The thought experiment is easy sufficient to be taught to undergraduates and troubling sufficient to hang-out adults. You might be strolling previous a shallow pond while you see a baby face-down within the water. You may wade in and pull him out, however doing so will spoil your footwear and muddy your garments. Who however a monster wouldn’t agree that you need to wade in and save the kid, no matter the associated fee to your footwear?
The Australian thinker Peter Singer held that the fundamental “instinct” most of us have about this case expresses one thing deep and necessary about our shared moral commitments. If it displays one thing we actually consider concerning the ethical weight of preventable struggling, then it doesn’t keep politely by the hypothetical water’s edge. It follows us residence, into our budgets, our careers, our politics. The world is filled with drowning kids and we, the comparatively prosperous, are able to assist them with a single financial institution switch. Dying in a Shallow Pond is David Edmonds’ account of how a single philosophical picture escaped the seminar room and have become an argument that now tugs, persistently, on the conscience of the prosperous.
The thought experiment is easy sufficient to be taught to undergraduates and troubling sufficient to hang-out adults. You might be strolling previous a shallow pond while you see a baby face-down within the water. You may wade in and pull him out, however doing so will spoil your footwear and muddy your garments. Who however a monster wouldn’t agree that you need to wade in and save the kid, no matter the associated fee to your footwear?
The Australian thinker Peter Singer held that the fundamental “instinct” most of us have about this case expresses one thing deep and necessary about our shared moral commitments. If it displays one thing we actually consider concerning the ethical weight of preventable struggling, then it doesn’t keep politely by the hypothetical water’s edge. It follows us residence, into our budgets, our careers, our politics. The world is filled with drowning kids and we, the comparatively prosperous, are able to assist them with a single financial institution switch. Dying in a Shallow Pond is David Edmonds’ account of how a single philosophical picture escaped the seminar room and have become an argument that now tugs, persistently, on the conscience of the prosperous.
Dying in a Shallow Pond: A Thinker, a Drowning Youngster, and Strangers in Want. David Edmonds, Princeton College Press, 288 pp., $27.95, September 2025
Edmonds admirably avoids each hagiography and invective. He’s specific that his ebook is “not a polemic.” As an alternative, he provides one thing nearer to a family tree: how the shallow pond thought experiment acquired its peculiar philosophical authority; the way it traveled from the tutorial world of “utilized ethics” right into a fledgling ethical motion; and why it has generated, alongside converts and donors, a particular recoil. The result’s the uncommon ebook that treats a philosophical argument as a social phenomenon.
Singer emerges right here not solely because the identify hooked up to a set of arguments however as a temperament, an individual in whom calculation reliably dominates emotion, and as a person whose life and thought have been formed by exile and the aftershocks of conflict and genocide. The ebook is filled with deft, disarming particulars: Singer’s activism transferring from the Vietnam Struggle and abortion reform to what would turn into his signature causes of animal struggling and world poverty. These biographical info are usually not provided as crude clarification however as context for an ethical seriousness unusually prepared to offend widespread sense.
Singer was the beneficiary of a selected mental second. Oxford within the late Sixties and early Seventies was a self-discipline in the midst of a quiet revolt. In a world marked by the Vietnam Struggle and the Holocaust’s lengthy shadow, the analyses of moral language that had dominated the Nineteen Fifties have been starting to really feel distinctly evasive. The rise of utilized ethics, cemented institutionally within the founding of the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, was neither inevitable nor universally welcomed. Singer arrived simply as inhibitions about “moralizing” have been weakening. Had he come earlier, or later, Edmonds suggests, the shallow pond might need remained a intelligent classroom puzzle somewhat than probably the most influential ethical analogy of the previous half-century.
Having arrange this context, Edmonds traces the shallow pond’s most consequential afterlife: its translation into an influential motion whose adherents name themselves “efficient altruists.” The motion, whose chief founders Toby Ord and William MacAskill met as graduate college students at Oxford, takes Singer’s provocation and asks how far it may be systematized, institutionally, philanthropically, and politically, and rendered much more radical—making use of, for example, not simply to those that presently exist however folks within the distant future.
Efficient altruism, Edmonds repeatedly reminds us, will not be itself an ethical principle. Whereas many efficient altruists are motivated by utilitarian reasoning, the motion presents itself as open-minded about its philosophical foundations, united much less by doctrine than by a sensible query: Given restricted assets, how can we do probably the most good? Edmonds’ account of how that query hardened into a particular ethos of evidence-based giving, cost-effectiveness, and suspicion of sentiment is among the ebook’s nice strengths. He additionally exhibits, with out caricature, how that ethos generates resistance: empirical doubts about assist; ethical unease concerning the dignity of assist recipients; political worries about technocracy and elite authority.
Edmonds pays sustained consideration, as different writers on this topic hardly ever do, to psychology. The shallow pond argument does a lot of its work by upsetting a peculiar mixture of guilt, admiration, irritation, and resentment. Edmonds treats this sample of responses as issues to be defined somewhat than dismissed. But right here the ebook additionally exhibits restraint. It’s one factor to catalogue why folks resist Singer’s conclusions; it’s one other to ask whether or not that resistance may itself reveal one thing necessary about morality’s place in a human life. Edmonds repeatedly flags this risk whereas leaving it to the reader to determine what, and the way massive, that place is.
The shallow pond isolates a small cluster of instinctive judgment—about rescue, urgency, and duty—and renders them vivid. The more durable query is whether or not it might function the organizing picture for a life one acknowledges as worthwhile, or for a political motion able to commanding widespread loyalty. For that, the values it makes salient should coexist with others many individuals expertise as no much less elementary: dedication to household and associates, attachment to initiatives that give form to a life, and types of partiality not skilled merely as ethical weak spot. Utilitarianism can acknowledge these items, however sometimes solely “derivatively,” as inclinations it’s helpful for us to have as a result of they have a tendency, in the long term, to supply good penalties. That isn’t how they seem to us from, because it have been, the within.
This hole between principle and expertise was identified most sharply by Bernard Williams, a vital determine repeatedly invoked on this ebook, who argued that a few of our “initiatives” are usually not simply issues we occur to care about, however a part of what makes a life one’s personal. Singer has been taken to be saying that each seemingly harmless alternative—time spent together with your kids, a espresso and croissant for breakfast—is implicitly a choice to not save a drowning little one. The argument invitations a type of moral self-surveillance that threatens to flatten the excellence between what we morally worth and what we worth, full cease. Edmonds presents this fear with sympathy however stops wanting asking whether or not a morality that persistently generates this sort of friction is likely to be revealing not human failure, however ethical overreach.
Some current philosophical arguments have urged that this resistance might merely replicate our discomfort with morality’s true calls for. Because the thinker Nikhil Venkatesh places it, utilitarianism shares one thing necessary with socialism: Each urge us to reevaluate the price of our attachments in gentle of our nature as social beings whose lives are sustained by the labor and restraint of others. If that argument is true, then the alienation folks really feel in response to Singer’s conclusions will not be a refutation however a symptom.
Efficient altruists generally describe extraordinary lives—lives structured round profession, relationships, and private initiatives, with solely restricted altruistic sacrifice—as ethically suboptimal. That description could also be right by utilitarian lights. However it’s an open query whether or not the explanation many people reside such lives is merely weak spot or blindness. Might it not be that these are the lives we expect now we have purpose to reside, all issues thought-about?
Maybe the hostility Singer’s arguments provoke will not be greatest understood as confusion or weak spot, however as resistance to any morality’s declare to sovereignty over a life. Nietzsche, a determine Edmonds doesn’t point out, invited us to think about the deeply unsettling thought that human indifference to most struggling was not only a forgivable compromise for the sake of our sanity, however in itself an excellent factor chargeable for a lot that’s good in human life.
Notably, efficient altruism itself has retreated from probably the most demanding implications of Singer’s unique argument. Its main figures now stress that fixed optimization is self-defeating: A scientist who tried to make each day by day choice maximally altruistic would possible abandon the very analysis that may, in the long term, save 1000’s of lives. Because of this radically altruistic psychologies—the individuals who give away all the things right down to their surplus kidney—are sometimes handled with ambivalent admiration. Larissa MacFarquhar’s profiles of such maximal altruists, Strangers Drowning, a pure companion to Edmonds’ ebook, captures this truth with extraordinary sympathy.
Ultimately, there are two cussed info to be defined. The shallow pond elicits recognition: a way that one thing necessary has been revealed. And it elicits resistance, irritation, defensiveness. Edmonds’ nice achievement is to take each reactions severely, and to let the philosophers and economists who articulate them converse at size.
Efficient altruism in its varied types attracts out one highly effective strand of our values: responsiveness to struggling and preventable hurt. What they haven’t proven, and will by no means present, is that our attachments, loyalties, and initiatives are illusions to be overcome somewhat than sources of that means that additionally deserve our allegiance. Dying in a Shallow Pond doesn’t resolve that pressure. However by tracing how one small ethical picture got here to embody it so vividly, Edmonds has written the uncommon philosophical ebook that leaves the reader each clearer-headed and extra actually conflicted.
