Death in a Shallow Pond – A Philosopher, A Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need

This is a thorough philosophical investigation of Peter Singer’s famous 1972 thought experiment involving a moral decision as to whether to rescue a child from a shallow pond, given that this will ruin your expensive new shoes and make you late for a meeting. From this, Singer draws the inference: 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. This has developed into the movement for effective altruism, and still represents a moral challenge to each of us: to what extent do we prioritise helping distant strangers rather than our own immediate - and often trivial by comparison – needs?