Consider an afternoon spent entirely on one person. A long lunch with someone you love, the kind that runs well past the coffee. An hour's drive to sit with a parent. A child's birthday — the cake, the present that cost more than it should have, an afternoon in a decorated kitchen that did no good whatever for any stranger anywhere. Several hours. Real money. All of it directed at a single person you already know well.
And most of us would not give back a minute of it. Suppose someone had stopped you that morning and pointed out that the lunch money would have done more good in a clinic six thousand miles away. You might well have agreed it was true — and gone to the lunch regardless, and not concluded that you had done something wrong. You would have called yourself a person living a life, not a thief.
That reaction is different from the one we examined last week. Last week's thought, at the moment of giving, was that Singer's argument must contain a mistake — that no genuine morality could demand what Singer's does, so some step in it had to be false. This week's thought does not say that. It concedes the argument. It says: suppose you are right; suppose I cannot find the false step and the rule really does hold. Even so — not this afternoon. This was mine. Whatever else I owe, I do not owe you an account of the hours I spent on the people who are actually my life.
That claim — that some of this life is mine — is the subject of today's episode. Two serious philosophers have built their entire objection to Singer out of it, and built it without ever claiming that his argument is wrong. The question is whether "some of this life is mine" is a genuine position to hold, or the oldest excuse there is given a more respectable form. And, either way, what it costs to take it.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the fifth of seven episodes on what we owe a stranger.
Last week we set out the strongest objection anyone makes to Singer: that a rule no one could live by may have revealed something false in the rule itself, rather than something guilty in us — the best available way out, but not a cost-free one. Singer's reply was to ask how a person tells "too demanding to be true" from "more than I am willing to give," and every stopping line anyone proposed still left someone on the far side of it, savable by the next contribution. So we ended holding a way out and a debt we had not paid. Today's objection is of a different kind. It does not dispute the argument at all. It grants every step, and asks whether the argument was ever entitled to the whole of a person.
Last week's objection and this week's differ in a way that is easy to miss, and the whole episode depends on the difference. Last week we went into Singer's argument, found the step we wanted to reject — that a true morality could really demand nearly everything — and rejected it. The claim was that the step is false: the conclusion cannot be lived by, so the rule is mistaken somewhere. That was an attack on the argument itself.
The two objections we examine today do not attack it. They do not look for a false step. They are willing to grant that the argument may be sound in every part — that each step holds, that the sums are right, that an impartial accounting really does conclude the lunch money belongs in a clinic. Grant all of it. Then they add a single point, and the whole dispute is contained in it: even if that accounting is correct, what gives it authority over the whole of a person?
That is not the claim that the argument is false. It is the claim that the argument exceeds its authority. A calculation can be entirely correct and still have no standing to require what it requires — no right to demand the afternoon with your mother — because some things were never the kind of thing that such an accounting governs in the first place.
So there are two ways to answer an argument you cannot accept. The first is to show that it is unsound: that a step in it is false. The second is to grant that it is sound and to deny that it has the authority it claims — not "you are wrong" but "you are claiming more authority than you have." Both of today's objections are of the second kind.
Here, then, is the claim both of today's thinkers are making, in its plainest form. A human being is not a neutral instrument for producing good in the world. Each of us is a particular person with a single life, and that life contains things that are ours in a way that does not reduce to the quantity of impartial good they produce — our projects, the people we love, the few commitments that are the reason we do anything at all. A morality that treats all of that as raw material to be spent wherever it does the most good has not merely asked for too much. It has misunderstood what a person is. It addresses you as though you were a device for directing resources to the greatest good, and as though your attachments and projects were a fault in the device — when those attachments and projects are not a fault in the person. They are the person. There is nothing else there to address.
And this is dangerous ground, because everything just said may be true, and it is also the single most convenient thing a comfortable person could believe. "Some of this life is mine" may be the deepest objection anyone has put to Singer. It is also, word for word, what every person who ever wished to keep their money has always said. Those are the same words. That is the difficulty. The saint protecting the one irreducible core of a human life and the miser protecting his comforts say exactly the same sentence, and today's problem is whether there is any way to tell them apart — or whether the claim "this is mine" holds equally for both of them, and lets both walk away satisfied.
Two philosophers have tried to formulate the claim so that it holds for the saint and not for the miser. One approaches it from the side of consequences, from within Singer's own way of thinking, and marks out a protected space. The other comes from the opposite tradition — the one that begins not from consequences but from duty — and arrives at a duty with an unusual and crucial feature: it leaves room for choice. One is a permission; the other is a duty. We take them one at a time, state each as its defenders would put it, and then set out what each one costs. Begin with the permission.
The philosopher Samuel Scheffler set out the first objection, in his book The Rejection of Consequentialism, published in 1982. I will give it at full strength, as he would want it given.
Start with what Singer's kind of morality asks, stated plainly. At every moment, with every dollar and every hour, you are to do whatever produces the most good, counted impartially — your good weighing the same as a stranger's, and no more. Consider what that implies for the afternoon with your mother. From the impartial standpoint — the one that counts everyone equally, from no particular position — your mother is one person and the strangers the money could have saved are several, so the afternoon is a moral error: a scarce resource spent on the smaller number. From that standpoint there is no accounting for the choice except as a failure of resolve.
Scheffler's answer is that the impartial standpoint has left something real out, and he says precisely what. Each of us has a life to lead — not a share of the world's total welfare to administer, but a life, lived from the inside, from one particular place within it. From where you stand, your mother is not one unit of welfare. She is your mother. The hours remaining with her are not interchangeable with hours anyone else might spend on anyone else. The fact that something matters greatly to you, from within your own life, is not a bias the universe is asking you to correct; it is a genuine source of reasons — reasons that do not have to justify themselves at the impartial counter before they are allowed to count. Scheffler's term for this is that the personal point of view is independent: it generates real claims on you that do not reduce to, and need not be ratified by, the impartial reckoning.
So he proposes what he calls an agent-centred prerogative — a permission, which is the plainer word. Morality, he argues, grants you a permission: you may give your own projects and the people you love weight out of proportion to their weight in the impartial sum. Not unlimited weight, but more than their strict share. You may spend the afternoon with your mother even though the impartial numbers point to the clinic, and you are not thereby failing, or falling short, or a thief who has merely escaped notice. You are exercising something morality itself grants: the room to live the single life you have, from within it, rather than administering the world's welfare from a standpoint no human being actually occupies.
What makes this more than special pleading is the following. Scheffler is not saying "ignore the strangers." He is saying that a morality leaving you no such permission — one that genuinely required you to treat your own life as nothing but a means of directing good to others — would not be a demanding morality but an incoherent one. It would require you to stand towards your own existence in a way no one can while remaining a person. The demand to count yourself as exactly one, always and everywhere, is not heroically strict; it amounts to erasing the person. And a moral theory that requires the erasure of the person has not set a high standard. It has mistaken its own subject — which was how a person should live — since a person is exactly what it is asking you to stop being. That is not a flinch. It is a serious charge, and many careful people judge that it holds.
It is a serious objection, and it requires you to find nothing wrong with Singer's logic. The argument may be sound in every step. You still keep the afternoon.
Now the cost, which is hidden in the very feature that made the objection attractive. Scheffler gave you a permission. He did not give you a limit. Consider again what he established: that you may weight your own side more than its impartial share. More — but by how much? He does not say. And this is not an oversight that could be repaired; it follows from what a permission is. Scheffler worked hard at this very point, and the best-known result of his work is a gap he could not close. He found a sound rationale for the permission — for loosening the demand, for the room to favour one's own life. He could find no corresponding rationale for a restriction — for where the loosening must stop, for the point beyond which favouring yourself is simply greed. The limit he was looking for, he never located, and he said so plainly.
So consider what the objection actually leaves you with. You may weight your own side more heavily than its impartial share, and there is no specified point at which the extra weight stops being your life and becomes mere self-preference. Return to the two people from a moment ago: the saint, keeping the one irreplaceable afternoon; and the miser, keeping the boat, the second house, the wine. Both claim this same permission. Both say the same words — this is mine, my life, my projects, weighted above their impartial share, as Scheffler allows. And the permission, as stated, holds for both. It cannot do otherwise. It was designed to release you from the impartial reckoning; it cannot then turn round and become the reckoning that audits how far you have gone.
That is the cost of the first objection, and it is easy to leave holding the wrong half of it. The permission is real. You very probably do get to keep some core of your own life, and a morality that denied it really would be mistaken. You are not a monster for spending the afternoon with your mother; the permission is genuine, and honestly granted. The cost is that it has no boundary. You carry away a permission with no limit on it, which means the whole question — how much of this life is genuinely mine, and how much am I merely calling mine because I would rather keep it — is exactly as unanswered afterwards as before. You have escaped "you owe everything." You have not escaped having to say, for yourself, where "mine" stops. And the child from the pond is still there, just beyond whatever line you settle on — the same child, in the same position, as last week. The objection has moved. The child has not.
The second objection comes from the opposite end of the field, and you have already met the philosopher who built it — last week, though I did not give his name.
Recall the exercise from last week. Never lie — even to the man who arrives at your door intending murder and asks where your friend is hiding. A rule with no exception and no room to move, holding even when holding to it gets someone killed. That rule, in that unbending form, is Immanuel Kant's; in an essay of 1797 he argued that you must not lie even to the murderer at the door. When people want an example of morality at its most rigid, that is the one they reach for, and they reach for Kant.
So the same philosopher, at about the same time, said something that sounds as though it came from a different person. He held that you also have a duty to help other people — and that this duty is deliberately loose.
The distinction he drew is among the most useful things he left us. Kant thought duties come in two forms. Some are strict: they tell you exactly what to do or not do, every time, with no room to move. Do not lie. Do not break your promises. He called these perfect duties — precise, exceptionless, the murderer at the door. Others have a different form, and the duty to help others is the principal one. Kant holds — in The Metaphysics of Morals, published in 1797 — that you must take up helping other people as a genuine aim of your life, making their needs your own, not as an optional extra but as something morality requires. And — this is the whole point — the duty does not specify when, or whom, or how much. It cannot. No one can help everyone, in every way, at every moment. So the duty, by its nature, leaves you what Kant calls latitude: room to choose. You must make helping a standing policy of your life; you choose the occasions.
This is the position many thoughtful people already occupy, even those who have never heard Kant's name. It is not "I need not help" — no decent person believes that, and this is not that. It is: of course I must help, and help more than I do; it is a duty, and I am not pretending otherwise. It is simply that the duty was never the kind that takes all of me. It leaves room for choice. I must be a person who helps; I need not be a mere means of producing aid. That is not an evasion of the duty but a claim about its actual shape — that the duty of beneficence is wide, where Singer reads it as narrow; that it was always a duty to adopt the aim, not to maximise the output at every moment. And it lets the afternoon with your mother be what it felt like: not a debt evaded, but the exercise of the latitude the duty was built to allow. Like the first objection, it does not need Singer's argument to be false. It holds that the duty to help is real, and demanding, and yours — and still leaves room for choice. The argument may stand. You still choose the occasions.
That is the position, with nothing softened. Its cost is a near relation of the first one's — which should begin to tell us something.
Latitude is not an unlimited licence. Kant knew this, and it is the first thing to say to anyone reaching for this duty as a way to do almost nothing. The room the duty leaves has a floor beneath it, and the floor can be located. Kant's test of whether a policy is even permissible is whether you could will it as a law for everyone — whether a world in which everyone acted on your policy is one you could rationally endorse. So try to will the policy "I will help others only when it costs me almost nothing," and try to make it the universal law. You cannot — not because it is mean, but because you yourself are someone who will one day need help you cannot provide for yourself, and you cannot coherently want a world in which everyone has adopted near-zero help as a standing policy, since that is a world that abandons you as well. So a policy of near-zero giving fails; it cannot be willed. The latitude was therefore never permission to do nothing. The moment you use "it is a wide duty" to license helping almost never, the policy becomes one you cannot consistently will, and you have abandoned the duty while still using its name.
So the floor is real. But now ask the one question that matters, and watch it become last week's question again. Where is the floor? How much help is enough to keep the policy genuine — to keep you a person who has actually adopted the ends of others, rather than someone doing the minimum and calling it latitude? Kant does not say. The structure cannot say. It can tell you that almost nothing is a sham, and that everything is not required; but the entire range in between, where human lives are actually lived, it returns to your judgment under the word "latitude," with no number attached. And so we are back where we were last week, on entirely different ground. Last week the question was how much must I give, and every line anyone drew left a child just beyond it. This week the question is how much may I keep, and the duty that was supposed to answer it hands back latitude and says no more. It is the same undrawn line, approached from the other side.
That brings both objections into one place, and lets us state the point Singer is entitled to make, since he has been present throughout and has not been answered. Both of today's objections — the permission and the wide duty — name something they say is yours to keep: your life, your projects, your latitude. Mine. And neither will say how large it is. The permission has no limit. The duty has a floor it will not locate. And Singer, whose argument needed no defence today because no one attacked it, is entitled to the question that has been waiting beneath both objections: where does this "mine" come from, and how do you tell it apart from "what I would rather not give up"? From where he stands, "the personal point of view is an independent source of reasons" and "I would very much like to keep my afternoon" produce the same conduct and the same bank balance, and nothing has yet been said that distinguishes them.
Perhaps there is a genuine, irreducible core of a human life that morality was never entitled to. Or perhaps "mine" is the oldest excuse there is, and these two able philosophers have spent their careers making it respectable. Singer thinks it is the excuse. He has not proved that. But neither objection has proved him wrong. The room you are permitted to keep is real; its size is left blank; and the blank is where the disagreement lies.
So no one has won tonight, and I will not pretend otherwise on the way out. The two most humane objections to Singer both grant you something real, and then fall silent at the precise point where you most need them to speak.
Both objections succeed in part. Neither will say how far. You leave, once again, holding a way out and an unpaid debt: morality very likely does owe you some core of your own life, and no one — not Scheffler, not Kant, not I — has said how large it is.
Next week's objections are of a different shape, and more difficult. Every objection so far — last week's and this week's — has granted Singer something enormous without noticing the concession. Next week, two objections refuse to grant it. They put distance, and particular faces, and the specific person in front of you back into the argument — not as the feelings we set aside earlier, but as reasons — and the second of them goes further still, asking whether there was ever an impartial point of view of the universe to grant in the first place. That is a different kind of dispute, and we do not open it tonight.
So carry this away. Last week the question concerned them — the strangers, the line, the child beyond it. This week it concerns you. You now have a permission; morality may well owe you a life of your own — the afternoon, the birthday, the people who are actually yours. But no one has told you its size. Take the part of your life you would defend most fiercely — the time, the money, the care you direct at the few people who are yours, all of which would do measurably more good spread wider — and put the question to it directly. How much of that is the irreducible core of a human life, the thing Scheffler and Kant were right to protect? And how much is merely what you would rather keep, called mine?
Where does mine stop?
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.