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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Kenneth McRobbie

Of drowning children, near and far (I)

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Human Nature, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Shame and Guilt

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Karl Polanyi, Kenneth McRobbie, Mencius, Peter Drucker, Peter Singer, trolley problem, utilitarianism

The image of a drowning child is a vivid one – enough to make it a key example in two very different traditions of moral philosophy. In ancient China, Mencius used the image to illustrate humans’ natural inborn moral benevolence: we would all “have a feeling of alarm and compassion” at such a sight, and not out of any form of self-interest. Thousands of years later, in the early 1970s – when Chinese philosophy was known to the West but it would rarely have occurred to a Western philosopher that he should study it – the Australian utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer used the same image. In his famous article “Famine, affluence and morality”, written in 1971 and published 1972, Singer says this:

if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

But Singer puts the image to a very different use than Mencius. Continue reading →

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