Can Morality Survive Dirty Shoes?

Imagine the following scenario: You are walking to school when you notice that a child is drowning in the shallow pond at the side of the road. You can wade into the pond and save the child without too much trouble, but you would ruin your shoes and have to go home and change, which would make you a few minutes late for school. What would you do?

Now, consider this: you are checking your email while eating breakfast, and you open a message from a highly reputable charity organization. They are requesting twenty-dollar donations to buy mosquito nets for children in South Asia. These mosquito nets prevent the spread of malaria, and buying one would statiscially guarantee that you save at least one child’s life. Would you donate the twenty dollars?

I believe that most of us would have a very different visceral reaction to each of these scenarios, not hesitating to wade into the pond and save the drowning child, but likely deleting the charity-organization email with only a mild sense of guilt. However, do these two cases truly impose distinct moral obligations? Philosophy and utilitarian Peter Singer does not see any important difference between them, and argues that it is equally morally abhorrent in each case to not save the child’s life. 

So why do our feelings cause us to feel a much larger impetus to act in the case of the child drowning directly in front of us? This can pretty easily be explained by evolution—it is evolutionarily beneficial for a species if people feel a strong moral obligation to save other members of the species that are close by. Evolution did not consider the case of emails from charity-organization websites, for they did not exist yet. Blaming the discrepancy in feeling on evolution can lead us to several different conclusions.

We could say that okay, we may not have the same strong moral feeling that we should donate to the charity that we have in the case of the drowning child, but the result and cost of each of these actions is the same (one child saved at small price), so we should act upon the greater moral principle that it is always good to save a life and save the child’s life in each case (either by wading into the pond or by donating to the charity). Or, perhaps, we could say that morality simple is the sense of justice we get from evolution, and we should only be morally obligated to do the things that we already feel that we ought to do. For most people, this perspective would result in them saving the child but only occasionally donating to charity. Yet another conclusion may be to reason that if our moral sense is merely caused by evolution, then perhaps it is not so important after all and each person can have a different sense of morality that is each perfectly valid, for they developed it through their own unique generational pattern of evolutionary mutations. So for some people, they might be morally obligated to donate to the charity, and for some people, they might not be. 

There is a broader distinction here, which is the difference between viewing morality as some broad system of what is intrinsically right and wrong, or as a personal feeling guiding each of us to separately determine what is right and what is wrong. In the first case, an act is intrinsically either good or bad, and this is true no matter what anyone’s personal feelings are about it.