The drowning child

The core argument

valid

1. 1.

   Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.

2. 2.

   If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

3. 3.

   It is in our power to prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance.

4. 4.

   If [1] and [2] and [3], then we ought, morally, to prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care.

5. 5.

   Therefore, we ought, morally, to prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. [1,2,3,4]

Editor's note

The live tool could not complete this passage: its repair stage failed output validation on both attempts and the run failed closed, so no artifact exists yet. The argument shown is a hand-authored reconstruction that passed the deterministic syntax and transparent-entailment gates. It will be replaced by a tool artifact when a run succeeds. Textbook reading: two stated premises (suffering from lack of necessities is bad; we ought to prevent bad things when we can at no comparable cost) plus the factual premise that affluent people can do so. The drowning child is an application of the second premise, not a premise itself; the reconstruction treats it that way.