It is contradictory to say “saving the child won’t harm yourself” and “you will ruin a $5000 suit”, as if monetary harm isn’t harm, and as if money doesn’t mean spending a portion of your life to get that money.
This particular example is a trick that depends on:
the fact that people with $5000 suits can usually be assumed to have a lot of money and not be significantly harmed by losing their suit.
the fact that most people don’t like to describe lives in monetary terms at all, regardless of whether the amount is $5000 or something else, even though it is necessary to describe life in monetary terms to make any reasonable decisions in this matter
the fact that people are taught that wanting money is evil, even though this teaching is often questionable as applied
Let’s change the example a little bit: you have a $5000 used car. You can drive the car into the water, thus destroying it, in order to save the child. Should you be morally required to do this? A lot more people will answer “no” to this version of the question even though they wouldn’t to the one about the $5000 suit, even though it shouldn’t make any difference whether it’s a car or a suit—the difference is that they better understand that destroying a $5000 car isn’t “just money”, but that it’s a hit to their quality of life that significantly harms them.
Here’s another one: Imagine that you can save the child by using a magical spell, but the spell has a karma requirement, so if you save the child, your own child has a 1% chance of immediately dying. Are you required to save the child? After all, even at a 1% chance of dying, it’s a net gain of 99%, added up over all humanity. Yet a lot of people would say you don’t have to save the child in this situation either. Would you be required to save 25 children this way?
(There’s also the variant “would you destroy a $10 suit to save a child”. The trick in that case is that generalizing this to saving many children introduces a heap paradox, and the solution to the heap paradox is “set a limit and do no more than that”, but you exclude that solution. You seem to allow it, but actually allowing it would let you put the threshhold at 1 child or two children, or “fewer children than the number that is already helped by the taxes I pay”.)
I keep walking, of course.
It is contradictory to say “saving the child won’t harm yourself” and “you will ruin a $5000 suit”, as if monetary harm isn’t harm, and as if money doesn’t mean spending a portion of your life to get that money.
This particular example is a trick that depends on:
the fact that people with $5000 suits can usually be assumed to have a lot of money and not be significantly harmed by losing their suit.
the fact that most people don’t like to describe lives in monetary terms at all, regardless of whether the amount is $5000 or something else, even though it is necessary to describe life in monetary terms to make any reasonable decisions in this matter
the fact that people are taught that wanting money is evil, even though this teaching is often questionable as applied
Let’s change the example a little bit: you have a $5000 used car. You can drive the car into the water, thus destroying it, in order to save the child. Should you be morally required to do this? A lot more people will answer “no” to this version of the question even though they wouldn’t to the one about the $5000 suit, even though it shouldn’t make any difference whether it’s a car or a suit—the difference is that they better understand that destroying a $5000 car isn’t “just money”, but that it’s a hit to their quality of life that significantly harms them.
Here’s another one: Imagine that you can save the child by using a magical spell, but the spell has a karma requirement, so if you save the child, your own child has a 1% chance of immediately dying. Are you required to save the child? After all, even at a 1% chance of dying, it’s a net gain of 99%, added up over all humanity. Yet a lot of people would say you don’t have to save the child in this situation either. Would you be required to save 25 children this way?
(There’s also the variant “would you destroy a $10 suit to save a child”. The trick in that case is that generalizing this to saving many children introduces a heap paradox, and the solution to the heap paradox is “set a limit and do no more than that”, but you exclude that solution. You seem to allow it, but actually allowing it would let you put the threshhold at 1 child or two children, or “fewer children than the number that is already helped by the taxes I pay”.)