Is it ethical to spend money on personal luxuries or things you find meaningful and important when this money could be repurposed to promote health and even save lives? I’m not totally sure, but must decide anyways. Alas, such is life. Anyways I wrote an essay about the question for my philosophy class, and by popular demand am posting it here. Interested to hear people’s opinions, to what extent you disagree or agree, or if you have any other interesting arguments.

“Meet Laura. Laura is a 25-year-old American professional living a relatively ordinary, comfortable life. Laura spends her disposable income on projects and pursuits she finds valuable, meaningful and fun – video-games, nice haircuts, potted plants, tasty food and drink, and toys for her dog. She donates $10 a month to support a YouTuber who makes enjoyable, educational videos, and $5 a month to her local art museum. Peter Singer argues that Laura is doing something seriously morally wrong: she is morally obligated to give large quantities of her wealth to life-saving charities, but she is failing to do so. Reconstruct Singer’s argument and describe what you take to be the best objection to it. Does it defeat his argument?”

Introduction

In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” Peter Singer argues that widely-accepted Western moral standards are deeply wrong about how we should treat strangers. In particular, Singer argues that it is seriously morally wrong for Laura to spend money on luxuries when this same money could be used to save lives.

I will argue that Laura’s actions are not morally wrong because Laura has a strongly partial obligation to imbue her own life with meaning, which means that in some cases “donating to charity” and “spending money in ways Laura finds personally valuable” are of incomparable moral value.

Exegesis

Before denying Singer’s argument I reconstruct it. I will frame the argument around the question:

“Is Laura morally obligated to donate large quantities of her wealth to life-saving charities?”

For concreteness I will use the “Against Malaria Foundation” (AMF) as a stand-in for a highly effective life-saving charity. The AMF provides Malaria prevention nets for $5, saving one life per $5500 on average according to third-party statistics provided GiveWell.

Singer’s argument is as follows:

P1) “Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.”(231)
P2) “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”(231)
P3) Laura could prevent a substantial amount of suffering by donating to the AMF instead of indulging in luxuries like nice haircuts and potted plants.
P4) Laura preventing children from contracting Malaria is more morally significant than Laura having money to spend on luxuries.
C) Laura should donate to the AMF rather than purchasing personal luxuries.

In fact, Singer claims that Laura should donate money until donating more would substantially lessen her quality of living, or perhaps even further until when donating any more would result in her suffering exceeding the suffering that she abates by donating to the AMF.

I believe that Singer’s argument is valid. I will challenge the validity of P4. Singer explains his premises as follows:

P1) Singer takes P1 for granted, as do I.
P2) Singer motivates P2 with a story: Imagine that you encounter a child drowning in a pond. Singer asserts that you are morally obligated to save the child, even if it means getting your clothes dirty, because this consequence is morally insignificant compared to the value of the child’s life. Part of the subtlety of P2 is that it is supposed to apply regardless of where the bad event in question happens, or whether we know the affected party. Singer justifies these aspects of P2 by asserting that a life on the other side of the world is still highly valuable, even if they are a stranger to you. Singer also considers an important variation of the pond case where there are multiple people present around the pond. This illustrates that even if there are other people in a position to aid the drowning child we are still morally obligated to save the child.
P3) P3 is a fact, based on the statistics of the AMF.
P4) Singer advocates for P4 with the argument that human lives are more morally important than the luxuries that compose Laura’s comfortable life.

Singer claims the surprising nature of his conclusion is a result of social norms and evolutionary pressures rather than any moral reality.

Assessment

I now argue that Singer’s P4 is false. Initially this might sound selfish and callous: can we really say that Laura’s comfortable lifestyle is more morally important than preventing the illness and potential death of children? This is not my claim. The health and lives of these children are highly morally significant. It is certainly good for Laura to donate to the AMF. However, the quality of Laura’s life is also important. Let MAL denote the action “donating money to the AMF” and let PER denote the action “using money in personally meaningful ways.” I claim:

(X) MAL and PER are not morally comparable. That is, it is not wrong for Laura to PER rather than to MAL.

Before I explain my reasoning for X I must clarify the scope of X. X does not mean that Laura has no moral obligation to help people who have high chance of suffering from Malaria. It will be consistent with my argument that Laura should donate some substantial portion of her wealth to organizations focused on reducing suffering in the world. My argument is only that it is not wrong for Laura to PER, even if the money she spends on herself is not necessary for her health or survival and could be repurposed to increase the health of others via, e.g., MAL. In fact, I believe it is likely morally reprehensible for Laura to waste her money on pursuits that she doesn’t find meaningful, but this is not the focus of my essay.

Defining morality

Now I make my argument for X. To understand what X means, we must first establish what it means for an action to be “morally good”. Then we must explain why some actions are better than others, and why some pairs of actions are have incomparable goodness.

The utilitarian conception of moral-goodness is roughly

The moral-goodness of an action can be measured by the extent to which this action promotes some objective such as happiness.

In contrast, a virtue ethics conception of moral-goodness has a more personal perspective. For the virtue ethicist, virtue is a fundamental object that cannot be defined in consequentialist terms. Virtues are ideals like honesty or generosity, which to a virtue ethicist are intrinsically valuable. By contrast, a utilitarian might say honesty is valuable because it avoids the chance that you are caught in a lie, and they might say that generosity is valuable in-so-far as is increases the happiness of others. Thus, from the perspective of virtue ethics we can only assign morality to an action within the greater context of the reasons behind the action. A virtue ethics definition of morality is

An action is morally good if you perform it for virtuous reasons.

There are a vast number of arguments for and against both the utilitarian and the virtue ethics conceptions of morality. For instance, sometimes the results of our actions seem important: running a red light and accidentally killing someone seems worse than running a red light and not killing anyone. However, sometimes the intentions of our actions seem quite important: an attempted murder still seems quite bad, even if it does not succeed.

In this paper I accept the virtue ethics perspective as generally correct and argue that Singer’s conclusion is invalid under a virtue ethics conception of morality.

Comparing morality

Using this definition of morality we can now compare the moral goodness of actions. Many actions are morally comparable, for example:

Ex1) If charity A can inoculate more children against malaria per dollar than charity B, then, ceteris paribus, it is morally better to donate to charity A than to charity B.

Without more data the only virtue at play in Ex1 is rationality, which picks out donating more efficiently as a good. There are also many cases where two actions are of incomparable goodness. For example,

Ex2) Your best friend and your brother are both dying of a poison, and you have a single antidote. It is morally gray who it is better to save.

Note that saying that two actions are morally incomparable is quite distinct from saying they are of equal goodness. If two actions are equally good, then small fluctuations will cause one to become better than the other. But this is not the case in Ex2: if you learned that your best friend was planning on donating $10 to charity tomorrow if he didn’t die today this would not instantly sway you towards saving your friend being the obvious choice.

Comparing PER and MAL

To show that PER and MAL are morally incomparable, I first use a more extreme example:

Ex3) Imagine you could sacrifice yourself to save 2 children on the opposite side of the world. Is it morally permissible not to?

This situation seems morally ambiguous, i.e, arguably neither choice is wrong. Virtue ethics would laud self-sacrifice out of love for these children as a good action. But there are also virtuous reasons for choosing self-preservation. Some possible such reasons include finding your own life beautiful, a desire and determination to strive for dreams, and a sense of loyalty and responsibility for the people close to you.

Our intuition in Ex3 may be clouded by an inclination to label the person that preserves their own life as selfish. The following example makes the partiality of morality in virtue ethics more obvious:

Ex4) Imagine you had to choose between saving your daughter or saving two strangers. Is it wrong to save your daughter?

Here virtue ethics likely rules that it is wrong not to save your daughter. A decision to save your daughter would be based on love, protectiveness. A decision to save the two strangers would be based on abstract utility calculations, which it seems dishonest to claim are an equally virtuous reason as the reasons for saving your daughter.

Now, I will extend Ex3 to my claim X (that MAL and PER are morally incomparable). My argument is as follows:

P1) Ex3 is morally gray.
P2) The choice between MAL and PER shares the same essential moral characteristics as the choice in Ex3.
C) X

I have argued for P1 above. P2 is more controversial: in Ex3 we are weighing Laura’s life against other lives, whereas superficially in X we are weighing Laura’s comfort against other lives.

Now I argue for P2. Imagine Laura really did eschew all personal luxuries. Instead of spending time with friends or her dogs or on her projects, she spent all of her time on making money to donate to charity. From the lens of virtue ethics Laura is making a mistake by avoiding all the various ways which she could develop virtue by focusing on her own life. Although Laura keeps living, she has arguably sacrificed her life in a similar manner to the person of Ex3 who literally stopped living. Laura’s personal pursuit of meaning is an essential part of her living a good life and it would be bad for her to neglect this.

An objection

To conclude I address what I find to be the most compelling objection to my argument.

OBJ) We routinely engage in motivated reasoning, whereby we can alter our perceptions of morality. This casts doubt on the claim that actions which we take for “virtuous reasons” are truly morally good. In other words, maybe Laura has merely tricked herself into believing that MAL is not strictly more morally important than PER.

This objection is concerning but ultimately fails. Firstly, virtue ethics measures morality based on our action reasons for actions, not merely our purported reasons. This rules out acting morally in the case where one has shallowly tricked themselves into thinking an action is moral. However, it is plausible that overtime we can thoroughly convince ourselves of some actions moral goodness. My answer to this is that willfully altering your beliefs out of self-interest is extremely morally wrong. Furthermore, your choice to alter your moral beliefs would implicitly be a part of any choice that you made based on these altered moral perceptions. Thus, the immoral motivation for the self-deception translates into an immoral reason behind the later action, despite your changed perceptions.

Conclusion

I have argued it is not morally wrong for Laura to spend money in personally meaningful ways even when this same money could be donated to life-saving charities. My argument is that it is very morally good for Laura to imbue her own life with meaning, rendering the decision between spending on herself and donating to life-saving charities morally gray.

Bibliography