The Ethics Lesson

Sometimes my professionalism slips for a week or so, and instead of discussing the usual run-of-the-mill conversational bullshit, I throw my students a bone of contention to gnaw on. A couple of weeks ago it was some of Kholberg's classic moral dilemmas. I'd better quickly mention I teach young adults at university level. The first dilemma to go under the microscope of the young and hormonally disturbed mind was this one - concerning money and family indebtedness:

Ali is a fourteen-year-old boy who wants to go to a summer camp. His father promises he can go if he earns the money himself. So Ali works hard and saves 400 TL, enough for the camp. But just before camp starts, his father changes his mind. Some of Ali’s father’s friends have decided to go on a fishing trip, and Ali’s father doesn’t have enough money to go. So he tells Ali to give him the money he saved for camp. Ali still wants to go to camp, so he thinks of refusing to give his father the money.

      What should Ali do..? And why..?

Anyway, after giving the little darlings a couple of minutes to think it through, I asked them what they thought Ali should do. The answers were pretty much universal - a big fat "No teacher, Ali shouldn't give his money to his father." A few said they'd fork it over, but they didn't feel too happy about it. 'Grudgingly' was the adverb they were looking for I think.

Part of what I do is to keep conversations going, and just about the best way to do this is to piss people off. Well, erm okay, not piss them off so much as to try and get them to re-think what they've said. Luckily, this almost always boils down to the same thing. Gotta love my job in this respect, it's not often middle-aged leather-elbow-patchers like me get paid to mess with teenage heads.

I play the emotional blackmail card: "Oh c'mon... Think of all the stuff your fathers have done for you throughtout your childhoods - remember that time you were ill..? Who took you to the doc's..? Who paid for your medicine..? What about the clothes on your back, the food in your mouths, the birthday presents, the bicycles, the cars, the braces on your teeth..? Have you any idea how much your parents have spent, and sacrificed for you over the years..? Imagine your father's face, right now. Got it..? You can see it..? Okay, imagine his face looking sad.

Now, imagine his face looking happy - what's that worth..? Isn't it worth 400Tl..?"

You get the picture. They cave. They all mutter-mutter "You are right, we should give the money. Our parents' happiness is more important than a silly summer camp." I smile, and tell them they are good sons and daughters and that their parents would be proud of such good, self-sacrificing children. They smile back. Sighs of relief are sighed.

They think it's all over.

Then I ask in passing, "University yeah - quite expensive, isn't it..?" They all agree - sucking their teeth like car mechanics. "wooo - expensive teacher." "So," I ask, "How are you paying..? Books - Dormitory fees - everyday things..?" [They smell a rat at some point around here]. "Our parents pay for it teacher." "Ah," I say, "So, if they'd turned round about a year ago and sat you down and said, 'Hey kiddo, you know how you were wanting to go to university yeah..? Well, me and your mother got to talking the other day, and we've decided to spend the money we were going to send you to university with on a world cruise. Seeya.' - what would you have done..?" Type three conditionals - the bane of all English students.

"What..? Logical consequences..?"

So - Now that it's not just some random 'Ali goes to summer camp' situation, with no personal impact - everyone's suddenly falling over themselves with indignation. Of course they have a right to that money etc... Of course Mummies and Daddies are socially bound to spend every last penny on their education etc... They have no right to take away our futures... At this point, after letting them splutter themselves into heavy-breathing red-faced messes, I politely withdraw. It's interesting though that grattitude hardly ever enters the discussion. Only one in a hundred ever says anything like "I realise that my parents have a right to do whatever they want with their money, and I'm grateful they choose to spend it on me."The idea that they are indebted not entitled, is hard to face, at least in the culture here.

For my own opinion, I'm undecided. Bit of a cop-out I know. Ethics has always struck me as a very contingent thing. Dependent on the details of the system.

"Damn, my foot's getting cold."

The next situation illustrates this contingency very well. It's probably the most well-known of all of these types of things: the runaway trolley:

 [a] A trolley is moving, out of control down a track towards five people. You are standing beside the track, near a switch. If you push the switch, the trolley will change tracks toward only one person, who will be killed.

      What should you do..? Why..?

There's the fat guy on the bridge version too I know, but the above's enough for our purposes at the moment. I had one girl who came out with "I would do nothing - that way I haven't killed anyone. Whoever was the guy who let the trolley get out of control is responsible for the deaths of the five, but if I pull the lever and save them, I'm responsible for one death. I'm a murderer. Therefore, morally, I don't pull it. Okay, she gets points for thinking deeper than the average bear, and she's right to some some extent - but also wrong. Inaction is an action. She's still responsible. She killed five people.

Yes. Inaction is an action. So there. Say there's a button, and a bomb. [The button is one of those that springs back up after being pressed btw. It doesn't lock into an obvious down 'Hey I've been pressed dumbass' position] If you don't press the button, the bomb explodes in five minutes. If you press the button, no boom, and the door opens in five minutes instead. Press the button again, the countdown to boom resumes. Of course you press it. Easy - walk off whistling.

Now, how about before you come into the room, someone presses the button for you, and doesn't tell you..? Or perhaps just leaves a sign propped-up nearby saying "Y'know..? That button might have been pressed already..."

Told ya.

Sorry - tangent. Most of my students do a little counting on their fingers and pull the lever, sacrificing one, to save five. More life being better than less life overall in their book.

This whole "more life is better than less life" bit, to me, is important, not because I think it's right so much as recognise it as everyone's default position.

I'm not going to look at this very deeply - as you've probably done that already - only to note how easy it is to change peoples' answers. I say "Okay - that one guy is not just some random person - it's your friend, do you still pull the lever. No..? Hmm - but you said one life is better than five, didn't you..? Still no..? Okay - there aren't five guys on the other track - there's six, seven, eight, ten, twenty, a whole bunch of Nuns, a maternity hospital... How many lives is your friend's life worth..? Now it's not your friend, it's your brother, sister, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, child..."

Lots of fun. Now try pregnant wife and  vs. two brothers, one ex-girlfriend and two drinking buddies... Rinse and repeat. Turns out we don't value life so much as value relationships with the life in question.

Now for the last: One that got made into a film with Nick Fury. Unthinkable. You know the drill. (Only difference is that film had nukes, Kholberg's just has bog-standard bombs).

"This is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me motherf**ker."

A terrorist has been caught. He has already placed some bombs and they will explode soon. Maybe hundreds of people will die. The terrorist won’t talk, and wants a lawyer – which will take too long. You are the chief of police - one of your colleagues wants to torture the terrorist to make him talk. Do you agree?

If you do, and the man still does not talk, would you torture the terrorist’s innocent wife - you arrested her too - if that is the only way to make the terrorist talk?

                  Why / Why not…

Pretty much everyone tortures the terrorist for real, then tries initially to con the terrorist into at least thinking his wife's being tortured. I say "he doesn't believe you" and "think of all those innocent lives - one of those bombs could be planted next to your little brother's school you know..." and sooner or later, the wife gets the chop.

Are they right..? What would you choose to do..? Remember - you're chief of police, you're setting a precedent. Don't discount the future.

Anyway, after all the torturing is over, the terrorist coughs and tells the students where the bombs are, they diffuse them and save the day. Pats on backs, and smiles all round. Then I ask them if it had been a football match - society-city vs. terror-united - what would they say the score was..? "Well," they say, "us 1, terrorists 0 of course, duh."

I hmm and hah a bit and say, "I think it's more like you guys 2, terrorists 1 - what do you think..?" Blank stares. "Okay - look at it this way - are you the same person you were this morning..? - I mean, before you became a great scary innocent-woman-torturing monster..?"

 Gets worse though, if you think about the precedent set. After this event, and its successful conclusion - saving the most amount of people-wise anyway - the police internalize the new rule "it's okay to torture people in extremis." Which is a slope so slippery you could ride a sled made of sandpaper down it. And then, when it gets out, how about  society's reaction to this new state of "having a police force which is known to torture people."

Afraid much..? The next door they knock on could be yours.

A hundred lives. Sounds like a lot. Is it worth society's peace of mind as a whole though..? Nebulous I know. A bit like the trolley scenario - juggling pregnant wives against brothers and drunken mates. But remember the conclusions of the trolley - it is not the number of people, but our relationship with those people that seems to matter.

Not "Raggedy Ann goes Waterboarding"

In a perfect society, the governed and those they govern, would be friends. Afterall, what basis would they have to not be..? People would do what was expected of them, when it was expected, and those expected duties and contributions would be created for the equal good of all.

The people would not fear the state, nor the state fear the people.

Unlikely, I agree. But it is this idea of a people's 'friendship' with the state is worth exploring. And it's decline after the rise of the Western 'war on terror'.

In the trolley scenario my students were willing to sacrifice X amount of random people to save the life of someone they had a relationship with. We could write some asshole formula if you like: maybe -

Saved Person(s)(SvP)+Value of relationship(s)(VR)=Sacrificed Person(s)(SaP)

SvP+VR=SaP

Now - since both SvP and SaP are measured in people, we can kinda cancel them out. Let's say you save one friend at the expense of five strangers in the classic scenario.

1SvP+VR=5SaP => 1+VR=5 => VR=5-1 => VR=4

As I said - asshole formula, but still - the point is it seems, at least in the abstract, you can measure the value of a relationship in human lives.

Statistic time. Deaths due to terrorism. Probably to be taken with a pinch of salt, but who knows.

 To put this - '07 for example 13,000 - in perspective - let's compare other causes of death. (With equal amounts of salt too).

The point of this is not to emphasize the seemingly crazy high-level response of governments to the threat of terrorism in comparison to say, the level of response they display towards eh, alcohol or something - that's been done already (and incidently done wrongly because of catagory errors - deathrates due to the above are fairly steady-state, eg. it's vanishingly unlikely that one year everyone becomes outright alcoholics across the board causing deaths due to alcohol to rocket up, or everyone gets sad and commits suicide. However, with terrorism - just add nukes, or weaponized bird-fu or something and bingo megadeathkill deathrate fluctuation). Anyway. What I do want to draw your attention to is this.

Let's say that some perfect government, by implementing a series of controls upon the society it governs, totally abolishes deaths from terrorism (Let's ballpark this at 10,000 lives). Unfortunately it is in the nature of controls to be invasive, intrusive and lots of other in-somethings toward personal freedom and privacy - things detrimental to any relationship. So:

 SvP(10,000)+VR(-10,000)=SaP(0)

 ie. the cost of saving those lives is a loss of  'friendship' between the governed and the state - on a society-wide scale - every one of the governed individuals bears the full cost of negative VR due to the controls used to save those 10,000 random people who would have died had those controls not been implemented.

A cold-calculus I agree, but are those 10,000 worth it..? Or should a populace - both the governed and those who govern - agree that the value of their friendship - call it the social contract, the bill of rights, or simple fucking respect if you like - is worth the sacrifice maintaining it would incur..?

To me at least, the numeric value of the living is of lesser importance than the manner of their living.