Back to Teaching First Year Philosophy: "Don't tell me about my affluence and imperialist privilege you stupid philosophy instructor!"

The school year has started up again and, lucky enough to have found some contract work, I am back teaching undergrads about philosophy and trying very hard not to sound like a jaded academic.  The best thing about teaching undergraduates is that you get to see how "common sense" morality and capitalist ideology is still a significant filter in the way they approach theoretical concepts… and if you're lucky enough to succeed in getting a few of them to question these assumptions, you sometimes end up learning something in the way that their often sudden moments of insight are fresh and exciting. Otherwise you just keep relearning how being selfish is "human nature", why people who are doing mental labour are more hard-working than people who do the majority of the world's manual labour, and that a lot of your students desperately believe that they will not be a failed academic like you when they finish their glorious university career.

One of the most interesting exercises we sometimes give first year philosophy students––an exercise aimed at making them think through common sense assumptions and to teach them something about how philosophical arguments work––is a summary of Peter Singer's seminal argument about famine and affluence.  Then, after providing them with this summary, we sit back and watch them try to debate it out so we can eventually tell them something about how argumentative logic is supposed to work, point out the predictable fallacies of their counter-arguments, and try to get them to map an argument they generally do not like and thus force them to think about things they do not want to like.

Austrialian born liberal with some good points wandering about in a documentary about philosophy

For those outside of philosophy who are unfamiliar with Singer's Famine, Affluence and Morality, the core argument goes something like this… Say you are walking by a small pond and see that there is a child drowning: if you are wearing very expensive shoes and would thus ruin these shoes by entering the pond to save the child would you sacrifice the shoes to save the child?  The majority of people would agree that it would be morally reprehensible to allow the child to drown, expensive shoes or no, and would instantly claim that they would wade into the pond and save the child.  Singer then argues the following: there are people dying of hunger in the third world and just because we aren't walking past the "pond" of famine we are still aware that they are dying and thus it is not a morally significant fact that we can't see them; it is morally reprehensible that we live in affluence when other people and that we would spend our money on expensive shoes when the same money could feed a starving child for a year.

To be clear, I think Singer is an inveterate liberal.  The moral solution to the problem he rightly pin-points is to donate the price of expensive shoes, or expensive what-have-you, to charity organizations like UNICEF or OXFAM.  Philanthropy does not solve world hunger; NGOs are usually bound up in the imperialist project; a "rescue" discourse is often tantamount to imperialist intervention; an ethics of consumerism will solve nothing.  At the same time, however, the way he outlines the problem of first world affluence in the face of the misery of the peripheries is stark enough to really jolt university undergraduates who aren't used to thinking in this way.  Moreover, it is very useful in revealing the influence of bourgeois ideology on the way first year philosophy students think.

Indeed, the best thing about asking undergraduates to think through Singer's argument is that it demonstrates just how outraged people can get when they are asked to consider their possible privilege.  "I'm not a bad person for wanting to buy nice things," is the general knee-jerk response, "How dare this stupid philosopher make me question the fact that I might want to buy nice shoes or what-have-you!"  And from this outraged response, which we use to teach our students about fallacious counter-arguments, follows a whole host of problematic ideological assumptions: people starving at the peripheries of world capitalism aren't the same as a child drowning in a pond because there is no connection between their poverty and our affluence––hell, they're only starving because maybe they don't work hard enough!

The best bad response I heard this week in response to Singer's argument was: "when we buy expensive shoes we are paying the wages of the people who make the shoes and so it is a moral act to buy expensive things."  And so the fact that the bourgeois way of seeing the production process is treated as dogma is telling… It really does teach you something about how to make sense of the labour theory of value because it is pretty easy to ask the people making this argument how you can possibly be paying someone's wage for a product that was assembled and placed into market before you showed up to buy it––if this person's wages have already been provided ahead of time (and usually, due to imperialism and the export of capital, at a sweat-shop price) then how can you possibly imagine that you buying this product is going to be transferred back in time to the poor worker who assembled the product?  And those attempting to answer these reprehensible attacks on Singer's argument––who want to defend Singer's position––fall into the same consumerist trap by disappearing into the consumerist ethics of "fair trade" ideology.

Then there are the random "besides the point" arguments that imagine they are clever by thinking up things they believe Singer never imagined: "hey I got this rope on me so I don't need to ruin my italian shoes and the child will grab hold of my rope" (really? have you ever engaged with a one year old?); "Singer is stupid because no child would be drowning in a small pond unless its parents left it there so it's the parents fault" (and so then it is okay to let it drown?); "what if you expensive shoes allow you to get a good job so that you can give more money to charity" (well this is a problem with the whole charity narrative, but come on… returning to the original analogy, even if your shoes would get you a good job you probably would wade into that pond!).  We always have to wonder why people are so obsessed with trying to disprove Singer's argument rather than take it further––why there is such a desperate attempt to avoid accepting the fact of first world affluence in the face of third world poverty.

Thus, the reason why Singer is such a useful teaching tool is that his argument about famine and affluence causes students to critically think through the fact that they are living in a context of affluence––something they don't like doing.  They have been socialized for years to think that they are outside of more general social relations, to imagine that the fact they can sit in a university classroom is not dependent on all of the invisible labour of people who will never have the same opportunity.  Provide them with a stark argument about famine and affluence, regardless of its eventual liberal conclusions (which must be combatted), and some of them are personally offended.

It's in this moment of offense that intervention is possible.  Take Singer out of the terrain of liberal assumptions in which is argument is enmeshed and the students are left this stark scenario: people are dying while we live in affluence, and yet you think it's ethical to live in affluence while the majority of the world is starving––you are even going out of your way to defend your "right", based only on the fact that you were born in a culture of affluence, to pursue some pretty stupid consumerist commitments.  And in this context, why do people feel really committed in arguing against a comparison of a drowning child in a pond, which is only figurative, and a starving child at the peripheries of world capitalism, which is viscerally literal?  And sometimes critical thought is able to pierce these core capitalist assumptions… Other times, not so much: as I've always maintained, politicization is rarely dependent on a good argument; ideology is often far too strong, able to overcome every reasonable arguments, because class commitment is not simply based on whether or not a position is rational.