Will you share your food (serious question)

[DLJ]

Interesting.  But poorly worded.

I fell at the first hurdle.  I chose the option stating that there is no moral obligation to rescue the child.

It's very precise in its wording, but it's trying to weed out moral nihilists from the git go. A lot of ethics thought experiments fall flat if there is no moral obligation driving one choice over another. To just see the ideas put plainly (no interactive elements) go here:

https://openborders.info/drowning-child/

or watch this:

Granted. But I'm not a moral nihilist (by their definition - " a moral nihilist - i.e., if you think there's no such thing as right and wrong") and I still don't agree that there is a moral obligation ... as worded, it implies a universal rather than a personal/situational right/wrong.

Had the question been: "Would you rescue the child?" without any of the 'obligation' baggage, my answer would have been "yes".

Incidentally, a variation of this thought experiment was used during a philosophy group meetup I attended in Singapore. The variation being that it was a river and not a shallow pool and there was no doubt that the child was drowning. The speaker stated that you had to be a monster if you didn't dive in to attempt to save the child.

I was quietly adamant that I would not save the child so for nearly an hour I was the 'monster' of the group. Finally someone asked me to defend my position.

"I can't swim", said I. "If I tried, two of us would drown."