A Moral Obligation to Invest?

Rethinking Utilitarian Demands Through an Economic Lens

A famous moral thought experiment in recent decades belongs to the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. Singer asks us to imagine walking by a shallow pond where a small child is drowning. Surely, we have a moral obligation to jump in and save the child, even if it means we might muddy our clothes or be late for an appointment. After all, the cost to us is small, and the benefit to the child is immense—namely, preserving their life.

Singer pushes this line of thought further: if we accept that it’s worth incurring small costs to save a life nearby, then it should logically follow that we ought to do the same to save distant lives. We should, on Singer’s view, donate our surplus income to aid organizations, support the global poor, and do all we can to alleviate suffering. Some take this to mean giving away a large portion of one’s wealth to charitable causes.

However, from an economic viewpoint, one could challenge this conclusion. This post is not an attempt to deny that helping the less fortunate is commendable. Instead, it asks that we consider a different possibility: if you truly believe there is a moral obligation to maximize well-being (as many utilitarians do), then perhaps your obligation is not to give to charity directly, but rather to save and invest so as to grow the total resources available.

Singer’s Child in the Pond

In Singer’s example, the personal cost to you—dirty clothes, missed meetings, potential short-term obligations—is relatively minor compared to the benefit of saving a life. By some moral standards, saving the child seems obligatory. From a purely practical standpoint, however, the cost to help is not truly zero. In the real world, you might have to pay for a plane ticket, take time off work, or outsource the rescue to an aid organization. You are diverting some of your resources—time, money, or both—to address a problem. The question is: is that the best use of your resources in a world of scarcity?

Additionally, there is the question of what would have happened to resources had they not been dedicated to charity. Presumably some portion of resources spent on life-saving charitable causes might otherwise be invested, generating future returns that would compound over time. Consequently, a consistent utilitarian would need to account for this opportunity cost before leaping in to save the child.

Mortality Risk Tradeoffs

Economics has long pointed out that our choices about spending and investing carry indirect but very real tradeoffs, including with respect to mortality. A rise in income can improve health outcomes because individuals and societies can afford better healthcare, nutrition, and safety measures. Conversely, if we reduce our incomes too much—say, by donating until we are ourselves teetering on the edge of financial precariousness—we might unintentionally increase risks, because a poorer society has fewer resources to spend on life-saving services.

In practical terms, consider two different uses of funds:

1. Immediate Charity: Pay several thousand dollars to help a child in a developing country today.

2. Investment: Save and invest those resources, aiming to double or triple them eventually.

If over time you accumulate much larger sums of money, those future resources could potentially save many more lives through bigger, better-funded initiatives.

Likewise, a small expenditure of resources today to help those in need is not a costless endeavor when viewed from the standpoint of lost investment. Foregone returns produce costs that can compound over time, leading to losses of future life.

Opportunity Costs Should Guide Giving or Not Giving

Acknowledging opportunity costs may initially appear cold-hearted, because it can result in deferring direct assistance to those in immediate crisis. Yet from a strictly utilitarian standpoint—a philosophy that prides itself on rationally maximizing overall well-being—the notion that more capital ultimately equals the potential for more help is entirely in line with cost-benefit reasoning.

Indeed, some utilitarians endorse an “earning to give” strategy, whereby one deliberately chooses a high-paying career in order to accumulate wealth, enabling more donations over the long term. Following this approach, the lives we save are in the future, and so are therefore more abstract and temporally distant from our own. But Singer teaches us that such distances should be irrelevant if our goal is maximizing expected wellbeing.

The main problem with the “earning to give” philosophy is the giving part. Unless investment opportunities are exhausted, it usually makes sense to continue investing rather than donating, in which case the best utilitarian principle to follow might actually be “earning to earn,” or, put more simply, just investing.

When Saving A Life Is Profitable

To be clear, investing does not always mean neglecting immediate humanitarian efforts. In some scenarios, the best “investment” might be to save that drowning child, because that child’s future contribution to society could exceed the cost of saving them. This is a straightforward cost-benefit analysis, but notice how the reasoning shifts: we become concerned with returns on investment, rather than pure moral duty.

Singer’s conclusion that we must help whenever the cost is small seems to skip over the issue of how resources can expand over time. If we accept that there is an overarching moral duty to help, we should consider the possibility that methods of creating and investing wealth might, in the long run, save the most lives and, just as importantly, consider that efforts to help often have unintended consequences, resulting in large losses of life.

Animal Welfare and the Wealth Nexus

Utilitarian discussions often extend beyond human welfare to include animals, especially in critiques of factory farming. Here again, a long-term economic perspective might suggest an unexpected strategy for reducing suffering: as societies become wealthier, they often develop higher animal welfare standards. History shows that richer societies tend to invest more resources into ethical treatment of animals, environmental protection, and other non-immediate concerns.

Seen in this light, perhaps the swiftest path to widespread improvement in animal welfare is pursuing economic growth—yes, even if that growth currently relies on some uses of non-ideal animal agriculture. This might seem counterintuitive or morally uncomfortable in the short term, but the logic is that the wealthier a society becomes, the more capacity it has to prioritize and fund humane treatment of animals.

Not all creatures will reach the threshold of moral consideration at the same time. Society has already extended legal protections to pets and many farm animals; but chickens, for example, may lag in terms of public sympathy until collective wealth and ethical concern rise to a certain level. For pests like cockroaches or mosquitos, society might never muster the same moral interest. The pattern, however, still suggests that as total wealth increases, our moral circle often expands.

The Power of Compounding and Growth

Across these diverse scenarios—helping children and the poor and improving animal welfare—there is a common theme: wealth, technological innovation, and economic growth can solve or ameliorate social problems on a large scale. By saving and investing, individuals and societies harness the power of compound returns. Over time, this accumulation translates into more widespread prosperity, better healthcare, improved environmental outcomes, and heightened concern for animal welfare.

Of course, there are no guarantees. Poor governance, corruption, or misallocation of resources can squander the fruits of investment. But if the question is about maximizing the expected utility from one’s actions, focusing on the efficient creation of capital and its directed use over time might well outperform piecemeal charitable giving.

Conclusion

If you believe, as many utilitarians do, that we have a moral duty to help others, then it’s worth exploring whether the most effective form of that duty is to save and invest, rather than to sacrifice wealth immediately through charity. One need not deny the power of Singer’s illustration—saving a drowning child still seems praiseworthy, even obvious. But once we shift from a simple example to having a broader perspective that acknowledges real-world scarcity, costs, and tradeoffs, the utilitarian calculus changes significantly.

Emotions may tug us toward direct, immediate aid. Yet a rational, future-oriented approach reveals that consistent investment will likely do far more total good. That might sound dispassionate. But if we take rational utility-maximization seriously, then saving and investing may be the best path to eradicating poverty, improving public health, and eventually extending care to other sentient beings.

To be clear, I do not acknowledge that any moral imperative like the one Singer suggests exists. No value system is objectively correct—everyone has their own unique set of values and reasonable people can disagree on what is the ethical thing to do in particular instances. Less fundamentally, there can be no moral obligation to help others if the costs of helping exceed the benefits. I suspect Singer might agree with me on this, yet we would probably go about doing the cost-benefit analysis very differently.

But even if you accept the idea that utilitarianism imposes a moral obligation, it may be time to consider whether the most urgent moral demand is not to give, but to grow.