Larissa MacFarquhar borrowed the title of her new book, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help, from a famous thought experiment first proposed by the Australian ethicist Peter Singer in 1971.
If you walked by a shallow pond and saw a child drowning, Mr. Singer asked, would you rush in to save him, even if it meant ruining your clothes?
Most people would insist that they should, and yet Mr. Singer pointed out that there were children dying all over the world who could be saved for less than the cost of a new pair of pants. Why should it matter that those children were not directly in front of us? How could Westerners justify spending money on luxuries when their dollars could be directed to relief organizations that, for small sums and through basic services, could help rescue children from almost certain death?
Ms. MacFarquhar has assembled a cast of “extreme do-gooders” who, whether knowingly or not, have taken Mr. Singer’s challenge to heart. Though radically different in circumstances and competencies, they all feel the suffering of distant strangers as keenly as they might the suffering of intimates. They commit their lives to the alleviation of that suffering — by donating a kidney to someone they don’t know; by moving to distant crisis zones and doing what they can to help; by living simply, even meagerly, to be able to give as much as possible to those in desperate need in the developing world.
In an interview, Ms. MacFarquhar discussed the challenge of writing about do-gooders and reflected on what they might teach the rest of us about how to balance the competing claims on our moral consciences. Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Your book contains fascinating portraits of various “do-gooders,” from effective altruists to the founders of a leper colony. What is the common bond between them, and between the activities that define them?
In my book, I explain what I mean by “do-gooders” by contrasting them with heroes. A hero, as I use the term, is someone who comes across a crisis, or somebody in trouble, and rises to the occasion. A hero might find someone hurt in the street and help him to the hospital. Or — and I give this example because I was writing the book during the Ebola epidemic — she might be a nurse who finds that her hospital is suddenly filled with Ebola patients who put her own life at risk, but she does the right thing and sticks to her job. A do-gooder, on the other hand, doesn’t wait for trouble to find him — he goes looking for it. He knows that there is suffering out there in the world and he calculates how he will live his life in order to best alleviate that suffering. Most of us need something like a visual stimulus to feel vividly the suffering that other people are enduring. We need either to see someone in trouble or we need something like a photograph — like the picture of that drowned toddler off the coast of Greece that moved the entire world. Do-gooders are different. They don’t need a photograph. They feel the troubles that the rest of us only understand intellectually. And that is part of what moves them to a sense of urgency and obligation.
Does being a do-gooder necessitate great personal sacrifice? Bill Gates has stepped down from heading Microsoft and now devotes his time entirely to his philanthropic work. He’s done a lot of good. Does he count as a do-gooder?
Bill Gates does an immense amount of good, but he isn’t a do-gooder in my sense of the word because a do-gooder is someone who wants to give as much as he possibly can. For this reason, when I was looking for subjects to write about, I wasn’t interested in how much they gave away, but rather in how much they had left. But the reason I defined the category that way is not because I thought of do-gooders as self-sacrificing people who set out to make themselves miserable. Most of them are not miserable. They may live less materially comfortable lives than most of us, but they have something that most of us don’t, which is a sense of fulfilled purpose in their lives. They believe that they are living as they ought to live. And that’s an extraordinary feeling that very few people have.
I found one of the most fascinating parts of the book to be your discussion of the history of the uneasiness with which the do-gooder has been regarded over the centuries, as well as your account of the ambivalence surrounding the efforts of many of the do-gooders you chronicle. Did these responses surprise you?
Oh, yes. When I began this project, I started out by interviewing people who had given one of their kidneys to a stranger. I thought that was an extraordinary thing to do, and I wanted to know more about the people who had done it. But I discovered, to my surprise, that these donors had encountered an enormous amount of resistance in making their decision. Their families were often quite resentful and irritated that they would put themselves at risk, and give away something so precious to a stranger. Relatives would ask: What about us? What if we get sick? Friends thought giving a kidney away was just a bizarre thing to do. And transplant surgeons were often baffled by these people. At the time I wrote the piece [which appeared in The New Yorker and became the basis of a chapter in the book] a few years ago, something like half the transplant programs in this country wouldn’t even interview people who wanted to donate to a stranger. This was in part because psychiatrists have long been skeptical of altruistic donors — they suspect they must be crazy to want to do such a thing — and this view has had a great influence in hospitals. And besides that, some transplant surgeons felt that it went against their Hippocratic oath, to do harm to a healthy person who would not benefit from it.
Now, of course, in my view, and in the view of the donors, they did benefit from it: They got to help someone in a very profound way, and one that was almost certain to succeed. Trying to help other people is very complicated and often backfires, but donating a kidney these days almost always works. And afterward, the donors felt wonderful about what they’d done. Oddly enough, though, this didn’t strike many doctors as a good reason to donate. In fact, in some cases, it was felt to be a reason to disqualify a would-be donor — if the donor said that he wanted to donate in order to feel good about himself. It seemed to me to be an excellent reason.
I was very struck by this ambivalence, this resistance, this skepticism, toward these donors whom I felt were so admirable. So I started looking into it. And this is why I used the term do-gooder in the book, because it comes loaded with the kind of prejudice that I wanted to examine. If you say to someone, “I want to look into why we are skeptical and ambivalent about people who do good deeds,” they might say, “No we’re not. What are you talking about?” But if you use the term “do-gooder,” immediately everyone knows exactly what you mean.
In the course of thinking about why some people are ambivalent about do-gooders, I came to feel that certain qualities were quite overestimated in our culture — qualities that are associated with do-gooders, such as self-righteousness or being judgmental. Many people think that those are terrible qualities, but it seems to me that they are very minor flaws. Imagine one person who devotes his life to helping the homeless but is kind of puffed-up about it, and another person who is a delightful cynic, fun to go out to dinner with, but who has never done anything for anybody — are we really going to say that the second is a better person?
Some of the do-gooders you profile work in established institutions, but many others work outside institutions or start their own. How do you think extreme do-gooders relate to the more quotidian do-gooders that populate much of the nonprofit sector?
It’s sometimes difficult for do-gooders to understand regular people, because they don’t think they — the do-gooders themselves — are doing anything extraordinary. They feel that they’re simply doing their duty, and they don’t understand why other people don’t do more. However, they do realize that the world very much needs the people who run nonprofit institutions. For instance, many effective altruists have decided that they can do the most good not by becoming aid workers or doctors themselves but rather by earning a lot of money and donating that money to organizations that can use that money to pay for several aid workers or several doctors. But they, of course, realize that if those organizations did not exist, then all their earning and donating would be for naught. So they realize that the infrastructure of aid and social-welfare nonprofits is vitally important.
In the opening of the book, you argue that do-gooders have to be understood on a case-by-case basis, through their own stories, and much of the book is structured around this biographical approach. So there is a strong impulse for the reader to search these stories for clues to explain behavior, to mine their personal histories for evidence of emotional scarring and need, often involving parental abuse or neglect. Did you worry about overdetermining the do-gooders’ own history and making their choices seem predetermined by their pasts?
Well, I certainly didn’t solve the problem of free will; that’s beyond the scope of this book. Going into this project, I was quite resistant to psychoanalytic and psychological theories of altruism, because many of them seemed to be designed to explain altruistic behavior in terms of some kind of damage or mental illness, and I really wanted to push against that. But there was one theory that did ring true to me, the theory of the parentified child. This is the idea that a child growing up in a household where at least one of his parents is not functional — perhaps because he or she is mentally ill, or is an alcoholic — may feel that it’s up to him to try to fix the family. So he tries to be as good as possible: He might try to become a perfect student, he may do the housework, he may take care of his younger siblings or his parents. And a child like that may then grow up to feel an outsized sense of moral duty as an adult, and feel an obligation to fix the world, in the way that he once felt obliged to fix his family.
When I first read about this I thought, bah, here’s yet another of those psychological theories designed to make do-gooders seem mentally ill. But then I thought about the people I had written about, and while they were not a scientific sample, it was very striking to me how many of them did come from backgrounds like that. Not all of them, but many of them, had either an alcoholic or a severely mentally ill parent. So I thought, there might be something to that theory.
On the other hand, I still want to resist the idea that just because a sense of moral duty may have some origins in childhood trauma, that it is therefore a sign of ill health. Imagine another child, who grows up in a fantastic home with two terrific parents, who raise that child to have a sense of duty to care for strangers because they believe it’s the right thing to do. That child is going to grow up feeling equally obliged to try to fix the world, and you wouldn’t call that child mentally ill. So I don’t see any reason to suppose that just because this sense of duty may come in part from trauma, that it is necessarily less free or less true than the sense of duty felt by a child raised in a good home.
Another element of the book that I really appreciated was your own obvious efforts to grapple with the themes of moral responsibility that it raises, without succumbing to an easy cynicism or sentimentality, or arriving at any neat, tidy resolutions. How did your own attitudes and understandings of do-gooders change as you researched and wrote the book?
My attitude toward the do-gooders themselves did not change. I view them with wholehearted admiration. What did change is that I came to have a greater appreciation and understanding for the forces allied against them. I certainly don’t think that it’s impossible to be a do-gooder and take good care of your family. But I know that most people feel that they want to give everything they possibly can to their family and the people close to them and their community, to the exclusion of strangers. That is a very deep human impulse, and I’m not sure it’s a bad one. It’s very difficult to imagine what the world would be like if everyone ceased to feel that way. It would a very different world — in which much of what we now think of as human nature would be abandoned — and I’m not sure it would be a better one.
Benjamin Soskis is a historian of philanthropy at the Center for Nonprofit Management, Philanthropy and Policy at George Mason University and co-editor of HistPhil.
