Singer's Shallow Pond Thought Experiment and Virtue Ethics

Peter Singer's shallow pond thought experiment is often used to argue that we have a moral obligation to provide aid to others, regardless of factors such as proximity and number of bystanders. Critics claim that Singer’s thought experiment fails to capture key features of global poverty and should thus not be applied to analyses of global justice. I argue that this use of the shallow pond thought experiment can be maintained only if we reconsider the thought experiment as entailing a virtue ethics principle of moral obligation. I support this conclusion by introducing a modified ‘never-ending’ shallow pond thought experiment.