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Ruin an expensive suit to save a drowning child?

Would you ruin an expensive suit to save a drowning child?

  • Yes

    Votes: 210 90.5%
  • No

    Votes: 22 9.5%

  • Total voters
    232
Do you feel that way 'bout 'Amnesty', Cap'?


sure thang, miss veruca (as long as ya put out next week, bitch)
for one, i don't think amnesty is a sponsorship foundation
they work at freedoms and prisoners and the like.
i did for a time donate to them (and green peas), but their agendas seemed futile back in the day. i felt as though i was only contributing to their own existence more than anything.
later on, recently, when i actually went for a job where i was going to be managing a team of people making calls for such orgs, and i did a roleplay based on one of their anti-china spiels. it didn't feel right. i wasn't comfy in talking shit about a place that has and still does feed my inlaws, you know?
i mean, we were raised on the tiannamin square and tibetan western propaganda (including twin peaks), well, my wife was fed another and having had perspectives of both, i can tell that both stories are greatly exaggerated. :\
 
if it was a saw situation and I had to do something fatal or life threatening to myself to save the person, I dont think Id do it
but if I knew it was possible id save anyone
 
i haven't read this thread further than the first (and 2 last) post but the fact that it is still going on is surreal!


although i do agree that it's better to question even what seems obvious rather than to take it for granted, i find the fact that someone asked the question surreal
the fact that people are pondering it is surreal
the fact that some people may save an object over a life is delirious

we were raised on the tiannamin square and tibetan western propaganda (including twin peaks), well, my wife was fed another and having had perspectives of both, i can tell that both stories are greatly exaggerated
what is false in western point of view regarding tiananmen ?

the government made the army open the fire on innocent protestors and kill them

i don't see many other ways to interpret that

but maybe the vision that your wife gives you is simply softer because the same party that killed up to 3000 protestors is still in power and tries its best to keep this point of history outside of its borders
 
^perhaps, but i'd also question the motives of those who fed me the western versions.

i wasn't there and neither were you. i saw the pictures and heard the stories. i was just as horrified as anyone else. the chinese government/ military are obviously not saints.

but the only fact that i do KNOW is that something terrible happened. the whys and hows i take with small portions of salt. it is unrealistic, futile and unfair/unjust to impose one societies standards on another. i am in no position to judge.

but the china/west discussion is not one in which i should be getting too heavily into, nor anyone should listen too strongly to my opinions, since my interests are obviously in conflict.

but still, insert any other region and the above still applies. thai drug smuggler executions? horrific by our standards, yes, but for fuck's sake, you know the rules when you go there. you know the consequences. any foreigner stupid enough to take such a risk has great difficulty achieving my sympathy. their families get it but they seldom do.

guests do not dictate the rules of the houses they stay in.
 
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you said it all, mate.

i would love to help out those in third world nations, but i do feel that that ability is beyond my reach. i don't trust sponsorship foundations. many have a political, religious or financial agenda, and i can't tell them apart.

If you spent the time to do the research you would find that, with great probability, you can save several children's lives from various immanent dangers for a year for less than $5.

Organizations to whom you can donate money and know the donation will go toward saving a child's life include UNICEF and Oxfam. All you have to do is take the time to do the research so that you do know.

The fact that you "feel the ability is beyond your reach" is irrelevant if it is, in fact, not beyond your reach. In the thought experiment, if it were true that you could actually swim and save the child with only the loss of your suit, but you had the irrational feeling that saving the child was beyond your reach, it would plausibly still be wrong for you not to save the child. I find this especially plausible if the irrational feeling was grounded in a lack of effort to find out if you could save the child (e.g., you turned away and had the terrible feeling the lake was filled with man-eating crocodiles but refused to look back to check if there actually were crocodiles).

Last, if you want to argue that you cannot know if an organization will help save a child with money you donate, I would suggest that this belief is based on an exceptional standard of "knowledge". With a little research, you can come to know how you can donate a few bucks to help save children in peril with as much certainty as you can know anything thats not directly in front of you.
 
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where would one research information that is not directly from the organisations themselves. i am all ears.

btw: i donate a few bucks every pay (automatically) for some dude in my organisation (interstate, i don't know him) cuz his kid has leukemia. i may be skeptical and a little cynical but i am not cold hearted.
 
What, you think the man wearing the $7500 suit is gonna ruin it for a little kid?? C'mon!!!

Sorry, been watching Arrested Development all day... Couldn't resist :P
 
where would one research information that is not directly from the organisations themselves. i am all ears.

btw: i donate a few bucks every pay (automatically) for some dude in my organisation (interstate, i don't know him) cuz his kid has leukemia. i may be skeptical and a little cynical but i am not cold hearted.

A simple google search will yield several independent websites dedicated to evaluating charitable organizations (e.g., charity navigator). Likewise, a google scholar search turns up scholarly papers on the subject such as, "How are Charities Held Accountable?" written by John Plummer. I found these sources and several more by looking around for all of 5 minutes.

I didn't mean to imply that you were cold hearted. I just think that many people in general, including myself, are prone to coming up with excuses for why we don't help. Usually these excuses aren't justified and one of the most common examples of this is the excuse, "I don't know that if I donate money it will help." Most often, the reason we don't know that our donations will help someone is because we haven't taken any significant amount of time or trouble to find out. The whole thing is a very convenient instance of bad faith and just about everyone who could help starving children but doesn't is guilty of it to some extent. Does it mean that most people who can afford luxuries and don't help are cold hearted? No. Does it mean that their failure to act is immoral? I think that it does.

When it comes to organizations like UNICEF and Oxfam, which have excellent reputations, I think the appropriate question is "Why wouldn't our donations to these places go to the causes they are said to" rather than the skeptical question, "How can we be sure that they do?" The latter question seems on par with asking, "How can we be sure that Paris exists?" and acting as if it doesn't just because we have never been there ourselves. We might have a reason to think that there are some cities people talk about which don't exist (e.g., El Dorado), but none of these are reasons to think that Paris doesn't exist. Likewise, there might be reasons to think that some charities are scams (maybe one's associated with some crazy religion) but that's not a reason to think that reputable ones like UNICEF and Oxfam are scams.
 
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fair points all round. i appreciate this, skywise. you are absolutely right.

my skepticism has gotten the better of me, and granting that i find the independent sources you mention, for which i have no reason to doubt i will, I will most certainly begin to contribute.

thank you for this.
 
^^ Glad to be of help! I read a book by Peter Unger called, "Living High and Letting Die" that basically led me to the same conclusion that you are expressing (only with regard myself). It's written by a professional philosopher and so has some technical sections. However, the author always makes a point to force the reader down from philosophical subtleties to the fact that we could be saving a human life right now but are choosing not to. I found it to be a very eye-opening experience. It's also interesting that there have been very few philosophy papers published which attempt to tackle his arguments since his book has been out. This is despite the facts that the book has been out for several years and few people find it easy to swallow his conclusion that most of us behave in a morally atrocious manner. It's a first class work of philosophy that is very difficult to refute and that has enormous practical importance.
 
I would like to pose a question that everyone should answer truthfully (mods, if you could make it a poll that would be sweet). Hopefully we can make some progress in finding an answer to the question of a universal ethical code's existence.

If you are wearing an extremely expensive suit and come upon a child drowning in a lake, would you ruin the suit in order to save the child? (For the purposes of this experiment, YOU are the only hope that this child has for survival and that if you save the child the suit will be ruined). Annnnd GO!

What kind of question is that? I think you would have to be the worst person on earth if you didn't save the kid.........
 
What if it was your only suit? And you needed the suit for a job interview the next day, and you had no money to get another one? And you needed the job to feed your family.

Well if you had a family to feed you would want someone else to feed your family if they were in danger. If I was in the situation i'd still do it, and if the job didn't want to listen to my circumstances then that's not a job Id be proud to have. Jobs come and go and can find a new one, you can't find a new life for a child that drowned.
 
Of course! There's the chance the suit might not be ruined anyway unless the lake is full of blue-green algae or something. If it was that expensive, surely it would survive just getting soaked :)
Even if it did get ruined I'd still try and help the child, if I had enough money for the suit in the first place I'm sure I could buy another one eventually.
 
i would ruin a child (maybe just his/her psychological health) to save an expensive suit (maybe just from dry cleaning). ;)
...
but big ups to skywise for making this into a more 'fruitful' exercise.

eboal
 
This sounds like Unger's thought experiment.

Q: Would you ruin an expensive suit to save a drowning child?
A: Of course! Only a moral monster wouldn't!

Q: Is there any moral difference between the case of the drowning child and the case of our not giving very small amounts of money that would (with similar probability) save starving and diseased children in Africa?
A: Of course there's a relevant moral difference! I just can't think of a single one...

In the drowning child example, the child's life is solely in your hands. And you are an individual. In the starving Africans example, the children's lives lie solely in the hands of society. And society is a group.

To make the first question more similar to the second, you'd have to ask something like "If you were a cheap-suit-wearing individual in a crowd of cheap-suit-wearers, would YOU muscle your way through the crowd, so that YOU would be the one to ruin your cheap suit and save a drowning child?"
 
I think a person that answers no needs a couple doses in their morning coffee. 8)

This would be a more interesting question if you asked would you take bodily damage (possibly resulting in death) to save another person.
 
In the drowning child example, the child's life is solely in your hands. And you are an individual. In the starving Africans example, the children's lives lie solely in the hands of society. And society is a group.

To make the first question more similar to the second, you'd have to ask something like "If you were a cheap-suit-wearing individual in a crowd of cheap-suit-wearers, would YOU muscle your way through the crowd, so that YOU would be the one to ruin your cheap suit and save a drowning child?"

Well, there's no analogue to "muscling your way through the crowd" in the real-life case of starving children. All you have to do is donate a few bucks to a reputable organization.

You're right, however, that a difference between the two cases is that in the drowning child case you are the only one around to do the saving, and in the starving children case there are lots of people who could be doing the saving.

Is this a moral difference? It seems clear to me that it is not. The fact that there are other people who could save the drowning child, but choose not to in order to save their expensive suits, does not seem to make it any better for you to do the same! You would have all behaved wrongly. The old saying, "two wrongs don't make a right" comes to mind. How could the fact that there are multiple people failing to act make one person's failure to act morally permissible (especially when that same failure to act when others are absent seems morally impermissible). It is implausible to suggest that something becomes morally permissible just because more people are doing (or failing to do) it. For example, if beating children is morally impermissible for one person to do when he is alone with a child, why would it suddenly become permissible just because lots of other people were beating the child too?
 
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