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Stoic q&a: Would Epictetus save his mother or two strangers?
C. Writes: I just finished reading Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar. It is a collection of profiles of people who go to extreme length to help strangers. The title comes from a thought experiment discussed at the beginning of the book — “Should you save your mother from drowning, or two strangers?”
Utilitarianism tells us of course we should save the two strangers — two lives are more important than one. The do-gooders in the book all took this route to great extent, giving up many things normally considered good — money, time, pleasure, health and social status — in order to help strangers.
However, this also affected their own family negatively, which is a bit unsettling for me. This seems to be very much contrary to what we always hear in films and literature — “Family always comes first!” For example, a US Christian missionary in the book took her young children with her to Africa when she worked there, and one of them almost got kidnapped by a mob.
I wonder how a Stoic sage would answer this question. Would Epictetus save his mother instead of two strangers?
Well, I ain’t no Stoic sage, but I will try nevertheless to channel by inner Epictetus. I think the answer, as usual in virtue ethics, is “it depends.” That’s because of two reasons: (i) real life situations are often more complex than simple thought experiments; and (ii) Stoics are concerned with intentions, not outcomes. Let’s talk about each in turn.
When someone says “two lives are more important than one” this is assumed by Utilitarians to be axiomatically true. But of course it isn’t. “Importance” is a complex concept, which can be cashed out in a number of reasonable and yet not necessarily mutually compatible ways. In one of the examples you bring up, is the welfare of the people in the village where the Christian mother is working more important than that of her children? Perhaps, but the point has to be argued.
The problem is that in these scenarios we treat people as if they were entirely interchangeable, as if they were identical molecules of the same gas. But that’s obviously false. What if one of the two people I rescue while letting my mother drown turns out to be a mass murderer? Then again, he could be the next…
