What Do We Owe Strangers? 我們欠陌生人什麼？

🔊Now the principle says nothing about distance. A child dying of a preventable disease in another country is as real as the child in the pond, and for the price of the shoes an aid organization can do something to prevent the death. The principle also says nothing about whether other people could help and do not. If others were standing around the pond doing nothing, you would still have to go in. So the conclusion appears to follow that spending money on things we do not need, while children die whom the money could save, is the moral equivalent of walking past the pond. Giving to relieve great suffering, which we have always called charity and praised as generous, is on this argument a plain duty, and failing to give is wrong.

而這條原則，對「距離」隻字未提。另一個國家裡一個死於可預防疾病的孩子，跟池塘裡的那個孩子一樣真實；而用那雙鞋的價錢，一個援助組織就能做點什麼來阻止那個死亡。這條原則也沒有提到「別人是否也幫得上忙卻沒有幫」。就算池塘邊站著別人、什麼也不做，你仍然必須下水。所以，結論看來是推得出來的：當有孩子正在死去、而錢救得了他們的時候，把錢花在我們並不需要的東西上，在道德上就等同於從池塘邊走過去。為了解除巨大的苦難而捐助，我們向來稱之為「慈善」，並且讚美它是慷慨；照這個論證，它是一項明明白白的義務，而不捐是錯的。

🔊The Chinese philosopher Mozi had reached the same position by another road in the fifth century BCE. He asks where the disorders of the world come from, and answers that they come from people not loving one another. A son loves himself and not his father, and so injures his father for his own gain. The lord of a state loves his state and not his neighbor’s, and so attacks it. The remedy is to replace partiality with impartial care: “regard other people’s states as one regards one’s own, other people’s families as one regards one’s own, and other people’s persons as one regards one’s own.” His critics said that the idea was fine and could never be put into practice. He replied with a test. Suppose you must go to war or on a long embassy, he says, and do not know whether you will return. You have to leave your parents, wife, and children in someone’s care. Would you entrust them to a man who holds that he should care for his friend’s family as his own, or to a man who holds that this is impossible? Even those who argue against impartial care, he observes, would choose the impartial man.

中國哲學家墨子，在西元前五世紀就從另一條路走到了同樣的立場。他問：天下的禍亂是從哪裡來的？他的回答是：「起不相愛。」兒子愛自己而不愛父親，所以損害父親來利自己。一國之君愛自己的國而不愛鄰國，所以去攻打它。對治的辦法是用「兼」取代「別」：「視人之國若視其國，視人之家若視其家，視人之身若視其身。」批評他的人說：這個想法很好，卻永遠無法實行。他用一個檢驗來回答。他說，假設你必須上戰場，或者出使遠方，不知道自己能不能回來。你得把父母、妻子、兒女託付給某個人照顧。你會把他們託付給一個主張「應該照顧朋友的家人如同自己的家人」的人呢，還是託付給一個主張「這不可能」的人？他觀察到：就連那些反對兼愛的人，也會選擇那位主張兼愛的人。

🔊Against Singer and Mozi stands a fact about human beings that Adam Smith described in 1759. Suppose that the great empire of China, with all its inhabitants, were swallowed by an earthquake, and consider how a humane man in Europe would take the news. He would express his sorrow and reflect on the precariousness of life. Then he would go about his business. “If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren.” Smith did not approve of this. He asks at once whether the same man would sacrifice those hundred million to save his finger, and answers that human nature recoils from the thought. Something in us, which he calls conscience or the impartial spectator, knows that we are one of the multitude and no more important than any other. But the feeling does not keep pace with the knowledge.

擋在辛格與墨子面前的，是亞當・斯密在 1759 年描述過的一個關於人的事實。假設偉大的中華帝國連同它所有的居民，被一場地震吞沒了；再想想歐洲一位有人情味的人，會怎麼接受這個消息。他會表達哀傷，並且感慨生命的無常。然後他就去忙自己的事了。「假如他明天就要失去自己的小指頭，他今晚就睡不著；但只要他從來沒有見過他們，即使他的一億同胞毀滅了，他也會在最深沉的安穩之中打鼾。」斯密並不贊成這樣。他緊接著問：同一個人，會不會為了保住自己的指頭而犧牲那一億人？他回答：人的本性一想到這個就退縮了。我們裡面有某個東西（他稱之為良心，或「不偏私的旁觀者」）知道我們只是眾人當中的一個，並不比任何別人更重要。然而，感受跟不上這份知道。

🔊Psychologists have since measured the gap. People give more to save one named child with a photograph than to save eight children described in numbers, and their willingness to help falls as the number of victims rises. The effect has been called psychic numbing. A remark often credited to Stalin puts it brutally: one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths are a statistic.

心理學家後來測量了這道落差。人們捐給「一個有名字、有照片的孩子」的錢，比捐給「用數字描述的八個孩子」的更多；而受害者的人數越多，人們幫助的意願就越低。這個效應被稱為「精神麻木」。一句常被歸給史達林的話，把它說得很殘酷：一個人的死是悲劇，一百萬人的死是統計數字。

🔊Mencius attacked Mozi in the strongest terms he ever used. “Mozi’s impartial care amounts to having no father. To have no father and no ruler is to be a beast.” Behind the abuse is an argument. Moral concern, for the Confucians, has a source, and the source is the family. A child learns to love by loving the people who feed and hold him, and the feeling is then extended outward: “Treat your own elders as elders should be treated, and extend it to the elders of others.” The order is “affection for kin, humaneness toward the people, and care for creatures.” A person who claimed to feel the same for his neighbor’s father as for his own would not have reached a higher love. He would have cut the root from which any love grows. When a Mohist named Yi Zhi buried his own parents with great expense, against his school’s teaching, Mencius took it as proof that even Mohists cannot live by the doctrine.

孟子攻擊墨子，用了他平生最重的話。「墨氏兼愛，是無父也。無父無君，是禽獸也。」在這句謾罵背後，有一個論證。對儒家來說，道德關懷有一個源頭，而那個源頭是家。一個孩子，是靠著愛那些餵他、抱他的人而學會愛的；然後這份感情被往外推：「老吾老，以及人之老。」次序是「親親而仁民，仁民而愛物」。一個宣稱自己對鄰居的父親與對自己的父親感情相同的人，並沒有達到一種更高的愛。他是把一切愛賴以生長的那條根砍斷了。有一位名叫夷之的墨者，違反自己學派的教導，厚葬了自己的父母；孟子把這件事當作證明：就連墨者自己，也沒辦法照著這個教義過日子。

🔊The Confucian position is not that strangers have no claim. The king who would not extend his kindness to the people was told that he was leading beasts to devour men. It is that obligations come in degrees and that the degrees are right. Western philosophers have defended the same view under the name of special obligations. A parent who let his own child drown in order to save two strangers’ children would have done something wrong, however the numbers come out.

儒家的立場並不是陌生人毫無要求。那位不肯把恩惠推及百姓的國君，被告知他是在率獸食人。儒家的立場是：義務有等差，而這些等差是對的。西方的哲學家用「特殊義務」這個名稱，為同樣的看法辯護過。一位為了救兩個陌生人的孩子、而任由自己的孩子淹死的父母，不管數字怎麼算，都做錯了某件事。

🔊Suppose one accepts that distant strangers have some claim. The hard question is where it stops. Singer’s principle has no natural stopping point. After I have given the price of the shoes there is another child, and after that another, and the argument applies each time with the same force. Followed strictly, it requires giving until one has reduced oneself to near the level of those one is helping. Singer accepts this as the truth about what morality asks, and suggests a public standard of giving a tenth or so as something people might actually do. Critics call the view too demanding. A morality that leaves no room for a person’s own projects, friendships, and family, they say, has misunderstood what a human life is.

假設我們接受遠方的陌生人有某些要求。困難的問題是：它到哪裡為止？辛格的原則沒有天然的停止點。我捐出了那雙鞋的價錢之後，還有另一個孩子；那之後，還有另一個；而這個論證每一次都以同樣的力道適用。嚴格地照著它走，它要求人一直捐，直到把自己降到接近受助者的水準。辛格接受這就是「道德要求什麼」的真相；他並且提議，以捐出十分之一左右作為一個公開的標準，那是人們實際上可能做到的。批評者說這個看法太苛求了。他們說：一套不給個人自己的計畫、友誼與家庭留下任何空間的道德，是誤解了人的生活是什麼。

🔊Kant offers a middle position. Helping others in need, he holds, is a duty, since a person who willed a world in which no one helped anyone would be willing away the help he will himself one day need. But it is an imperfect duty. It commands us to make the well-being of others one of our ends and leaves to our judgment how much to do, for whom, and when. One may not do nothing. One is not required to do everything. In the last twenty years a movement called effective altruism has added a further question to Singer’s: given that one is going to give, where does a dollar do the most good? Its researchers have estimated that the best charities can save a life for a few thousand dollars. The movement has been criticized for its confidence in such calculations, and it has made the pond harder to walk past.

康德提供了一個中間的立場。他主張，幫助有需要的人是一項義務；因為一個人如果意願一個「誰也不幫誰」的世界，就是把自己有朝一日也會需要的幫助一併意願掉了。但它是一項「不完全義務」。它命令我們把別人的福祉當作自己的目的之一，而把「做多少、為誰做、什麼時候做」留給我們的判斷。人不可以什麼都不做。人也沒有被要求什麼都做。過去二十年，一個名為「有效利他主義」的運動，在辛格的問題之外又加了一個問題：既然要捐，一塊錢花在哪裡能成就最多的善？它的研究者估計，最好的慈善機構用幾千美元就能救一條命。這個運動因為對這類計算太有把握而受到批評；而它也使那個池塘變得更難視而不見地走過去。

🔊The debate can be read as a warning against two errors. One is to care only for one’s own. Mozi saw that this is the root of war and of the indifference that lets the distant starve, and Adam Smith’s sleeper is its portrait. The other is to care for humanity and for no one in particular, which Mencius thought monstrous and which often turns out, in practice, to be care for nobody. A parable from the Gospel of Luke holds the two together. A lawyer asks Jesus who counts as the neighbor he is commanded to love. Jesus tells of a traveler beaten and left by the road, passed by a priest and a Levite and helped by a Samaritan, a foreigner of a despised people. He then turns the question round. The lawyer asked whom he must treat as a neighbor. Jesus asks which of the three proved to be one. The stranger in the story is a particular man in a particular ditch, and what was owed to him was owed by whoever came near.

這場辯論可以讀成對兩種錯誤的警告。一種是只關心自己人。墨子看出，這是戰爭的根源，也是任由遠方的人餓死的那種冷漠的根源；亞當・斯密筆下那位酣睡的人，就是它的畫像。另一種是關心「人類」，卻不特別關心任何一個人；孟子認為那是可怕的，而它在實踐上往往變成誰也不關心。《路加福音》裡的一個比喻，把這兩者握在一起。一位律法師問耶穌：他被命令要去愛的「鄰舍」，誰才算？耶穌講了一個旅人的故事：他被打傷，丟在路邊；一位祭司與一位利未人從旁邊走過去；救他的是一個撒瑪利亞人，一個受人鄙視的外族人。然後他把問題轉了過來。律法師問的是：我必須把誰當作鄰舍？耶穌問的是：這三個人當中，哪一個成了鄰舍？故事裡的那個陌生人，是某一條溝裡的某一個人；而他被虧欠的東西，是任何一個走近的人都欠他的。