Many of us have mixed emotions about special days—those days designated for us all to feel and act in a certain way.
Mother’s Day. I knew a woman who detested her mother so much that, on every Mother’s Day, she held a brunch for friends who, for whatever reason, preferred not to celebrate or even think about their mothers. It was well attended every year.
Father’s Day. That was a tough one for me growing up in the 1950s, when two-parent households were assumed. My father got very sick when I was 7 or 8 and died when I was 11, so Father’s Day and Father-and-Son events were painful and embarrassing. Later, I felt diminished when my adopted son thought the holiday was all about his grandfather.
Valentine’s Day. I suspect that most of us had awkward and uncomfortable experiences in school, wondering if we were giving and receiving the optimum number of cards.
Thanksgiving Day. I recently explained my ambivalence toward it.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday. These have been tacked on to Thanksgiving Weekend in the United States, the first two by the for-profit business community and the last by the nonprofit business community. They have been enormously successful.
My Vajrayana Buddhist practice incorporates gratefulness and generosity into my essence, or more accurately: My practice is to recognize and rest in the gratefulness and generosity that are part of my inherent Buddha Nature. So, creating a special day for those aspects of my being feels odd and incidentally encourages my ego to seek out opportunities for recognition.
As for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, my practice tells me that it is OK to take advantage of a sale now and then but not to cling to the idea that the sale or the item purchased will get me closer to happiness. I feel similarly about Giving Tuesday. It may be a skillful means to remind people (including me) about charitable giving, but I welcome the slew of emails I receive no more than those I receive about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and whom to vote for on Election Day (which blessedly comes before Thanksgiving Weekend).
That’s just me. The goal of From the Pure Land is to spur and encourage you on whatever path feels right for you. In that spirit, to explore aspects of generosity, I thought I’d present the ideas of Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer from a pro and con standpoint—food for thought on Giving Tuesday Eve.
You may be familiar with Singer because of his best-known book and his website, both called The Life You Can Save. You can download the book free here. The website is particularly useful because it helps identify what, according to Singer’s criteria, are the world’s most effective charities.
It was around ten years ago when Singer’s website helped me choose GiveDirectly as a regular recipient for my charitable spending, which continues to this day. Its mind-bogglingly simple philosophy is that the lowest overhead and highest effectiveness can be obtained by simply giving poor people money and following up on effectiveness. I highly recommend it and encourage you to check it out.
Singer has made significant contributions to the field of ethics, particularly in the areas of animal rights, effective altruism, and utilitarianism. His work has sparked both admiration and controversy. Here’s how Jack Maden, Founder and Director of Philosophy Break, sums up the questions raised by the thought experiment Singer often uses:
Whose responsibility is it to improve society? Do we each have a moral duty to help those we don’t know? And, if so, how far does that duty go?
The thought experiment in brief:
Your walk to work takes you past a knee-deep pond, and on this day, you see a toddler splashing in it. Then you realize her arms are flailing, and she’s in danger of drowning. You see no one else around. The child must have wandered there on her own. You know you can easily wade in and save the toddler, but then your new shoes would be ruined, your suit would need cleaning, and the aftermath would make you late for work. What should you do?
The answer, in this case, is obvious. But then, Maden explains:
Having established this, Singer then asks us to consider the fact that, actually, there are children dying of preventable causes around the world every single day.
In poverty-stricken areas of the globe, for instance, children lack access to life-saving medicines or vaccinations that cost just tens of dollars to administer.
If we’re willing to sacrifice our clothes to save the life of a child drowning in front of us, then surely we’d be willing to sacrifice a few spare dollars to save children elsewhere from preventable deaths.
The question Singer then puts to us is: well, why don’t we? Why aren’t we all routinely giving as much as we can to help save children’s lives? [Emphasis Maden’s]
Overall, Singer’s utilitarian philosophy would guide our actions and our spending toward increasing happiness and reducing suffering for all beings worldwide. It makes no difference to Singer whether the child in danger of dying is about to drown in a pond in your neighborhood or about to starve to death on the other side of the globe. And, for Singer, “all beings” definitely includes animals. Singer’s views make sense from a Buddhist perspective, but then there’s that non-Buddhist aphorism about the Devil (Mara?) being in the details.
Singer, for example, finds euthanasia permissible in some circumstances for severely disabled infants. Moreover, some critics find flaws in applying Singer’s ethics in everyday life.
In a Philosophy Now article titled Peter Singer Says You Are a Bad Person, Howard Darmstadter, an adjunct professor of philosophy and law, says:
Singer’s ethical theory has become controversial because it has led him to views on abortion and euthanasia that many find abhorrent. However, for most of us, issues about abortion and euthanasia seldom arise, whereas eating and spending are daily events. But even in areas involving animals or charitable giving, Singer’s principles have awkward consequences. Consider: if all pleasure or suffering counts equally, then (as his argument goes), the pleasure or suffering of your own children should have no special place in your calculations. So if you live in Ohio and are deciding whether to spend $200,000 to send your daughter east to Princeton for four years, or instead spend $80,000 to send her down the road to Ohio State, while giving the other $120,000 to save the lives of hundreds of African children—well, Hello, Columbus (Ohio)! (The Life You Can Save, p.138)
Here’s another quotation from Darmstadter:
Finally, that child in the pool. Everyone knows what you should do. But suppose that later that day you encounter a second drowning child. Again, we would want you to take the plunge. But a third? A fiftieth? Suppose you encountered a hundred such children every day. Perhaps at some point you’ll think “Why does this all fall on me?” and walk on by, pretending you don’t hear the child’s screams. Or perhaps you’ll just spend more time away from pools.
Darmstadter’s point is that our feelings about one drowning child we can save can’t be compared with our attitude toward all children in mortal peril.
My views loosely align with those of Peter Singer. The goal of what I do is to reduce overall suffering, but I tread a Middle Way between all beings and the beings I know and love. I feel loving-kindness for all beings but do sometimes give priority to humans over termites and to my spouse over all women who are recovering from surgery. On the other hand, I encouraged my sons to go to state colleges.
Charitable living is not an either/or state of being. I welcome any thoughts you’d like to share in the comments below or by email to melpine@substack.com.
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