Some of you, this week, will have tried to give. You opened the website or took out the card, reached the box where one types in an amount, and found that no amount would settle. Fifty dollars seemed indefensibly small beside what last week's argument said was owed. Five hundred was more than you could bring yourself to enter. And the principle from last week offered no help, because you already knew what it says: it does not stop at any of those figures. It stops only when giving more would cost you something comparable to a life — which is to say, when you are close to destitute. So perhaps you closed the page. Or you gave the fifty dollars and felt worse than before you began.
And at some point in that difficulty a thought will have occurred to you, and it will have come as a relief. The thought runs: this cannot be right. No true morality could require this of a person. A rule that would have me give until I am nearly as poor as those I am giving to cannot be what goodness consists in — and if the argument says otherwise, then the argument has gone wrong somewhere, even if I cannot yet say where.
The first thing to say about that thought is that it deserves respect. It is not an evasion, and it is not weakness. Stated properly, it is the strongest objection anyone has made to Peter Singer's argument — it is known in the literature as the demandingness objection, and serious philosophers have devoted their careers to it, some of them concluding that it simply defeats Singer outright. The difficulty is that at the giving screen you did not state it properly. You had it as a reaction — a refusal without reasons. Today we take that exact reaction and turn it into an argument. And then we establish what the argument will cost you, because it is not free, and no honest account can pretend it is.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required — and this is the fourth of seven episodes on what we owe a stranger.
Last week was the difficult one. We came to it holding the child in the pond and the child overseas apart by five differences — distance, invisibility, the numbers involved, institutions whose job it is, and uncertainty about whether help works — and, tested one at a time by our own standards, none of the five held. But what that examination defeated were the intuitive defences, not the philosophical ones. Nearly everyone who has argued against Singer in print concedes everything last week established, and objects on some other ground — by argument rather than by feeling. Today we consider the first and most direct of those arguments: the one that does not quarrel with any particular step, but takes the conclusion itself and turns it against the reasoning that produced it.
Begin with a question of method, because the tool we need today is general, and once acquired it applies far beyond charity.
When an argument leads, by steps one cannot fault, to a conclusion one cannot accept, one is in a genuinely interesting position, and most people respond to it badly in one of two ways. The first is capitulation: the steps looked sound, so one concludes that the conclusion, however extreme, must simply be accepted, and one resolves to live by it — or, more commonly, resolves to and does not. The second is dismissal: the conclusion is intolerable, so one turns away from the whole argument without examining it further, on the unstated assumption that somebody cleverer could find the flaw, which excuses one from looking. Capitulation and dismissal. At the giving screen this week, many of us managed both within the same ten minutes.
There is a third response, and it is the subject of this episode. An argument can be validly constructed — each step following from the one before, no unstated premise — and still arrive at a conclusion no human being could live by. When that happens, the unliveability of the conclusion is not nothing. It is evidence. Not proof, but evidence, that one of the premises, however sound it appeared, is in fact false. An argument's conclusion is only as secure as its weakest premise, and sometimes the only sign that a premise is false is that it leads somewhere impossible.
Philosophers have a name for this form of argument: reductio ad absurdum — the reduction to absurdity. The plain statement is the one worth keeping. If a rule, followed honestly, leads to an absurd result, that is a reason to doubt the rule, not a reason to accept the absurd result.
But there is a difference between the reductio and what actually happens at the giving screen. At the screen, one thinks "this is insane" and stops there — using the extremity of the conclusion as permission to stop thinking. The reductio requires something harder. It says: granted, the conclusion is unliveable; now return to the argument, identify the particular premise you believe is false, and state which one it is. One is not entitled to gesture at the argument as a whole and leave. One must specify the premise being denied.
And at that moment the objection stops being a comfort and becomes a commitment. To deny a premise is to make a claim — a claim that is true or false, and that must now be defended. Denying a premise has consequences, and some of them will be unwelcome. Capitulation costs a person their whole way of life. Dismissal costs them their intellectual honesty. The third course — returning to the argument and denying a premise deliberately — costs whatever that particular denial commits one to. The rest of this episode establishes what this particular denial commits one to.
That is the method. Now apply it to Singer.
Here is the objection, stated as strongly as the philosophers who defend it would state it. Last week established, by cases run in one's own head, that the strong principle has no stopping point. It does not stop at a tithe, or at ten per cent, or at any round figure that costs nothing one would miss. It stops only where the next contribution would cost the giver something comparable to the death it would prevent — which is to say, at the edge of destitution. Singer does not conceal this. In the 1972 paper he states the implication and accepts it.
The objection says: do not accept it. Consider soberly where the rule has arrived — a life reduced to almost nothing, every spare dollar and every spare hour directed to the next stranger, no margin remaining for anything that is simply one's own — and then ask, not "am I selfish for refusing this?", but a different question altogether: is a rule that demands this even a candidate for being true? A moral rule is supposed to be a rule for human beings — actual ones, each with a single life, with particular attachments, and with limits beyond which they break. A rule which, followed honestly, would require a person to give up nearly everything in their life has not revealed that we are all secretly guilty. It has revealed something about itself. The extremity of the conclusion is itself the evidence. When a principle demands the impossible, the impossible demand is a reason to judge the principle false. This is the form of argument set out a few minutes ago: the conclusion is unliveable, therefore some premise is false.
And it must be sharply distinguished from "I don't want to." That distinction is the difference between an excuse and an argument. "I don't want to" is a report about oneself — one's comfort, one's reluctance. The demandingness objection is a claim about the rule: that the rule's own output condemns it, in the way that a geometrical proof concluding that a triangle has four sides has thereby demonstrated an error earlier in the proof, whatever anyone's feelings about triangles. A person could positively long to give everything away — could be a saint, eager to do it — and the objection would stand unchanged, because it was never about anyone's appetite. It is about whether a true morality could have that shape at all. This is a genuine argument. It is, I think, the strongest single thing said against Singer, and many philosophers hold that it settles the matter.
Has it, then? Has the obligation just been discharged? May one give the fifty dollars and get on with one's life?
Not yet — because Singer has a reply, and it is a good one, and it must be given its full weight.
Singer's reply is this. You have shown that the conclusion is one nobody wants to live by. You have not shown that it is false. Those are two different tasks, and only the first has been done. Examine the inference actually made: it moved from "no human being would willingly live this way" directly to "therefore it cannot be true." What licenses that inference? Who established that a true morality must be comfortable? Perhaps morality really is that demanding, and the reason it feels impossible is not that the rule is defective but that we are comfortable. Singer can appeal to history here, and the appeal is uncomfortable: the comfortable have repeatedly found demands to surrender their comfort unliveable; they were not pretending. The demand felt, from within, impossible to meet — and the feeling was accurate as far as it went, because meeting the demand did mean the end of the way of life that depended on what they gave up. So when the objector tells Singer his rule is too demanding to be true, Singer is entitled to ask: too demanding — or merely more than you, the person who would have to pay, are willing to give? And how, from the inside, would one tell the difference?
That exchange is where the question stands, and I am not going to present it as more settled than it is. The objection stands: the sheer extremity of the conclusion is evidence against the rule. Singer's reply stands as well: "unliveable for the comfortable" is precisely how a true and demanding morality would also feel, so the discomfort cannot prove what the objector needs it to prove. Neither side has refuted the other. Philosophers who have read everything written on the question are, at this moment, on both sides of it. That is not a presenter declining to say; it is the current state of the subject.
But suppose one takes the objection anyway — stands with those philosophers who judge that the reductio succeeds, that a rule demanding nearly everything has thereby refuted itself. That is an entirely respectable position. Consider now what it costs, because the obligation does not disappear when one takes it. It relocates.
One has said: the rule is false, because it demands too much. Grant it, then: how much does the true rule demand? Something less than everything, evidently. So a line must be drawn. Ten per cent of income? Why ten and not eleven, or forty? Choose any figure whatever, and consider what stands immediately on the far side of it: a child who could still have been saved by the next contribution — the contribution one has just declared oneself entitled to withhold. A line has been drawn; there is a child beyond it whose death one could prevent and will not; and that is precisely the situation with which this whole series began. Philosophers call this the arbitrary-line problem, and it has force because the objector admitted it personally, at the moment of saying "too much." "Too much" implies that there is a right amount, and that the right amount is less than everything. And every right amount short of everything is a line, with no principled reason why it falls where it does rather than one dollar further on.
That is the cost of the objection, stated plainly. The demandingness objection is available. One may take it, and one is neither a fraud nor a coward for taking it. But whoever takes it thereby owes a line — a principled stopping point, not merely the figure that happens to leave them comfortable — and owes an answer to the child standing just beyond it. One has escaped "give everything"; one has thereby incurred "justify exactly how much, and justify it to the child not saved." Next, the philosophers who have tried to pay that.
The obligation is real, and serious philosophers have tried to meet it. The arbitrary-line problem is not merely a clever trap; it is a genuine piece of unfinished work, and there have been at least three attempts at it — to find a stopping point for the duty to give that is neither "everything" nor merely "whatever happens to leave me comfortable." Each retains a demanding duty; none is a licence to do nothing; each tries to fix that duty on a principle rather than on an appetite. And none reaches its line without difficulty. We should take them in turn.
The first attempt is Brad Hooker's, set out in his book Ideal Code, Real World, published in 2000. Hooker asks us to imagine choosing, collectively, the moral code in which everyone is to be brought up — the whole set of duties and habits a society teaches its children — selecting the one code whose general acceptance would do the most good over time. Would that code contain the rule "give until you are nearly destitute"? Almost certainly not. A code demanding that would be more than the people trying to keep it could bear; most would fail, and pass their lives regarding themselves as failures; and a society of exhausted, guilt-ridden, unsuccessful saints does little good for anyone. The best code for general acceptance would contain a serious and uncomfortable duty of aid — considerably more than most of us do — but a bounded one, a duty an ordinary person could sustain across a lifetime. On this view the line is not arbitrary: it falls where the generally followed rule produces the most good.
The reply is immediate. The child dying tonight is not dying of a defective social code. She is dying now; the money is available now; and "the rule it would be best for society to internalise permits me to keep this dollar" is a strange answer to give her in particular. Why should what works best as a general practice settle what is owed to this actual child? That is a genuine question, and Hooker owes it an answer.
The second attempt is Liam Murphy's, developed in his book Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, also published in 2000, and it addresses the thing that has been troubling many listeners since last week: why should what I owe expand without limit merely because everyone around me is doing nothing? It should not, Murphy argues, and a sound morality would not require it. Calculate what it would take to solve the problem if everyone did their part; what each person owes is their share of that total. And here is Murphy's distinctive claim: that others are failing to pay their shares does not increase mine. My share remains my share whether or not anyone else ever pays. I am not liable for the whole problem simply because I am among the few attending to it.
But suppose the full share has been paid, honestly and to the last dollar. The next child is still dying; the next dollar is still in one's pocket; and it would still save her at a cost that bears no comparison to her life. "I have paid my share" is a strange sentence to address to a child one could save at that moment and is choosing not to. Murphy must explain why the fair share is a permissible stopping point when the reasoning of the pond says there is none.
The third attempt is the subtlest, from Garrett Cullity, in his book The Moral Demands of Affluence, published in 2004 — and it is the boldest of the three, because it takes the strongest part of Singer's argument seriously rather than resisting it. The real force of Singer's position is aggregation: each individual need is small, and a great many small contributions one could easily afford accumulate into one enormous duty. Cullity concedes the aggregation entirely. He then argues, with considerable care, that even granting it, the sum does not run all the way to Singer's extreme — because to reach the extreme one would have to give up the very things that make one a particular person with a life of one's own: one's projects, one's attachments, the small number of things that supply a reason for doing anything at all. And a duty to help other people cannot coherently end by requiring the destruction of the self that is doing the helping. So a substantial, demanding, uncomfortable duty survives — but not the total one.
Perhaps. But who determines how much self one is entitled to preserve? The boundary between "the projects that make me a person" and "the comforts I would simply rather keep" is the boundary in dispute — and the child stands on the far side of it wherever it is drawn, as she always did.
I am not reporting that these three answers fail. I am reporting that none of them is free, and that the obligation the objection incurred remains genuinely unmet. This is live, current, unfinished work — not a solved problem with the solution withheld for effect. Each of the three provides a line, and delivers an obligation along with it: defend why the line falls where it falls. That obligation has not yet been discharged by anyone.
Let me state where we now stand. Singer's reply — that "unliveable for the comfortable" is exactly how a true and demanding morality would feel from within — has not been refuted, and one may not proceed as though it had merely because one would like to be finished. And on the other side, no one — not Singer, not his ablest critics — has drawn a stopping point that answers the child standing just beyond it. That is not a fact I have been keeping back. It is the current state of the subject, and the listener who has followed this far has now reached it, alongside everyone else who takes the question seriously.
So the position reached tonight is this. When an argument one cannot refute drives at a conclusion one cannot live by, there is now a third thing to do, besides capitulating and besides dismissing. Return to the argument; identify the exact premise to be denied; deny it deliberately; and then pay what the denial costs. Name the premise and count the cost. We have done it tonight with "too demanding." The same method will be needed again, and not only about charity — it applies to the question of whether anyone ever chooses freely, to the question of whether one should have children, to the question of whether right and wrong are real features of the world at all.
An argument can be validly built and still be wrong, and the work consists in finding the false premise and accepting what its denial costs. So no verdict on the famine should be carried out of this episode; none has been earned. What has changed is this: "it's too demanding" can no longer be the end of the sentence. It is now the beginning of one.
Next week's objection is of a quite different kind. It does not attack Singer's argument at all. It does something stranger, and for many people more tempting: it lets the argument stand, and asks whether morality is entitled to demand the whole of a person in the first place — whether some part of a life is simply one's own to keep, rather than a debt one is declining to pay. That is a different kind of reply altogether; it has its own cost; and we examine it next time.
There is also an exercise, because the method only becomes one's own through use on fresh material. Here, then, is a different argument, with no connection to charity. The argument holds that one must never lie, and the case for the prohibition is a clean one: lying treats the person lied to as a thing to be steered rather than a person to be dealt with honestly, so a sound moral rule forbids it, always and without exception. Now follow the rule to its conclusion: a man intent on murder comes to your door and asks where your friend is hiding, and the rule requires that you tell him the truth. Nobody can live by that. So there it is: an apparently valid argument with an unliveable conclusion — which means, by everything established tonight, that one of its premises is false. The task this week is to find it. It will not do to say "obviously one lies to the murderer" — that is dismissal. Go back into the argument and identify the premise being denied. Is it the claim that lying always treats a person as a thing? Is it the claim that respect for persons outweighs everything else at stake? Choose the premise, state it explicitly — and then be honest about what its denial costs, because it does cost something. Run the method once, unaided, and it is yours.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.