More Drowning Children

Scott hunts for the right PRESCRIPTIVE response to Singer's drowning-child argument. He first dispatches the easy escape (distance) with a cascade of inventive thought experiments (telepresence surgery in China, the Dublin-NYC portal, the Sociopathic Jerks Convention). He then examines two DESCRIPTIVE theories that explain our intuitions — the 'Copenhagen interpretation of ethics' (you incur obligation by 'touching' a situation) and a 'declining marginal utility of moral goods' (the death-cabin where you rescue a child every hour; the 37th rescue feels optional) — but argues that elevating these into prescriptive rules is the worst possible move, because they are merely rules for looking good (the cabin-moving-for-$525 absurdity; the Alice-in-a-gated-community vs Bob-in-Zimbabwe and the 'one spot in Heaven' tests). His resolution is Rawls's original position: pre-incarnation angels would agree to fund a general pot for helping people and to deputize whoever is nearest in an emergency (ideally with compensation) — so proximity/urgency matter not as markers of moral worth but as a coalition's emergency-response logistics. Since the coalition is 'in arrears,' obligations are limited, but acting as if it were intact is virtuous.

Quality 77 · Excellent. Strong-Excellent. A substantive, genuinely clever contribution to a core EA debate: the descriptive/prescriptive separation is sharp, the thought experiments are inventive and load-bearing, and the original-position coalition-deputization resolution elegantly re-derives proximity/urgency without making them moral fundamentals. Just below In-Continued-Defense-of-EA (79); the payoff applies Rawls more than it invents. 77.

Claude’s paradigm shift 50 · Moderate. Moderate. Builds on Singer, Rawls, and the Copenhagen-interpretation (Jaibot/TracingWoodgrains); the fresh syntheses are 'declining marginal utility of moral goods' and the coalition-deputization frame. 50.

Real-world impact 2 · Minor. A clever contribution to a core EA debate (Singer's drowning child): the descriptive/prescriptive separation, the 'Copenhagen interpretation of ethics,' and an original-position resolution that re-derives proximity/urgency without making them fundamentals. Conceptual influence within EA/ethics discourse, no material change — low RWI.