David Edmonds on Peter Singer's Shallow Pond Thought Experiment
Philosophy Bites
Nigel Warburton
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2025
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
In this interview of the Philosophy Bites podcast Nigel Warburton interviews David Edmonds about Peter Singer's famous thought experient about what you would do if you saw a child at risk of drowning in a shallow pond, and what the moral implications of that. David has recently published a book about this thought experiment called Death in a Shallow Pond.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Philosophy Bytes with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton. |
| 0:06.2 | Philosophy Bites is available at www. www.com. |
| 0:10.9 | A thought experiment involving a drowning child is one of the most famous in moral philosophy |
| 0:15.8 | and arguably the most influential. A book has just been written about it. I should know as I wrote it. |
| 0:23.4 | Here Nigel questions me about the origins and significance of and the problems with the so-called shallow pond. |
| 0:29.7 | David Edmonds, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you for inviting me. |
| 0:34.0 | The topic we're going to talk about today is the shallow pond, the thought experiment of |
| 0:39.2 | the shallow pond. Could you just outline what that is? You're to imagine that you are on your |
| 0:45.2 | way to work. You're wearing a nice suit and very expensive shoes and you walk past a pond where you see a small child struggling you look around to see |
| 0:57.4 | where the parents are where the guardian is there's nobody there you're about to wait in to save this |
| 1:02.6 | child when you suddenly think about your extremely expensive shoes and you think shoes or child that's the |
| 1:09.2 | shallow pond thought experiment does anybody seriously think shoes or child, that's the shallow pond thought experiment. Does anybody seriously think |
| 1:12.2 | shoes or child in that situation? Well, that's the point. It's a rhetorical question. Nobody's |
| 1:17.3 | supposed to think, oh, I should worry about my shoes, which I haven't got time to take off and let |
| 1:22.6 | the child die. And the point is that the person who comes up with this thought experiment says that we are in a shallow pond thought experiment every day of our lives. |
| 1:32.3 | Every day you and I privileged people in the West with disposable income are effectively walking past a shallow pond and we could be saving lives. |
| 1:41.8 | So that person is Peter Singer, the philosopher Peter Singer, |
| 1:45.1 | who's been a guest on Philosophy Bites several times. Why does he think we're walking past |
| 1:50.0 | children drowning? Because we're not, literally. So he comes up with this thought experiment in 1971. |
| 1:56.1 | It's the time of the war of liberation in Bangladesh. So East Pakistan, what we now call Bangladesh, is |
| 2:02.6 | breaking up from West Pakistan. There's a terrible civil war. Millions of people are flooding |
| 2:07.5 | across the border from Bangladesh to India. And they're emaciated, they're diseased, |
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