Beating Singer at His Own Game

Peter Singer is one of very few living philosophers who are known in the mainstream--I have seen him on the Morning Show, the Colbert Report, and a BBC news special.
Its probably a toss-up whether he is more known for his animal rights stuff or his ending world poverty stuff, but he is extremely prominent in both areas.
Recently, Singer has published a book entitled "The Life You Can Save". This book is written for a popular audience, and it basically makes the same case Singer has been making since his 1972 "Famine, Affluence, and Morality": that we (individuals as well as governments) should be giving A LOT more money to charities, to end world poverty and unnecessary deaths from things that, frankly, people shouldn't die from-- diarrhea, cholera, etc. etc. Even the poor in affluent countries like the U.S. are much better off than the poor in third-world countries, and proximity should have no independent effect on our obligations.
I generally agree with Singer's project, as well as most of his others (that is, I am a utilitarian who isn't afraid to follow those principles to their conclusion.)

Here, I want to focus on one of his most famous arguments. This is an argument that gets discussed in Intro to Ethics courses all over. Briefly, it is this:

"if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it. An application of this principle would be as follows: if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing...the principle takes, firstly, no account of proximity or distance. It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away. Secondly, the principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position." (Famine, Affluence, and Morality)

Its the example of the child drowning that gets me. I actually think it is an apt analogy--if you can save a child's life by donating $75 to Oxfam, that is just as good as saving a child's life that is drowning in a wading pool right in front of you. That's okay with me. Sure, you might ruin your suit. But saving a child's life is much more valuable than a suit, even a nice one.

But there is an issue here, if we are sticking strictly to our utilitarian calculus (which Singer wants to do). Let's assume, for sake of example, that a child in Africa's minor ailment can be cured with a $75 donation to Oxfam, allowing him to live a productive and full life. Next, let's assume that the suit I am wearing has a resale value of, say, $300. I notice the child drowning in front of me. Here we are, in the same situation which Singer gives above, but with the added detail about the suit's cost. So, it seems we should save the child in front of us--most people would even say its pretty obvious we ought to do that. But let's say I don't have time to take off my suit. If this is so, then, by utilitarian lights, I ought not save the child! Why? Because I can save the lives of 4 children by leaving, selling the suit, and donating the money to Oxfam. The lives of 4 are greater than the life of one, and proximity makes no difference.
This looks to be just another formulation of the trolley problem, or the forced organ-donor example. But it is especially interesting because what Singer says in his work on poverty seems to imply he has to be ok with this counterintuitive conclusion.
Anyone have any way of getting out of this? It sure seems like there ought to be one; that is, I think Singer's argument is cogent--so something fishy must be going on here.

The Terminator Argument for Determinism

Ok, so I saw Terminator: Salvation (a.k.a. Terminator 4) today. It has its moments of greatness, in between sections of mediocrity.
Anyway, there was one thing in the movie which made me think--and I'm pretty sure it was supposed to...the film didn't have a lot of brains behind it for the most part, but this may be one exception.
I saw, within the plot, an argument that might be used to shift the burden of proof onto the libertarian in the free will/determinist debate.
But let me preface this:
SPOILER ALERT



Ok, hopefully you have stopped reading if you plan on seeing the movie and haven't yet.

One of the characters in the film is named Marcus Wright. He learns in the movie that he is a cyborg--a human/machine hybrid, created by Skynet (if any of this doesn't make sense because you aren't familiar with the Terminator series, go to wikipedia.) Marcus sees himself as being completely human; he is, in fact, not even aware that he is a cyborg until about half way through. So, presumably, his judgment and actions appear to himself as autonomous.
However, later on, after Marcus helps get John Connor into the headquarters of Skynet, the main CPU at Skynet reveals that bringing John Connor was Marcus' programmed mission, and that Marcus has executed his mission perfectly, though he was unaware that he was doing so.
This all seems to make sense, in the moment. After all, it is an American action movie, one ought not think too hard in the heat of the moment.
But, if one could accept (and, even better, to argue for) that the case of Marcus Wright is logically coherent, as well as in principle physically coherent, it seems that a somewhat cogent argument against free will could be made.
If it is possible, in principle, to manipulate someone's experience in such a way as to give them the phenomenology of choosing freely when in fact they are not, then there really isn't any way of knowing why this may not just be the way we've evolved.

So, the argument would look something like this (and, grant me that its late and I haven't thought this through too much):

1.Some version of libertarian free will is the most intuitively plausible.
2.We, prima facie, as well as "the folk," find libertarianism about the will to be intuitively plausible, in main part, because of our phenomenology of choice--that is, we deliberate and act on what seems to us to be of our own choosing.
3a.(What we may call, The Skeptical Premise) This phenomenology of choice does not give us reason to favor a libertarianism about the will over a determinist one--that is,
3b. the phenomenology can be equally explained by something like the Marcus Wright story, without any messy science fiction tale (e.g. we may have just evolved to be Marcus Wrights). Ockham's Razor does not favor the libertarian explanation of the Marcus Wright one.
Therefore,
4.Our reason for finding libertarianism about the will loses its grounding, and along with this, its intuitive force.
Therefore, ceteris paribus,
5.Determinism should be the accepted view, libertarianism should hold the burden of proof.

What obvious hole am I missing? I may be accused of begging the question. Well, yeah, I guess that is probably true. But, if we took an anecdotal survey of reactions to the Marcus Wright story, and most found it coherent, then perhaps we could say intuitions about free will are too highly inconsistent to claim that libertarianism is more intuitively plausible than determinism.