The Burning House, a Picasso, and a Kid
The Burning House, a Picasso, and a Kid

PushingHappily.com 2020

The burning house, a Picasso, and a kid

There’s a house in your neighborhood, you walk past it often. There is a particular place and moment when you walk by that you can spot a painting on the wall. You look at it, without fail, whenever you pass by the house on your walks.

You did your thesis on Picasso, and that painting screams Picasso to you. You know Picasso made around 50 000 artworks in his lifetime(an unfathomable average of 2 per day). You finally decide to do some research and find out it’s indeed a Picasso. One worth a couple of million.

One day on one of your usual walks, you see the house burning. It looks bad, you notice a kid in one of the rooms screaming for help. There is no one around and there isn’t a lot of time.

You break down the entrance door, try to make your way up, then a thought occurs to you. The Picasso. I should also save it!

For a split second you reason that if you save the Picasso you can sell it, you can donate the money and save so many lives and reduce a lot of suffering. Much more lives could be saved with that money… than the death of one child.

But there’s no time! You can either save the kid or the Picasso.

Fuck the Picasso, you save the kid.¹

In theory it’s less overall suffering, one child’s life against countless others. But that is not how we are wired and that is not our nature.

Many argue that the Picasso should be saved and not the child. Utilitarians and most effective altruists in particular. Both utilitarianism and effective altruism have mostly excellent points and are data driven. Perhaps at some point we will get to a point where we can look at things so rationally and emotionlessly, but for now we can’t decouple ourselves from our emotions.

I personally could not do it, regardless of knowing how much more good would be done by saving the Picasso. The child is right there, right now. The others are somewhere abstract and in the future. I could not sleep at night, no matter how rationally I would explain it to myself.
['Pushing Happily']
['Self-awareness', 'Effective Altruism', 'Philosophy', 'Questions', 'Ideas']