Strangers Drowning

As you walk to work by the pond in the park that separates your office from your home, you spot someone flailing manically in the water, not waving but drowning.

“Is this a thought experiment?” you wonder in disbelief, dashing towards the pond where you lock eyes with the drowning woman. You’re thinking of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” in which the obligation to save a drowning child in a shallow pond at the cost of ruining your clothes serves as a metonym for the wider obligation to help others in need.

It is a thought-experiment, but you’ve misidentified which one. For as you dive into the pond near the desperate woman, you spy two splashing forms at fifty yards: a pair of strangers, also drowning. And you face a new decision. Abandon the woman you first saw in order to save two instead of one—or rescue her and let the others drown?

Examples like this entered analytic moral philosophy in 1977, with John Taurek’s legendary paper, “Should the Numbers Count?”¹ Taurek im…