This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds, and me, Nigel Robertson.

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Imagine you see four people drowning in a fast-rushing river. What do you do? The dangers

involved in attempting a rescue mean that no one could reasonably demand that you risk

your life to try to save them. But three of them are close together, and you calculate

that you're just about able to save them if you push your canoe out towards them. But

that means abandoning the single person in a different part of the river. There's

no time to save both the group of three and the one person on their own.

So what should you do? You can justifiably not take the huge risk of attempting a rescue

at all. Perhaps call the emergency services and hope they get there in time. Or you can

try to save either the three or the one. According to the philosopher Theron Palmer,

it will be morally legitimate not to attempt a rescue at all, but if you do attempt

to rescue, you have a strong moral obligation to try to save the three.

Theron Palmer, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Oh, thanks very much for having me. It's

a real pleasure to be here. The topic we're discussing today is what you

call the rules of rescue. Before we get to the philosophy, what do you mean by rescue?

Yeah, so by rescue, I mean preventing individuals from suffering significant harms. There

are sort of prodigmatic cases of rescue that I have in mind like saving someone from

drowning or saving someone who's trapped in a burning building, things like this. These

are cases of nearby emergency rescue. But part of the point of the book is to extend

the concept of rescue to cases where individuals are imperiled, but at a distance and perhaps

...