At Whitman and similar institutions, there are a lot of do-gooders. Student activists, the benevolently ambitious, idealists with a practical edge or just plain do-gooders all describe the same kind of person.   And, as someone who is involved in many of these kinds of activities or fits under these kind of labels, I want to locate the origin of this drive in our irrational idealism:

Could it be logic? Take international poverty for example. Philosopher Peter Singer has been arguing for decades that people in developed countries, namely US, have a moral obligation to donate the majority of the money we spend on things like clothes, gadgets and consumer goods to those in the developing world walking the fine line between subsistence and starvation.   The argument goes:

a) Suffering due to starvation, disease and malnutrition is bad.

b) If you can prevent something bad from happening to someone at little cost to yourself, you       ought to do it.

c) It makes no difference if the person suffering is in front of your eyes or thousands of miles away.

d) It makes no difference whether you act alone or with others in alleviating another’s suffering.

He made this argument in 1971 and last I checked, poverty, starvation and genocide still occur daily. Now, one could disagree with “b)” by arguing that we’re all selfish and should only help ourselves even at expense of others. If you agree with that, then whatever I have to say won’t matter.   Someone else a little less narcissistic could disagree with “c)” by arguing that by not seeing the person suffering in front of you, you are emotionally less invested and hence psychologically less willing to help them.   However, this objection relies on the empirical, descriptive fact that people are by nature less inclined to help those who they don’t see, know or have any connection to.

This objection doesn’t say that this fact of human psychology should be the case, only that it is.

Now, what about “d)?”   One could argue that if you were the only one donating to stop poverty, it’d be pointless, but that’s not the case.

Millions of people donate to stop poverty each year: it’s just that there are billions of poor people.

So what are we left with?   Is suffering only bad if we see it or relates to us, and the real suffering going on is ok as long as we don’t show it on TV?   I guess so. Certainly, E! True Hollywood Stories are less depressing than sub-Saharan Africa. Then, what’s the foundation for my and your student activism?   Just naked ambition?

Maybe looking at the foundation for activism, or “do-gooderness”, in terms of applying rational moral principles is wrong.   Rather, maybe the desire for “social justice” originates in a discrepancy between our ideals for the world, and the world that meets our eyes.

The larger the discrepancy, the stronger the will.   And that’s a good thing no matter how irrational.