The moral philosopher Peter Singer famously challenges us with an ethical thought experiment.
This is one of those “What would you do if” scenarios.
Singer describes a typical morning when you are walking to work through a park. There is a shallow duck pond that you walk past every day. On this particular day, though, you notice that there is something splashing in the duck pond, that is not a duck. To your horror, you see that thing splashing around is a toddler – a child small enough to drown. The child is clearly in distress.
You look around. Where is the parent? What happened to the babysitter?
No one else is around.
So… there’s no way around it. If the child is to be saved from drowning, it’s up to you.
You know that saving the kid would not present any danger to you. You are young and in good physical condition. Besides, the pond is calm and shallow.
But just as you are about to wade into the water, it occurs to you that you are wearing your finest Italian leather shoes. You really love those shoes, but you don’t really have time to take them off.
And then you think – who is this kid anyway? Is this kid my responsibility? If I stop here, I’m going to be late to work, and my boss hates that.
So.
What would you do?
Do you forge on and save the child?
Or do you leave the child to die and continue on so that you get to work on time with your nice shoes intact?
Part of the effectiveness of this thought experiment is the immediate feeling of moral outrage that we feel when we imagine the awful person who could even consider a pair of shoes in such a moment. We are all disgusted with this idea. Who is this horribly vain person – this an unfeeling, spiritually bankrupt individual who has no appreciation of the sacredness of human life?
I am certainly not that person.
This is not a moral quandary – this is a moral no-brainer.
Of course. Given this scenario, every single one of us would launch into the pond and save the child from drowning.
But Singer’s thought experiment would not teach us anything if it stopped there.
Actually, this is not so much a moral thought experiment as it is a moral ambush. Singer has carefully brought us to this juncture – to this feeling of utter moral disgust – only to turn the tables on us and point out that this horrible, vain, spiritually bankrupt person is…
Me and you…
We may not see children drowning in duck ponds everyday, but, we do know, don’t we, that there are children all over the world who are dying, right now… even though it is easily within our power to help them. According to the World Health Organization’s website an estimated 5 million children under 5 years old died worldwide in 2023, and the majority of these deaths resulted from preventable conditions like measles, malaria and diarrhea —medical concerns that, in developed nations, are almost never fatal.
Peter Singer’s point, obviously, is that many such children could be saved if we would just commit to donate some of the money we would otherwise use for luxury items like a good pair of shoes, a fine suit, a nice meal at a fancy restaurant, or even our daily cup of coffee, to a credible non-profit that is set up to provide for the medical needs of children.
But as I relate all this to you, I am painfully aware that I (and Peter Singer too) sound a lot like an ad for one of those nonprofits. You, like me, have seen a million such ads, and we have become impatient with the way that they manipulate our feelings in order to reach into our wallets. We often find ourselves turning the channel or hitting the mute button these infomercials come on – not because we don’t care, but because, O God, we care too much, and we are really not up for being stabbed in the gut with guilt when all we were doing was innocently settling down, after a long day of work, to zone out in front of the tube. Ads that shamelessly parade before us images of malnourished black children with flies crawling around their eyes show a certain kind of reality that we ought to pay attention to, but if we are feeling cynical, they can also cause us to turn off our compassion, precisely because they are trying so hard to make use of our compassion.
I’m not speaking to you on behalf of a charity today. I think there are many worthy charities, and I do not discourage you from donating (Cary and I do, actually, give a modest monthly sum to one such nonprofit) but I’m not in the business of guilt tripping you into parting with your hard earned money.
That’s not my job.
Since I am a pastor, I want to consider how Singer’s duck pond scenario speaks to our spiritual needs as Christians today?
**
Judith just read two passages for us – the first reading was Psalm 124, and the second was a passage from the ninth chapter of the gospel of Mark.
Though it is, no doubt, a controversial thing to say, I cannot help but wince when I hear the words of the psalm 124:
if it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when our enemies attacked us, then they would have swallowed us up alive,
How painfully ironic it is to hear words of psalm 124 today, while Israel is, even as we speak, engaged in shooting missiles and carrying out bombing strikes into a population of defenseless Palestinian civilians who are trapped in the Gaza Strip.
When I googled “number of children killed in Gaza” I came upon a post from Phillippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. Lazzarini presented a graph that indicated a deeply disturbing statistic. During a four month period (from October 2023 to February 2024) 12,300 children were killed in Gaza. This number is higher than in ALL the child fatalities in all the other wars in the world for the last four years, combined.
When I read this, I had to hold my head in my hands for a long time to hold the pain.
When the psalm says:
We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the hunters; the snare is broken, and we have escaped.
I cannot help but raise this prayer on behalf of the Palestinian people.
May the children of Gaza be like a bird, that has escaped from the snare of hunters.
Break the snare, O God, that they may escape.
I know…
I know that when I turn the ancient holy words of Jewish tradition into a critique of the Israeli military, I am certainly playing with fire.
And yet I choose to do so. I do so, though I am fully aware, that I risk (I think for the first time in my life) being called antisemitic.
I would, however, muster all the strength of my moral character, and all my sense of purpose as a human being who seeks justice, to argue that what I am doing is not antisemitic.
I do not criticize the Jewish people.
I criticize the Israeli government.
I do not think there is something inherently evil about the Jews.
But I do think there is something terribly wrong with the soul of Benjamin Netanyahu – or any human being, for that matter, who can order bomb strikes upon areas that, he knows full well, are populated by innocent children.
How, I ask, can such a person sleep at night?
**
According to the Webster’s New World dictionary the word “ultimate” is defined as a “condition beyond which it is impossible to go.”
Paul Tillich, one of America’s most influential theologians, describes religion as the “concern [that] is ultimate; it excludes all other concerns from ultimate significance.” (Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. I, p.14)
I think it is fair to say that when, earlier this morning, we were considering Peter Singer’s duck pond scenario, the center of gravity of the story – the moment of “ultimate concern” – was the moment when it became perfectly clear that the child was about to die, and that it was up to you (as the main character in the story) to act.
This moment leans on each of us, simply by virtue of the fact that we are human.
If this moment does not lean on someone – if that person is more concerned about their fancy shoes than saving a child’s life – then there is something fundamentally inhuman about that person.
We all recognize this truth without having to think about it. It is a truth that lives in our gut. It is a truth that is essential to our spirit.
We do not think about it.
We are compelled to save the child’s life because we recognize the holiness of that child’s life.
The child’s holy spirit calls out to our holy spirit with a silent but eternal compulsion.
We choose life.
Religion.
God.
These are just words that lead us to this ultimate, universal truth – that life recognizes and honors life.
To condemn a person who knowingly defies this ultimate truth, and intentionally decides to rain bombs on innocent children… this is not antisemitic.
This is anti-death.
Jesus takes this lesson and moves it from the negative to the positive.
When someone is found healing people in Jesus’ name, the disciples come and tell Jesus.
“This must stop” they say. “This man is stealing your schtick.”
But Jesus disagrees. It’s not a schtick. It’s healing.
If someone heals other people, why stop them?
When we see a child drowning, we don’t ask questions.
We jump in.
That’s what we do.
And Netanyahu… if you would like to join the human race… That’s what YOU should do to…
Amen