Before you work in the future as a nurse, an accountant, a civil servant, or a real estate agent, etc., you are a person. When you are off duty or retired, you are still a person. Your role as a ‘person’ is more fundamental than any other role you play in your whole life.

From an ethical point of view, to be a person is to be a moral agent From an ethical point of view, to be a person is to be a moral agent. To act like moral agents, we have to examine the justifications of our moral beliefs, but perhaps even more important, to care about others.

As an example, the new Financial Secretary, Chan Mo Po, is very unpopular and widely disliked because he behaves more like a psychopath than a caring person. He does not act like a moral agent because he only thinks about getting what he wants without showing any concern for others.

But how much do we really care about others But how much do we really care about others? There are two videos I would like you to watch.

The questions whether, when and how we should help others may reflect differences in moral beliefs and judgments. But it is more often a question of how much we care about or empathize with others.

Take the case of Baby Jessica, an eighteen-month-old girl who in 1987 fell down a well and trapped in a steel pipe. When Jessica’s story was featured on the national news, people around the world gave a total of $800,000 for her successful rescue, a heartwarming display of generosity. (You can find footage of this on YouTube!)

But before your heart gets too warm, in the span of time that she was trapped (two and a half days), just under 35,000 children likely died worldwide from malnutrition. How many of these lives could have been saved for the same amount of money? A lot.

We are more likely to help others when we feel empathy, and it is easier to empathize with Baby Jessica (especially if you are American) than with thousands of faceless starving children.

Similiarly, if you are American, you may feel sorry for the death of an American soldier on a combat mission. But you do not feel anything for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Laos, Vietnam, Afganistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen.

As far as charitable giving is concerned, the utilitarian choice is simple: we should do our best to help as many as possible, which means that it is better to donate to the Save the Children Fund (to help starving children in poor countries) rather than the effort to rescue Baby Jessica.

Peter Singer, a famous contemporary utilitarian philosopher, asks : ‘You notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy. Do you have any obligation to rescue the child?’ 

Most people would rescue a drowning child from a pond, even if it meant that their expensive clothes were ruined, so we clearly value a human life more than the value of our material possessions. Singer then asks: ‘Do we also have an obligation to give at least some of our disposable income to charities that help the global poor?’

If you are interested in this topic (i. e If you are interested in this topic (i.e. charitable giving), you may have a look at Peter Singer’s essay titled ‘The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle’ (available on the course website). Or you may check out Singer’s TED talk titled ‘The Why and How of Effective Altruism’.

For a critique of Singer’s view, you may check out an essay titled ‘Peter Singer Says You Are a Bad Person’ by Howard Darmstadter (also available on the course website).