Long before Google gave us the slogan “don’t be evil,” philosophers have been thinking about what “good” or “evil” behaviour really means. We think that we recognise evil when we see it – but do we really? Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment is an attempt to clarify that question.

The philosopher Peter Singer invites us to a thought experiment: If, on the way to the office, we saw a child drowning in a pond, would we think that we have to save it? Would it change anything if we were wearing a new suit and if we came late to our business conference because of saving the child? This case, he says, illustrates that we have a duty to help others if we can do so with a relatively small investment from our side.

To make Peter Singer’s drowning child example more realistic, let’s say you buy a colourful, cheap shirt from an Indian shop in some Western metropolis. Nothing bad about that. Not as bad, surely, as the really terrible things people do, like forced child labour or slavery. Except that this shirt, likely coming from India or Bangladesh, has probably been produced with child labour. The buyer is, after all, the one for whose benefit these industries were created, and therefore a part of the criminal circuit that keeps those children working. When the shirt, fashionably cut and attractively coloured, beckons from the retailer’s rack or the Amazon catalogue, it doesn’t come bundled with the pictures of the kids whose lives were destroyed making it. But perhaps it should.

Am I evil when I buy such a shirt? Probably not. Am I good? Probably neither.

Immanuel Kant wants us to treat others “as ends in themselves,” rather than only as means to our own ends. What does this mean?

When I take a taxi or a bus, I am certainly treating the driver as a mean to my own end of getting to my destination. I don’t really care who the driver is, if he’s happy, if he likes me, or whether his child is in hospital after a terrible accident. But I’m not treating the driver as a mean only; I’m paying my fare, and thus I give the driver the opportunity to use this money in order to pursue his own ends. He can take a holiday, if he makes enough, buy a new phone, or afford a better cure for his child.

But isn’t it the same with the shirt from India? Do I not pay for the shirt, thus enabling… what exactly? Enabling the circle of exploitation and slavery to go on? The problem is that the taxi driver is a member of my affluent society, informed about his rights, protected by the basic legal framework of my society, who has voluntarily agreed to …

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