How Many Fucks Should Be Given, and About Whom?
Is USAID just a scam run by Sudanese babies?
Everyone loves a hot take, so put on some asbestos-lined gloves and grab ahold of this scorcher:
That certainly is a take! That tweet was part of a discussion about the dismantling of USAID, and — edgelord-y though it may be — I think it gets to real feelings that people have about these issues (notice the 348 “likes”). And it might surprise you to learn that I half agree with this tweet. I don’t agree with the conclusion; my antipathy towards Sudanese babies only applies to specific Sudanese babies for specific reasons (they know what they did). But I do agree that, strictly speaking, other people’s kids’ are not my “responsibility” — at a minimum, that’s not the word I’d use. I think that much of the thinking around aid and charity is off-track, and I think that shoddy thinking gives aid and comfort to people who want to do things like dismantle USAID (which I do not). So, let me try to add something useful to the conversation, and bonus points if I can do it without losing my one Sudanese subscriber:
Welcome, one Sudanese subscriber! And who the fuck are you???
The philosopher Peter Singer has a thought experiment about charity and responsibility. Here it is, in Singer’s own words:
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.