidney]?” and “Regardless of whether you would donate your money [kidney] yourself, do you think that someone in such a situation should donate their money [kidney]?” In the following, we will only look at the former question.
The online survey was programmed with LimeSurvey, and 630 subjects from Bilendi successfully participated (i.e., they did not fail an attention check and completed the survey).
A surprising finding is that more participants said they would donate a kidney than money (χ² ≈ 5.620, p < 0.05); see Figure 1. This increased willingness could be due to the fact that donating a kidney is perceived as more immediate and life-saving, while donating money is often perceived as less urgent.
At the same time, we found that the willingness to donate does not change between the neighbourhood and the federal state (χ² ≈ 0.030, p > 0.1) but between the federal state and the far-away country (χ² ≈ 7.608, p < 0.01); see Figure 2.
Lastly, we didn’t find a significant difference when it comes to knowing the child or not (χ² ≈ 3.414, p > 0.05); see Figure 3.
Our results are partly consistent with Peter Singer’s assumptions. Nevertheless, they show that people’s willingness to help – at least in our hypothetical scenarios – seems to decrease with distance. Also, the type of aid (kidney vs. money) seems to play a role, while social proximity does not. Of course, these results need to be taken with a grain of salt, and further, more elaborate research is necessary. Interestingly enough, there is a discrepancy between given answers and actual behavior, as illustrated by the low numbers of organ donations in reality. While respondents signal a high willingness to help in hypothetical scenarios, practical implementation falls short of these expectations.
Data
Data and do files for analysis with Stata are available from https://github.com/alephmembeth/course-x-phi-2024/tree/main/autonomous%20systems.
Literature
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194. (Link)
Singer, Peter (1997): “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle,” New Internationalist 289. (Link)
Singer, Peter (2013): Praktische Ethik, translated by Oscar Bischoff, Jean-Claude Wolf, Dietrich Klose, and Susanne Lenz, 3rd edition, Stuttgart: Reclam. (Link)
Singer, Peter (2017): Hunger, Wohlstand und Moral, translated by Elsbeth Ranke, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. (Link)