To be or not to be...That’s actually not the question...not even close

Something that has worried me of late is can you do a bad thing, that may have a bad consequence, and be showered in glory when a good thing happens as a result? This has come about as I have noticed what seems like an infestation of bogan pride on social media lately that proudly states that hitting a child in discipline in not wrong due to the person in question apparently being hit as a child ‘...and it never hurt them much hey.’ Do you ever wonder whether Hamlet was wrong, he was being deceived, but killing his uncle was a good idea as he would have been a terrible king...could that act be right while being ill-informed?Someone, Nagel I think, asked us how far we can torture a disobedient child while we are stuck under wreckage in a car that is just about to crash. Can we break their arm to get them to free us and save us both?

Can you do something terrible (hit a child) with a good intention (disciplining the child) and expect to be praised as a result of performing a bad act (child behaves according to expectations) ?

A friend of mine sent me a wonderful link on the subject – an add about children copying which is brilliant. If you are going to listen to one thing on Youtube today, well listen to Dazed and Confused, after all, it’s Friday and you need to get a groove on already. But if you’re listening to two things....well, you know.

 

We’ve talked about the Heinz Dilemma before and how it expresses whether a person is wrong to steal, over-charge and the like for medicine;

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

But it can be complicated by a few things.

Firstly, is action more morally meaningful than inaction? Consider the two neighbours, Alf and Deb; both live in absolute luxury by virtue of the fact that they are the trusted protector of their very wealthy, multi-billionaire, two year old, orphaned niece. If Alf’s niece, or Deb’s niece die, Alf and/or Deb will inherit billions as the only remaining relative. Alf and Deb both absolutely hate their respective bratty nieces and resent looking after them.

One day Deb has had enough and, while her niece is in the bath, grabs her head and gently but forcefully pushes her under the water and her niece drowns.

As luck would have it, at exactly the same time Alf is bathing his niece and leaves for a second to grab a towel. When he returns, he noticed that his niece has accidentally slipped, fell, hit her head on the side of the bath and is currently not able to breathe. Alf doesn’t do anything. He steps back and waits for the bath to, of its own actions, kill his niece.

Both Alf and Deb are now billionaires and free from the trials of looking after their nieces. But is Alf’s conduct any less than Debs? Does it matter that he didn’t actually do anything to end the life of his niece?

Let’s warp the story a little more. Say neither niece die. Say that both Deb and Alf recanted at the last second and brought their kin back to life. But in this instance, their nieces both had book clots in their head which, being held under water for a little minute, were cured by the pressure of the water rushing in and blasting the clots out through their eyes. Should we praise either of them for curing the blood clots of their kin? Should Deb be praised more than Alf due to her actively changing actions?

Now, the more smarmy in our merry band will be shaking you fists at me screaming “This is the Doctrine of Double Effect and has been answered by everyone from St Augustine to Jerry Seinfeld.” And you’d be right, it has, but my favourite version of it; The Trolley Dilemma and the Kill Whitey Project, is where this blog is going today. And hey – if you already know the answer, skip ahead, but don’t spoil it for the person sitting beside you.

The essential question is – ‘what is the role of reason and emotion in moral questioning?’ We like to call ourselves advanced and say that emotion is bad and reason, devoid of emotion , equates to an advanced morality. Especially when you look at people like Piaget, Kohlberg and those following, there is this linear approach to moral development. The trolley dilemma and the kill whitey project present this wonderfully archaic, yet researched viewpoint that our morality is just as much a slave to our emotions, especially emotions like disgust, as they were to the hypothetical caveman who started the whole debate. It states that we are not further developed by our reasoning faculties at all.

The question is very much about Normative reasoning, of which there are two general schools of thought:  consequentialist and deontological, albeit there is a third school – virtue ethics which has a considerably better answer to these questions, but it’s not a task for us today.

The basic version of the trolley dilemma asks would you kill a man in a particular situation, and then presents a situation where this may be acceptable.

In the first instance, you are out walking one day and see a dilapidated train track. You follow it for a while and find two tunnels up ahead: one with five workmen in it, the other with only one workman. Then all of a sudden, an out of control train comes screaming down the track. You look down and, as luck would have it, you are positioned right beside the track changer which controls which tunnel the out of control train is headed. You notice that it is headed toward the tunnel with the five men in it. So do you act? Do you change the track to kill one man, deliberately and unashamedly just to save the lives of five?

Funnily enough, more than 90% of people faced with this dilemma would switch the tracks and kill one person.

In its second incarnation, the same situation happens, except rather than standing next to the track changer, you are standing on a footbridge on top of the entrance to the tunnel. You realise that you might be able to jump down in front of the train to stop it, but you would be way too skinny. Thankfully, standing beside you is a portly gentleman whose girth would easily stop the train. Do you push the man off the footbridge? Do you kill a man to save the lives of five?

In answering this question, most people say the exact opposite; almost everyone would let the five men die.

A third incarnation is where you are a doctor on duty in an ER, rushed and over-worked. A motorcycle accident victim comes in. He is pretty much dead, but there is a chance that an emergency procedure to open up his skull/brain area to relieve pressure has a 2% chance to save his life. It is a highly risky operation and no one would be the wiser if you accidentally slipped by half a millimetre and cut the wrong cord, killing the motorcyclist. You have five other patients, one who needs a lung transplant, one who needs a heart transplant, one who needs kidneys etc. And they need this within the next few hours or they will die. The motorcycle accident victim is a perfect match for all five patients and will most likely live in a brain-dead comma for a few days if left unoperated. Do you kill the motorcyclist? Do you perform the operation to the best of your abilities? Do you kill one man to save the lives of five?

There has been a great deal of research dedicated to trying to say why this is the case; from people being brain scanned while making these choices, to theories about our evolutionary background failing to come to terms with the significance of a switch.

Our sense of highly developed moral reasoning would say something like “the end never justifies the means” or perhaps “do the act that results in the least net harm” or something similar.

Then the Trolley Dilemma goes through a fat elvis stage; race and nationality are brought in. People are in a lifeboat which has one too many persons in it. You draw straws as to who has to leave (and drown). It comes up Tyrone Paton gets pushed off. Is this moral? Does saving the lives of the five men on the boat justify killing Tyrone. Almost all liberal voters would say no, almost all conservative voters would say yes.

In a second incarnation, you draw straws as to who gets pushed off and Chip Elsworth the Third’s name comes up. He gets pushed off the boat and drowns to save the lives of the five remaining passengers. Is this a moral choice? Is the killing of one man justified by the saving of five lives? Most liberal voters would say yes, most conservative voters would say no.

In further warps of the same logical problem;

·         is the killing of innocent civilians during a military campaign justified to end a war/restore peace in the situation where civilian casualties are minimised, but expected. In one setting, it is Western troops that are doing the fighting, and Iraqi civilians doing the dying; in another setting, it is Iraqi insurgence that are doing the fighting, Western Troops that are doing the dying.

·         is there a limit to the freedom of speech? Can someone burn an American flag? Can someone draw a malicious cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed? Which is freedom of speech and which has gone too far.

In these examples, the conservative/liberal divide comes through loud and strong: a liberal would have no problem killing Western Troops and burning the American Flag, but would see killing Iraqis and laughing at Mohammed as unacceptable. Conservatives go the opposite way.

Then something really interesting happens: people are given the same dilemmas to answer, but rather than political affiliation, they are first asked to unscramble a word. One group is given a word that is synonymous with patriotism, the other a word that is synonymous with multiculturalism. The findings, quite amazingly mirror the conservative responses in those given patriotism words, and the liberals in those given multiculturalism words.

What’s even more amazing is that people, when alerted to their moral inconsistencies: who will agree with the bombing of Hiroshima while at the same time being adamant that the end never justifies the means etc will change and adapt their understanding to new stimuli.

But irregardless, the findings of all this seems to be that we are not liberal, conservative, deontologists, consequentialists or the like; we have a morality like a bag of tricks, to be pulled out when we find it appropriate. This begs the question: why do we chose one moral principle in some settings, while find it abhorrent in other settings?

The answer, weak though it may be, is that we favour connectedness to a familiar view. We will do our best to preserve our own understanding of the world, to the point of absurdity at times, but we greatly exaggerate and over-estimate our own abilities. The confirmation bias, or as I’ve always said, “the one thing that unites us as humans is that everyone thinks that they are an above average driver.”

So is it right or wrong to hit children? I would say it is never acceptable...but why? Firstly, it doesn’t work, secondly it is violence, and violence is always wrong. Violence is always wrong. The only thing to be learned from it is to avoid it because it is the point where reason, thought...indeed humanity itself stops working. But then what about a situation where someone about my size was beating up a kid, an elderly couple or something and they weren’t listening to reason? Is it wrong for me to hit that person a few times...bugger, there goes that theory. What if the aggressor is considerably smaller than me?

What if it is the case that most people would pull the level to kill a person, but not push a fat man onto the tracks is because our evolutionary make up hasn't dealt with the concept of switches and buttons yet, however, we all know too well the effect of direct violence. Perhaps. Perhaps it is because we have never seen the effect of a switch, yet all of us have seen the effect of being pushed, in the school yard or in the workplace. Some of us know the effect of doing the pushing.

Then maybe it is because we have to see the man being pushed, we have to see the motorcyclist die. We see him watching us and dying. That breads the association that we fear and are disgusted with.

Is it just a case that I am not a pacifist, I see violence being used and chose to identify with the child that was hit, the child that will learn to mistrust these people, fear them, hate then and grow distant from them where other people would associate with the authoritarian parent figure and pretend that they learned respect from that action. Let’s just take that as a comment hey?

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

'“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.”

This post’s lame joke: `

A man and a woman who had never met before, but who were both "married to other people," found themselves assigned to the same sleeping room on a trans-continental train.

Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly, he in the upper berth and she in the lower.

At 1:00 AM, the man leaned down and gently woke the woman saying, "Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet to get me a second blanket? I'm awfully cold."

"I have a better idea," she replied. "Just for tonight, let's pretend that we're married."

"Wow! That's a great idea!", he exclaimed.

"Good," she replied. "Get your own damn blanket."

After a moment of silence, he farted.