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| Could you kill both to eliminate one? |
As the Firesign Theatre once said, ‘Everything you know is
wrong.’
Whenever I dig even a little bit deeper into anything that I
am supposed to believe without question, I find ambiguity.
‘Everything I know is wrong,’ to turn the phrase on its head.
True, it is not always wrong-better than I thought, nor is
it always wrong-worse than I thought. It is just wrong-different than I
thought.
Wrong-different is a gateway to understanding, though
straight and narrow. And the introduction of more information leads to more
understanding, left and right, up and down, forwards and backwards. Not so searingly
straight or squeakily narrow now, is it? And then comes more bewilderment. And
the realization that I cannot possibly understand this thing, no matter the
cost or expenditure of mental energy. It just keeps becoming more wrong-wrong
than I thought.
Things are more complex, more nuanced, more resistant to
gross characterization than any simple experiment in a Petri dish can
demonstrate. Life is not as simple as a thought experiment or a moral conundrum
such as: You are a switchman at a train yard. Various numbers of people, zero
to many, are vaguely standing on tracks in front of you and a box car breaks
loose at the top of a nearby hill and comes trundling down towards them. You
can use your exalted position as switch man to send it one way or the other,
killing few, many, or none in the process.
What do you do? Do you choose one life over many? Can you
live with the consequences and suffer the inevitable criticisms from
all-knowing but uninvolved observers after the fact? Those, “You should have’s”
that follow in the wake of every panicked decision? I doubt it.
Ah, and in the favorite conundrum of our day: What if one of
those many was Hitler? Does killing him and a handful of innocents outweigh destroying
all of them at the redemption of just one random other? The one you spared verses
the many you killed to eliminate one monstrosity? Even though it was a promise
of those many in the future you would thusly save? Several die including one who
is a horror. One lives, you know not his character. Is that good mathematics? Or,
do you say, as it is also in vogue to say at times like this, ‘It’s
complicated.’
We say, ‘It’s complicated,’ when we don’t know how to answer
a simple, straightforward question.
“Is this right or wrong?” we are asked of some moral dilemma.
“How much is a life worth?” more pointedly. We cannot decide. The very thought
that we have the right to choose between good and evil, which was the first sin
in paradise, is proof that we have failed the dilemma.
“What,” you say? Forget the apple. That succulent fruit was
just the first bite of, “I am right and you are wrong!” that we ever savored. And
we’ve been savoring it ever since.
Who can choose? Who is right and who is wrong? What action
is allowable despite its many consequences? What Enigma machine allows us to
weigh lives against lives and say, “I will let these souls die today that I may
save these many more lives tomorrow?”
So human it is to believe that we even have a say in the
matter. We do not. Once we go down that path, the path of thinking that we have
some moral compass of right and wrong, we become wrong. For behold! You, too,
stand on a track. The car approaches. Your life, too, is on the pan of the
scale. It swings from the balance beam and you are not detached. Not
indifferent. Not apart from the dilemma.
Or to quote The Doctor: “Let me ask you a question about
this brave new world of yours… When you’ve killed all the bad guys… And when
it’s all perfect and just and fair… When you’ve finally got it exactly the way
you want it, what are you going to do with the people like you? The
troublemakers? How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the
next one?“
And thus; as is taught by most of the world’s religions,
traditions, and philosophies; can it be summed up in two simple words: Harm
none.
“Well, it’s complicated,” we respond, as if that somehow
excuses us from further discussion. The moral debate is over, without question.
Unequivocal. Also unanswered.
I am right, whatever it is I am saying and just about to do.
You are wrong, whatever it is you are saying and your point
of view.
What if both our spins cancel out? What if the answer to the
dilemma is… silence?
We quickly retreat into the crumbling world of, ‘Everything
I know is right.’ We insist upon scooping up bits of sand and bracken on the
beaches of our chosen and selected experiences and molding them into sandcastles
of good and evil. No, ‘It’s complicated,’ here! Just pure, acidic truth. I am
right. You are wrong. All who disagree will be dissolved by it.
But it remains... Everything you know is… complicated.
