Imagine that you are walking to school one day and are passing by a park that you commonly see. As you get closer, you see a very young child in the pond , surely too young to swim. As you get even closer, you see that this child is not playing in the pond, but she is drowning in this pond. You can jump in to save her, but you’ll ruin your new pair of shoes. Would you still do it?

‘Of course,” is the reply most people would give. Even if there were others standing around, most people would not wait to for somebody else to jump in to save her.

For the same price as the shoes which you ruin to save the drowning girl, you could help save a life in Africa by donating to purchase several mosquito-nets to fight malaria, or cure blindness from glaucoma in one person. There seems to be no good reason why the severity of the case would change if the life were geographically distant.

This is the analogy which philosopher Peter Singer (in)famously uses to open his 1972 essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” and to form a principle which Singer offers in the paper:

“[I]f 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.”

It can also prove to be a problematic moral scenario for those who wish to reduce the role of the state in providing aid to failed nations across the globe, as well as making advocacy against government aid in developing nations difficult if not done in a tactful and well-informed manner. We owe it to the people of these nations to help them, and maybe the best way to help them is to get out of the way, but maybe there are other ways, too.

Make no mistake, Singer is explicitly not advocating that  governments ought to extract the cost of the shoes from you to save a life in Bengal, or that there should be a police officer by the pond to coerce you into saving the little girl. Instead, he is merely pointing out the moral conundrum faced by saving the child and not saving  countless other children across the globe.

It is this logic which liberationists use to advocate for greater aid to these nations. Chris Coyne’s recent book Doing Bad by Doing Good shows much of this aid tends to exacerbate the problem. How, then, do we help those in third world nations directly? Must we give up Singer’s imperative to do what we can, so long as it does not come at a comparable moral cost to us, for the sake of efficacy? Or do we, in an attempt not to concede the moral high ground, continue with aid that may ultimately be deleterious to the well-being of the people in those countries?

Neither, actually. Just as Singer’s own stance on international aid has changed throughout the years, we need not concede the moral high ground for efficiency’s sake. Utility and morality can work closely together in this case. A variety of efforts can be used to assist the least well-off in the world.

Effective Altruism

There is no need to sacrifice altruism for efficiency. Some charitable organizations and government aid organizations are quite ineffective at getting aid where it needs to go. Sometimes this is a result of corruption (such as in the UN’s Food for Oil program), and sometimes it is a result of mere organizational inefficiency. Some of these organizations, as Coyne points out, actually work to prop up corrupt and tyrannical institutions, preventing the development of further institutions which would help the people of these nations.

This does not, however, mean that there are not some organizations that are effective at aiding those who need it the most. What Singer calls “effective altruism” is the concept that we ought to be altruistic through organizations which are successful at getting aid to those who need it. Groups like GiveWell work to review these organizations and guarantee that the money donated goes to the best groups possible. With this fact in mind, it seems morally problematic to knowingly advocate for aid which is shown to be ineffective.

For the cost of a week’s budget for eating out, one can donate to organizations to fight malaria, blindness, starvation, and more, and save human lives that would have otherwise perished. Simultaneously, one would not be supporting failed government bureaucracies and intra-national organizations such as the UN.

Giving effectively is possible, and given the choice to donate to effective organizations or support failed systems, the moral imperative becomes to support these effective organizations and to reject systems like the ones Coyne surveys.

Institutional Support

Ideally, what supporters of uplift advocate for is to bring these third world nations to the level of developing and developed nations. Further work by institutional economists has shown that this requires the establishment of strong institutions. But what kind of institutions?

Williamson’s work shows that the wealthiest nations, per capita, are those with strong informal institutions and weak formal institutions.

As Coyne’s work surveys, strengthening strong formal institutions like governments can sometimes result in propping up dictators and having money that is intended for food being used on machine guns and tanks that kill and torment the very people the money was intended to aid. Further work by institutional economists, such as Claudia Williamson, shows that what ultimately matters is the establishment of strong informal institutions, such as property rights, and not necessarily strong formal institutions.. In fact the wealthiest nations are those with strong informal institutions, but weak formal institutions, because this prevents the extraction and destruction of wealth by formal institutions.

The problem becomes, then, how do we develop these strong informal institutions?  As good Hayekians, though, we know that one does not simply develop informal institutions, but rather,  must allow these institutions to spontaneously arise. Attempting to impose informal institutions will only result in a collapse of the governmental orders and cultures within those nations and add to the suffering already experienced by those people.

Thus, supporters of liberty find yet another reason through Singer’s motivations to oppose government intervention in these economies. If we care about alleviating the suffering of the least well-off in the world, we ought to advocate that our own governments stop meddling in the governments of these nations and allow these people to develop their institutions in organic ways.

Bring the Drowning Child Closer

One of the easiest and most effective ways of alleviating global poverty would be allowing the open and free trade of labor. In other words, open borders will make the world richer. Study after study  has shown that opening borders across the globe would nearly double global GDP and help some of the people of the poorest nations become richer. It has even been called the “efficient, egalitarian, libertarian, utilitarian way to double global GDP.”

It is possible that those in the best well-off nations would suffer a small decrease in average income, but after economies would equilibrate to the influx in new labor, it is predicted that these first-world incomes would return to their pre-open border levels.

Philosopher Michael Huemer adds another moral prong in favor of opening borders, if the utilitarian case from Singer is not enough to convince. Huemer asks if there are two people, let us call them Uncle Sam and Bob, who exist in a hypothetical world, and Bob needs to work in order to make money for his family, otherwise he and his family would die. There is a market across the street from Bob, and all he would need to do is walk across the street and work in the market, where the shop workers would happily hire him, and he would have enough money to provide for his family. Uncle Sam, though, stands in the middle of the street threatening to shoot Bob if he crosses. As a result, Bob does not cross the street and he and his family starve to death.

Most people, Huemer says, would agree that Uncle Sam is in some way morally responsible for Bob’s death. The analogy holds the same for borders. By not allowing people to move to first world nations, work and live, we essentially cause them to die, and are responsible for these deaths.

What We Can Do

I don’t think there’s much point in bemoaning the state of the world unless there’s some way you can think of to improve it. Otherwise, don’t bother writing a book; go and find a tropical island and lie in the sun.
– Peter Singer

Faced with overwhelming evidence that governmental aid to poor nations does not work, and faced with Singer’s principle that we ought to help prevent suffering, it seems that we must do something other than support government aid to these nations. With some of the options above — effective altruism, non-meddlesome institutional support, and open immigration — we can help alleviate pain and suffering across the world.

But we, as advocates of liberty and inheritors of its prosperity, can do even more. We can put our money where our mouths are and not only advocate that these organizations be given money and that borders be opened, but we can actually work to save lives worldwide. We can pledge a portion of our incomes (or future incomes, if we are students) to effective charities to help alleviate suffering. We can potentially work jobs which have the biggest impacts in mollifying human misery. And we can directly support these effective charities. By each of us stepping up and doing our parts, we enervate the argument that government ought to solve these problems. By working through private means and charities, motivated by a wish to allay human anguish across the globe, we can endeavor to create a reverse-crowding out effect, making the job of government in these sectors superfluous. Each of us can actively decrease the role of failed government programs internationally while simultaneously saving human lives.