Africans shouldn’t have kids if they can’t look after them

There is no general duty of charity to help starving children – only – maybe – a duty to lend to them

In Peter Singer’s ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, parents are strangely absent from the drowning child analogy. Introducing them into his analogy dramatically blunts the conclusions of effective altruists’ insofar as we rich people are only required to lend money to support malaria ridden children where their need cannot be immediately met by parents. After all, the duty to help malaria ridden children first falls on their parents, not strangers on another continent. And if Africans can’t meet this parental duty, i.e., afford children, they shouldn’t have them.

In his famous essay, Singer asks us to consider what our obligations are when walking past a drowning child in a shallow pond who can easily be lifted out. According to him because drowning to death is a ‘very bad thing’ we are required to ‘wade in and pull the child out’ even if this ‘means getting…[our] clothes muddy’. The moral principle Singer extracts from this thought experiment is we are required to help people in extreme need where doing so does ‘not involve sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance’. Applying this moral principle, Singer claims that since we have to help the drowning child, then, we need to help the malaria ridden child in Africa, because, death results in both cases and the cost to saving them is similarly small.

What this thought experiment misses is why the child is drowning in the shallow pond to begin with. Let us assume it is because a mother has negligently stopped watching her child. Here the mother has the first responsibility and must bear the full cost of getting her child out of the water; I modify Singer’s example to be on the sea front now. What if the mother can’t save her child by herself though? What if she needs assistance? Imagine she needs to take a nearby shopkeeper’s $3,000 antique cupboard to save her child who has been swept out in a slightly choppy sea. It will be ruined. Though the shopkeeper might still be obligated to let her use it, we intuit she has to pay for it, or, minimally, pay back the shopkeeper in instalments should she not have the money immediately.

Many African mothers are equally negligent. Negligent because they know that in bringing a child into the world there is a very good chance it will end up diseased and dead; just as the mother knows walking her unsupervised child along the sea front may end up in it drowning. About 1,000 children in Sub-Saharan Africa are born every day with HIV/AIDs which has a mortality rate of about 50% and can be very painful. Every day 1,000 children in Sub-Saharan Africa die of malaria. If a mother shouldn’t be negligent in walking her child along the seafront unsupervised neither should an African mother be negligent in having a child in extreme poverty. If a person can’t or won’t meet their parental duties in having a child, they shouldn’t have a child. Indeed; even a significant risk these parental duties will be breached bars procreation.

Denying parents themselves must bear the full cost of their parental duties opens rich people up to full blown extortion too. Imagine an African wants a child but cannot quite afford one, but would also like some more money too. If the full cost of meeting parental duties can rightfully fall on others, then, this woman could demand $2,100 dollars, a Nigerians year’s income, on the threat of having a child which will cost the rich man $3,000, because, effective altruists such as Singer demand that is what he give to avert the early death of the future child.

What are the alleged disanalogies in my argument?

A big difference between the two cases is it is a small cost for the mother of the drowning child not to be negligent, while, contrastingly, there is a big cost for the African mother in not being negligent, namely, not having any kids. The big cost could then be said to be great enough that it exempts the African mother from any accusation of being negligent at all; granting her a moral license to have children even if others end up paying for them. This is implausible. We don’t typically think the mere fact you’d have to incur big costs to make amends for a negligent act, or miss it altogether, absolves you of the responsibility to avoid it. If a poor drunk driver plunges their car into someone’s house, we still take him to be responsible for making amends to the homeowner, even though the cost to him of doing so is very large, i.e., the big cost of fixing the negligence doesn’t make the negligence cease to exist.

Maybe everyone has a right to have children in good conditions, and, insofar as wealthy people deny this to the African mother, they wrong her; unlike with the mother of the drowning child who can reasonably be said to already have that right actualised because she has the means at her disposal. No. If a couple cannot afford IVF hardly anyone thinks others are obligated to give them thousands of pounds for it, or, the mentioned couple can use force to take money from them. The case becomes stronger when considering disabled couples who want to have children but can only bring their disabled children up with millions of pounds of taxation, i.e., theft. Granting the power of both cases, African mothers certainly don’t have a right to have their children supported by Europeans, and, especially not the 4.1 children they have on average.

Moderate deontologist effective altruists such as

Amos Wollen

may admit the truth of my case but still say we are duty bound to help African children since they aren’t to blame for their predicament. Would it not be counterintuitive in the mirror instance to let the drowning child of the negligent mother die at sea? Yes. However, although the seafront shopkeeper might be obligated to let the negligent mother use his $3,000 antique cupboard, ruining it, he isn’t obligated to bear the full cost of the rescue, i.e., he can demand she pay him then, or, repay him in instalments. Parity of reasoning then dictates that though we in the West might be obligated to help African children we need not bear the full cost either. Instead, we are only obligated to lend money to their parents, parents who can then pay us back with interest. Practically, this means loaning your money to organisations such as Lend With Care and Kiva which probably indirectly lift children out of facing death.

Africans who can’t afford to meet their parental duties shouldn’t have children. However, should they have children who are likely to become diseased and dead, a moderate deontologist effective altruism, e.g. Michael Huemer’s, does not demand you donate to charity to save them. Rather, it only demands you make loans to the parents of the mentioned children, who have the ultimate duty to look after their own children. Any alternative account, implausibly relies on the notion strangers can be morally responsible for bringing up others’ children at great cost to themselves.