Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, A Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need—Pt.2/2

My review of David Edmonds’ latest book (Princeton University Press, 2025)

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

On December 21 of last year, I published here Part I of my review of the latest book by philosopher David Edmonds, Death in a Shallow Pond. That essay focused on what the Shallow Pond thought experiment is, why it matters, how it gave rise to the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, who the central figures behind that movement are, and how EA operates in practice.

Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, A Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need—Pt.1/2

What follows is an attempt to round out the project by turning to Part II of the book—the section devoted to critiques.

Brief recap: the most influential figure behind EA is its founding father, the moral philosopher Peter Singer, whose work that transformed the Shallow Pond experiment into a moral imperative: to maximize good, especially when doing so comes at relatively little cost to ourselves.

Decades later, a new generation of philosophers—most notably, Toby Ord and Will MacAskill—expanded and modernized his vision.

At first glance, the project seems unimpeachable. What could be objectionable about people pooling their resources, using First World advantages, and applying technological efficiency to alleviate suffering, feed the hungry, and give aid in global crises?

As Edmonds makes clear, the difficulty is not that EA is wrong, but that good intentions, even when paired with rigorous calculation, are not always aligned with the most considerate approach.

It is the gap between aspiration and consequence—as well as calculation and uncertainty—that Edmonds explores here, moving methodically through the many angles from which EA comes under fire. He begins, perhaps surprisingly, with utilitarianism itself—surprising because many EA proponents, most famously Peter Singer, explicitly view moral philosophy through a utilitarian lens.

Edmonds draws the reader into murkier territory by recounting a real-life drowning incident in which a man successfully saved two children but died in the act. The story destabilizes the clean logic of the Shallow Pond thought experiment. Sacrifice and heroism resist easy calculation.

These examples make the Shallow Pond scenario feel flattened. Edmonds acknowledges that philosophical thought experiments are often contrived by design: useful in lecture halls, but far less reliable in real-world contexts.

Consider the familiar “Picasso” thought experiment. A building is on fire. On one side of the entrance hall is a single child trapped in the flames; on the other, a Picasso painting. You may save the child, or you may save the painting, sell it, and use the proceeds to save many children elsewhere. Intuition pulls most people toward the child in sight. A utilitarian, however, is likely to argue that saving the painting produces the greater good: more lives saved means the morally superior outcome.

The logic is consistent—but unsettling.

Recent history has not helped this style of reasoning. The case of Sam Bankman-Fried looms large in Edmonds’ account. A utilitarian-minded student and the son of Stanford philosophers, Bankman-Fried encountered EA through MacAskill and redirected his ambitions accordingly. He founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, publicly framing his pursuit of wealth as a means to give it all away in service of the greater good.

In 2023, he was convicted of fraud and money laundering.

The episode crystallizes one of the most serious charges leveled against EA: that it risks justifying morally objectionable means so long as the projected outcomes appear sufficiently beneficial. Is it acceptable to forego integrity, overrun boundaries, and break laws on the altar of the greater good?

Utilitarianism, at least in its classical form, often answers yes. Because it takes an impartial view that prioritizes outcomes above all else, critics argue that it negates accountability. Without caricature, Edmonds shows how EA, in pressing relentlessly toward optimization, can defy nuance, flatten moral texture, and—most troublingly—blur responsibility when things go wrong.

Another surprising line of critique Edmonds examines is what he calls the Numbers Critique. EA presents itself as a numbers-driven project, its supporters embracing mantras like “donate with your head, not your heart.” Emotion, in this view, is treated as a liability—something that clouds judgment and leads people toward inefficient giving based on sentiment. This emphasis is explicit in MacAskill’s influential book Doing Good Better, title that implies a corrective: moral action should be guided by calculation, not preference.

Edmonds complicates this tidy picture through the curious case of Leona Helmsley, who famously left her fortune to her dog. The gesture is emotionally resonant—but from an EA perspective, indefensible. Yet Edmonds’ point is not to mock Helmsley’s choice. It is to show how deeply giving is shaped by attachment, loyalty, and meaning—qualities that resist translation into digits.

Edmonds returns to this tension repeatedly, perhaps most memorably in his discussion of trachoma. Surgery to cure the disease is remarkably cost-effective: for the price of training and placing a guide dog, a charity can fund several operations that cure trachoma, a common cause of blindness in Third World countries. By the numbers alone, trachoma surgery wins decisively.

And yet—people love guide dogs. They serve the blind broadly, not only those affected by a particular disease. Value depends on context, meaning, and individual need—irrational and incalculable, but still significant.

Another objection is illustrated through Groundhog Day, imagining a scenario in which one is morally obligated to save the same drowning child over and over again, endlessly. The burden becomes infinite. The savior has no rest.

Literature offers a similar warning. Edmonds invokes Mrs. Jellyby from Bleak House, whose obsessive devotion to distant charitable causes leads her to neglect her own family entirely. The old adage—charity begins at home—reasserts itself not as a rejection of altruism, but as a recognition of psychological and moral limits. Even Singer concedes this point, acknowledging that EA functions best within what he calls “normal psychological reach” (p. 143).

Edmonds closes this line of critique by noting an often-overlooked asymmetry: those most inclined to give generously bear a disproportionate burden, while many others give little or nothing at all. The result is not only inequality of contribution, but a real risk of burnout among the morally committed. Wanting to help does not make one inexhaustible.

The Institutional Critique is, in many ways, the most forceful—and the most uncomfortable—of the critiques Edmonds explores. Here, he examines several overlapping charges leveled against EA, many of which frame the movement as patriarchal.

Among the most persistent criticisms is that EA is disproportionately white, male, and privileged. Edmonds does not dismiss it. While he notes that the movement has, in recent decades, seen more women join its ranks, he also concedes that these women are overwhelmingly white. This fact, on its own, is not necessarily damning—but it does reinforce a troubling asymmetry: a largely white, affluent donor class making decisions about how resources are distributed to a far more diverse global population receiving aid.

Edmonds suggests that this demographic reality contributes to a perception—if not always the reality—of institutional bias within EA. One example he discusses involves MacAskill’s argument against boycotting sweatshops. Most people’s moral intuition recoils at sweatshop labor; the instinctive response is to avoid purchasing goods produced under such conditions. MacAskill counters that boycotts can actually harm workers by eliminating one of their few available sources of income. The argument is not frivolous, nor is it necessarily wrong—but it is deeply counterintuitive, and it often reads as privileging economic abstraction over lived experience.

This is where the charge of institutional bias gains traction. The position asks people—often those far removed from the conditions in question—to override moral discomfort in favor of outcome-based reasoning. Edmonds does not take a firm stance here. What matters is that such arguments reliably generate unease, precisely because they run against widely held moral sentiments about dignity, exploitation, and justice.

This tension leads Edmonds to one of the most consequential questions in the book: is it more effective to donate to political activism aimed at institutional change or to humanitarian aid that addresses the emergency?

Animal welfare offers a revealing case study. Within that domain, there has long been debate over whether donations should support direct care—such as shelters—or legislative and regulatory reform. Edmonds notes that, measured by outcomes, political advocacy has often proven more effective. Laws and regulations alter behavior at scale. The institutional route, though less emotionally satisfying, produces broader and more durable change.

Institutional solutions feel impersonal. They ask donors to trust systems rather than people, processes rather than stories. And once again, Edmonds resists resolving the tension. Instead, he exposes it—showing how EA’s commitment to scale and efficiency repeatedly collides with deeply human instincts about responsibility, proximity, and care.

Many of the critiques Edmonds examines overlap, and nowhere is this more evident than in the convergence of the Institutional and the Billionaire Critiques. The ultra-wealthy play an outsized role in modern philanthropy, and the mechanisms through which they give are overwhelmingly institutional—most often through private foundations. These foundations, Edmonds notes, are frequently opaque: minimally transparent at best.

Edmonds situates billionaire philanthropy within a long historical arc, reaching back to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and extending to contemporary figures such as Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett, and, controversially, Elon Musk. All possess what Edmonds memorably calls the kind of money that buys buildings—or “the graffiti of the rich” (p. 162)—along with access, influence, and almost no accountability. Billionaires, by definition, do not have to answer to anyone. They can move vast sums of money according to personal judgment, moral intuition, or ideological preference. That power is troubling—but it is also precisely what allows them to act with a speed and scale unavailable to others.

In 2024, Peter Singer declared that we are living in a “golden age of philanthropy” (p. 165), referring largely to figures such as Buffett and the Gateses, whose Giving Pledge has mobilized hundreds of billions of dollars for charitable causes. This style of giving is longtermist, institutional, and—again—largely shielded from public scrutiny. Yet by many outcome-based measures, it is undeniably effective.

And still, the unease persists. Critics worry that such philanthropy can function as a Trojan horse: reshaping public priorities, influencing policy, and entrenching private power under the banner of benevolence.

Edmonds does not attempt to resolve these contradictions. Instead, he exposes them. Billionaire philanthropy can achieve what democratic processes cannot—and in doing so, it raises the uncomfortable question at the heart of EA’s institutional turn: whether moral good, when pursued at scale, inevitably slips beyond the reach of oversight.

I loved Edmonds’ chapter on the Historical Injustice Critique of EA. The epigraph alone is marvelous: the unforgettable line from The Godfather Part II—“You broke my heart, Fredo!” It is a reminder that moral judgment, divorced from context, can become unintelligible.

He frames this critique through two broad philosophical traditions: analytic and continental. Continental philosophy tends to situate ethical questions within historical context. Analytic philosophy, by contrast, often relies on logic, abstraction, and formal reasoning—unbound by place and time. EA, Edmonds suggests, inherits more from the analytic tradition. And that’s the problem, according to this line of critique.

To understand why Michael Corleone orders the killing of his brother Fredo (apologies for the spoiler), one must understand the plot that precedes the moment—the betrayals, loyalties, and cumulative injuries that make the act legible, if not defensible. Context is not ornamental; it is constitutive.

This is the chapter in which Edmonds most clearly shows how colonialism and historical exploitation produced many of the conditions EA now seeks to alleviate. In the decontextualized Shallow Pond experiment, we know nothing about the child, nothing about the pond. But the details would make a critical difference as to whether action would be framed as charity rather than moral reckoning. If suffering is the result of exploitation, then aid may not be charity at all, but compensation. The absence of context in the Shallow Pond experiment is not a minor omission; it fundamentally shapes what kind of moral response is appropriate.

This concern folds naturally into what Edmonds calls the Motivational Critique, which examines why people give—and why they often do not. One well-documented phenomenon is the Identifiable Victim Effect: people are far more likely to help when they have a face and a story. Statistics rarely move us; narratives do.

The Motivational Critique extends to emotion. Edmonds surveys a wide range of incentives that shape charitable behavior: tax deductions, sponsored marathons, gala tickets, and star-studded entertainments. He also examines happiness. Study after study confirms that giving to others increases personal happiness. Altruism, it turns out, is not only good—it feels good.

Edmonds does not argue that EA is wrong to value effectiveness. Rather, he shows how history, motivation, and human psychology complete the big picture. Moral understanding evolves in time, among people, carrying stories that cannot be reduced to numbers—no matter how elegant the math.

Beyond the critiques already discussed, David Edmonds surveys several others that are intellectually serious but less compelling for a general readership. These include the Rationalist Critique and its preoccupation with eliminating cognitive bias and mitigating technological risks such as artificial intelligence. There is also the Power Critique, which examines the asymmetries embedded in donor–recipient relationships, likening them to other hierarchical arrangements, like employer-employee, where goodwill does not erase imbalance. The Effectiveness Critique, meanwhile, presses harder, arguing that charitable interventions often produce unintended consequences and that EA’s long-term focus does not always translate into systemic thinking. Edmonds gives particular weight here to the arguments of Angus Deaton, who warns that aid can be distorted or co-opted by authoritarian regimes and armed groups in conflict zones. Finally, Edmonds addresses what might be called the animus critique—the sometimes visceral hostility directed at Effective Altruists themselves. He admits to finding this puzzling. Even if one believes the movement is misguided, it is difficult to justify outright hostility toward a project grounded in generosity. Edmonds suggests that such reactions may conceal defensiveness, as though the existence of EA implies a moral judgment on those who choose not to give. The movement’s reputation for insularity—its tight-knit communities, online forums, and quasi-cultish aura—has not helped, nor has the fallout from the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal. Still, Edmonds resists caricature. His aim is not to dismiss these critiques, but to place them in proportion, and to remind readers that moral disagreement need not curdle into moral contempt.

David Edmonds begins the book with a sharp, focused look at the career of Peter Singer, and in the epilogue he returns us there—full circle. Along the way, he traces the arc of Singer’s intellectual life, from its incubator phase in the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford—an idyllic setting, but still not immune to the turbulence of the 1960s. As we saw in Part I, that turbulence shaped and sharpened Singer, giving him an imperative where earlier generations of moral philosophy had too often settled into complacency.

The story is not unique. Many coming of age at that moment shared a sense that enough was enough—that entrenched injustice could no longer be tolerated as background noise. What distinguishes Singer, and some of his contemporaries, is that he never stopped. Where others grew quieter or more cautious, Singer remained committed. Unsurprisingly, he has ruffled feathers. Yet even many of his detractors acknowledge his intellectual honesty. Some colleagues find his conclusions absolutist, but still recognize the seriousness with which he pursues them.

Some criticisms of Singer are substantive. Others are less so. Edmonds is careful, in closing the book, to address how often Singer’s arguments have been misunderstood—sometimes willfully, sometimes through hurried or inattentive listening. This is a familiar failure of our moment: objection outrunning comprehension. If one listens carefully, one does not hear Singer endorsing unethical actions. One hears a philosopher asking, relentlessly, what actions lead to the greatest good.

That is, after all, what utilitarians do. They reason toward outcomes; they calculate paths; they test intuitions against consequences. Singer does not demand that everyone think as he does. But his work deserves attention. We need philosophers willing to follow arguments where they lead, even when those arguments unsettle moral comfort or social consensus.

We need philosophy itself—often mocked, often misunderstood, but indispensable. It is the discipline in which our most abstract and uncomfortable ideas are pulled apart and examined rather than evaded. It is where thought experiments trouble us, where moral certainty dissolves into responsibility, and where books like Death in a Shallow Pond do their best work: not telling us what to think, but insisting that we think carefully before we act.