Boycotting Russia Until You Want Something Russian.

I don’t get ethical credit for not stealing in stores. But I would admire a person with kleptomania who is wired to steal and walks out empty-handed. The behavior is identical. The moral achievement isn’t. I walk out empty-handed and have sacrificed nothing. The other feels the compulsion to do it and walks out empty-handed. The cost is the struggle itself.

Maybe ethics begin to reveal themselves not when we profess what we believe, but when our beliefs cost us something.

My mother was a fundraiser who spent much of her life raising money for vulnerable people. She used photographs of individuals to show why money was needed. One of her understandings was that ethics become real when they cost us something. It is easy to care in the abstract. If putting others before yourself, when you can afford to, doesn’t hurt, are you really giving anything up?

Ethicist Peter Singer answers this. In his 1972 essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Singer argues that preventing something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance makes a moral claim on you. The argument grabs you with a drowning child. Imagine a child drowning in a pond. You can save the child, but will ruin your clothes. You save the child.

Singer then asks why distance keeps us from doing this abroad. If you would sacrifice something of limited value to save the child, why not sacrifice something unnecessary to help someone thousands of miles away?

This is a question running through the Hebrew prophetic tradition. If you have more than you need while others go without, what exactly do you owe them? Singer, who happens to be Jewish, isn’t saying giving would be nice of you. He argues morality requires it.

Singer shows us a drowning child in a pond. My mother showed up with photographs of one. He’s not saying, though, you must give up your world, just something that doesn’t cost you much. He’s asking why you don’t spend that pocket change on the vulnerable.

Ethics are relatively easy when they cost us nothing. But are we truly being ethical when there is no cost?

Imagine I am committed to boycotts of Russia over the war in Ukraine. Then a Russian publisher, on the recommendation of a colleague, offered to make one of my books available to Russian readers. The translation is financed entirely in Russia. Is accepting wrong?

Now suppose accepting requires me to spend $2,000 in professional funds with the Russian publisher. Does that change anything?

Imagine I never ask myself any of these questions, missing the moral moment. Does that change any judgment of me?

If the Russian publisher wants my book and accepting costs me nothing, the intellectual argument for saying yes seems powerful. Russian readers aren’t the Russian government. Intellectual exchange across political borders has value. Making my work available to people living under a government is hardly the same thing as supporting that government.

Say I have to spend $2,000 to publish it. This sometimes happens for such projects. The question is what happens when an ordinary professional transaction collides with an ethical commitment. Does walking past the boycott by directing the money toward a Russian publisher sacrifice my principle? Is it like crossing a union strike line to work? Must I walk away from the opportunity?

None of this tells us what I should do. What interests me more is the possibility that it never occurs to me that there is anything to think about. It may not occur to me that this is a moral moment. That speaks volumes. The boycott was easy when it was a political position. Then I encountered something I wanted.

Singer makes the problem harder because the whole point of the drowning child is that saving the child costs you something, but little in such a moment. Do we misunderstand ethical commitments? We imagine our beliefs are demonstrated by what we say we support. Perhaps they are demonstrated more clearly by what we are willing to lose.

Still, something bothers me about condemning myself. Professional success depends on a web of mutual dependencies, which may diminish my moral agency. Refusing opportunities can itself undermine professional obligations to oneself. I have obligations to my work and career too, and success may eventually help me meet obligations to my family. How much moral weight should those obligations carry? Singer still doesn’t disappear.

His argument makes ordinary choices resemble the clothes beside the pond. My mother arrived there through a different route. Make suffering concrete. Make the distant person difficult to ignore. Then see what happens when helping that person requires us to surrender something we want. Ethics are easiest when they remain opinions. The trouble begins when they send us a bill.

Living in my opinions does not make me ethical. I am rarely asked to give up something I want for what I believe. Perhaps this is one of those moments. Whatever I decide will make no discernible difference to the war. It will matter to whether I am living by my own values. If accepting meant paying the Russian publisher, I wouldn’t do it. I would be giving up very little. I agree with Singer.

If our ethics disappear precisely when they become expensive, were they ever ethical commitments at all, or simply beliefs we could afford to have?

False alarm. A Russian never contacted me.