Acceptable Losses

 

There has been a great deal of outcry over policies meant to curtail the spread of COVID-19 as it is argued that said policies are an infringement of either natural or constitutionally guaranteed rights. However, as America’s conservative politicians were found of saying after 9/11, after the subsequent ‘need’ to wholesale spy on American citizens was revealed, freedom isn’t free. Have the COVID-19 policies up until now been legal? More importantly, are they ethical? How much freedom, if any, is it permissible to curtail in order to stem a pandemic that at least on occasion sees people die?

 

As of this writing, according to Worldometer, COVID-19 kills 3.4 people per 100 recorded cases. In the U.S. there have been 70 million recorded cases and 866,000 deaths due to the virus or complications due to the virus, for a 1.2% mortality rate, a lower overall percentage in the U.S. due to improved medical facilities. In the U.S. for the unvaccinated, there is a 1-in-85 chance that infection will require serious medical attention. For the vaccinated, there is an approximate 1-in-10,000 chance of infection leading to hospitalization. I am leaving out statistics by age, ethnicity, or gender because they are irrelevant to what follows as a life is precious regardless of age, ethnicity, or gender. Is this not the case? It is the case; this is what abortion rights opponents would like us to believe. And, this is the viewpoint we’re all supposed to tow as a supposedly civilized species. But how civilized are we, really?

 

Not just in the U.S. but globally authoritarianism has been on the rise while at the same time there has never been a greater outcry for protecting one’s freedoms, usually by those very proponents of authoritarianism. While we might forgive political extremists for their blatant hypocrisy – it’s just what they do – there is a more sinister undercurrent of human psychology at work here. While no reasonable person is denying the virus that causes COVID-19 exists, makes people sick and occasionally kills people, what the people protesting for their right to assemble without even the most basic precautions are essentially saying is that any single person’s right to behave as they want should not be infringed upon even if that behavior potentially means someone else might die. In other words, our right to socialize in all the ways we socialized before the current pandemic should be retained even if there is a potential for one of the people socializing to die. This is not only (supposedly) ethically incorrect, but constitutionally incorrect in the U.S. I’ll explain, but first a quick yet realistic thought experiment

 

In terms of numbers, let’s suppose there are 1,000 people attending a concert: there is the potential for anywhere between 12 and 34 of those people to die from COVID-19 (a scenario made more likely if the audience members are unvaccinated). Even in a best-case scenario, at least 10 of those concert-goers are going to require going to the hospital and it would be a safe bet to say at least one of those 10 people are going to die. The question becomes this; in order to maintain the freedoms we are accustomed to, like being in a crowd at a concert, how many people are we willing to let die (with ourselves being among the potential victims)?

 

We calculate these kinds of risk-assessment unconsciously all the time. We do it when we drive our cars, for example. According to Gallup.com, in the U.S. there are .012 deaths per 100 drivers in the U.S. annually (or approximately 38,000 driver deaths) in order to preserve every driver’s right (privilege, really) to drive, with most of these deaths being preventable seeing how most of them are not mechanically related, meaning, due to driver error and/or recklessness. In the case of our actual constitutional right to bear arms in the U.S. there are approximately .0059 homicide related deaths per 100 citizens (or approximately 20,000 citizens a year) according to the CDC. The number of gun-related deaths goes up into the tens of thousands, of course, if we factor in suicides and accidents. That aside, in 2021 alone, 68 people were killed or injured in school shootings [edweek.org]. To be allowed to drive and own firearms, these appear to be acceptable losses for our rights/freedom to these things, whatever ‘rights’ or ‘freedom’ means. So, this should probably be sorted out.

 

When discussing these alleged rights and freedoms, we are probably talking mostly about those rights the U.S. Constitution affords, such as the right to bear arms (and not even have to be in a militia, apparently). Also afforded or protected are the rights to assembly, the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion (or not be religious), and importantly, the Ninth Amendment which states that rights afforded by the Constitution shall not infringe upon other rights. For most U.S. citizens the U.S. Constitution basically affords the right to go most anywhere and mostly do whatever we want so long as we don’t intentionally harm other people, least that be a violation of the Ninth Amendment. Certainly U.S. citizens have a level of freedom not seen in many other countries. Only how free are we as U.S. citizens, really? It might be helpful to think of all the ways in which we are not free and why this is important.

 

Let’s start with the First Amendment, which grants citizens the freedom of speech (among other rights). We are allowed to say whatever we want. Of course, this isn’t true – Explicit child pornography is not protected free speech and was ruled illegal by SCOTUS in 1996. Also ruled illegal is speech that incites violence/bodily harm, defames someone’s character, or tries to pass off someone else’s copyrighted work as your own, to name a few. The First Amendment is also supposed to allow us to practice religion as we see fit as much as protect us against state sponsored religion, only, several states’ laws contend that an atheist cannot hold office. (This is unenforceable according to the SCOTUS but has not been tested. Also, women have not been protected from religious zealots in Texas most recently and notably.) When it comes to the Second Amendment, which is supposed to hypothetically protect us against a tyrannical government, U.S. citizens can own assault weapons but not weapons of mass destruction such as a fully functional tank or nuclear weapon, which a hypothetical tyrannical government would be allowed to have.

 

We have a number of other federal, state, and local laws that limit our freedoms as well, and this is mostly for our own protection as well as the protection of our neighbors of whom it is irrelevant whether you like them or not. For example, while we don’t have to wear seatbelts, we can be ticketed for it and that fine will be enforced by a court of law. Also enforced by the courts is our responsibility to pay taxes; they have to be paid or we face fines or even jail. In most states, it is considered battery to spit on another person (without consent). In most states, we cannot marry a minor or marry multiple people at once. By law, we cannot arbitrarily discriminate against someone based on sex, race, religion, or national origin. (Yes, we know, this last one is broken all the time; people of color and women face gross inequities and mistreatment compared to their white male counterparts.) These are some of the more obvious ways in which U.S. citizens are not free.

 

Less obvious freedoms involve the widespread use of social media. The very people complaining about COVID-19 mandates are the same people who do not seem to realize that every time they use a search engine, log on to Facebook or other social media app, algorithms are tracking how the user behaves in order to keep that user engaged for as long as possible. Siri, Alexa – any smart devices we own – and the NSA are listening to us all the time. Everyone knows this. No one disputes the fact that major corporations and tech companies are doing everything they can to manipulate citizens into doing their bidding, and they often succeed. Oddly, or maybe I should be saying ‘unsurprisingly,’ no one cares and its never a part of the conversation regarding freedom(s).

 

These are but very few examples that are in place to reign in and control behavior for actors within a society for the safety of society. It is simply not true that a U.S. citizen can do whatever they want whenever they want unless they leave the country to become a king or queen of another country and they don’t use the internet.

 

What does any of this have to do with COVID-19? If it is not obvious by now, there is a pandemic affection millions of people, with almost one million deaths associated with the disease in the U.S. as of this writing. In order to stop the spread of illness – and possibly death –  it was asked of the general population to give up a small measure of freedom; wear face coverings, stay six feet apart, avoid large gatherings, and isolate if we felt the slightest bit ill or were in close proximity to a symptomatic carrier of the virus. It was also asked of the population to get a vaccine which would limit the number of people getting ill and more importantly limit the time during which an infected person is transmitting the virus. And none of this, so far, has become law. None of this has become law because if the population could not take the simple precautions first asked of them, making the precautions law would result in a nationwide riot. In short, Americans could not be asked to save the lives of almost a million of their fellow countrymen because individual ‘freedom’ is more important than those other people’s lives. That being the case, as with driving or being allowed to own firearms, we implicitly consent to acceptable losses. In actual numbers, for example, 2,462 school-aged children were killed by firearms in 2017; we consider this an acceptable loss of life so that the right to bear arms goes on uninfringed. The question is – when do the numbers start becoming unacceptable before we consider reigning in some freedoms? How do we arrive at those numbers if those numbers even exist? I ask because for some rights, it seems like no number will be too high for the U.S.

 

Concerning gun rights, the number did get too high for Australia. In 1996, a gunman killed just 35 people at a tourist destination with a semiautomatic weapon. Their gun laws changed within the following year and the country did not have another mass shooting until 2018 when 7 people were killed. A similar regard for life can been seen with Australia’s initial response to the pandemic.

 

When it was recognized in early 2020 that COVID-19 was going to be a problem, Australia closed its borders and required citizens returning home to isolate. The people who were required to quarantine were checked on by police. Some states and territories closed their borders to each other. Non-essential services were closed. There was bipartisan unity within the government to deal with the pandemic. Australia’s measures to protect themselves against COVID-19 was quickly implemented and clearly communicated to the public, resulting in nearly zero cases through the rest of 2020. Australia ended its zero-COVID-19 strategy in late 2021, citing that it was impossible to suppress the virus forever, which is probably not true had everyone (globally) initially taken similar measures. Australia, with its regard for its citizens lives, understandably wanted their people to return to life as it was before the pandemic. Unfortunately, they lifted their restrictions too soon, for instance opening their borders to COVID-19 carriers from less pandemically savvy nations. Fortunately, with high vaccination rates and occasional snap-lockdowns and other restrictions, Australia has kept their death toll below 4,000 for the time being. This is a vast difference from, say, the U.S. even despite the disparities in population.

 

It appears death tolls do matter to some nations. In contrast, the reason the U.S. has been so awful in dealing with COVID-19 has to do with the fact that compared to many other nations, U.S. citizens simply don’t care much about each other’s lives. Individual freedom must be maintained in the face of ridiculously high death tolls even when those numbers are largely preventable. It does not seem to matter how many people die in car accidents or are killed by gunfire. Recall that in one incident alone, in the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting, 61 people were murdered and 411 injured by gunfire. The numbers are astounding to everyone but gun rights advocates and politicians. If that incident did not change the nation’s mood towards the Second Amendment, we can gather nothing will. There does not seem to be any sense of national community. So, we should not be surprised that Americans do not care who they infect or kill by not taking any precautions against COVID-19.

 

Why is there no sense of protecting the greater community? Why do high death tolls that are preventable not matter to U.S. citizens? For starters, we can blame division on the internet that produces echo chambers for our worst human qualities, which itself is influenced by the larger tech companies that puts profits before people. We can also blame foreign regimes like Russia who have an interest in dividing Americans. The rich, such as the CEO’s of the afore mentioned tech companies, bear no love for the poor whom, they don’t seem to realize without, they would not be rich. (Also not a secret is that the rich and politicians only care about the poor long enough to exploit them, and this has been going on so long it’s accepted as just another part of life. My apologies for stating the obvious, which is apparently not obvious to enough people.) Blame may even lie with the American healthcare system, which only thinks in terms of dollars, in terms of putting a dollar sign on life, in terms of how not to pay for the medical care their insurance is supposed to provide. And, at the root for Americans, there is the false notion that the U.S. was a country born exclusively out of a need for individual freedoms to be had, with the nation as a whole to be burned to the ground should that notion be challenged. This is basically what the psyche of conservative America has been ever since people of color were allowed to voice their opinions and speak about their experiences with racism, jeopardizing white privilege. (To be certain, the current drive in conservative U.S. states to ban abortion is not because they care about life, rather, they fear being ‘bred out.’) Least we forget as well, history has demonstrated time and again that as human beings, we just don’t care about people beyond our immediate tribe(s). It appears frowned upon to say this forthwith, so history says it for us.

 

All this adds up to what I’ve come to call, again, ‘acceptable losses’ which in reality means ‘any amount of loss.’ Any amount of loss is acceptable to U.S. citizens to maintain their (alleged) absolute freedoms. Had the Las Vegas gunman in 2017 killed a thousand people, gun rights advocates and conservative still would not have seen a problem. There is no number of lives lost that would convince gun rights advocates and conservatives to willingly curtail their rights.

 

Realizing this, and out of curiosity, I’ve posed this question in my Ethics and A&P classes in relationship to COVID-19 or any other infectious disease: What death toll would be high enough for you to say we should curtail some freedoms in order to fight a deadly disease? Ebola for example will kill anywhere from 25% to 90% of the people it infects, allowing for various factors (with 25% being so low due to how the particular outbreak was responded to. Otherwise, Ebola’s mortality rate would be closer to at least 50%). Would sacrificing 25% of the population for our basic freedoms be acceptable? At what point would the death toll be so high it would cause you to say, “Perhaps we should curtail some freedoms so that there is at least a few people left to cook and serve me food at the restaurant”? Astonishingly, I’ve been given figures as low as 20% and as high as 80% of the population. While this perhaps speaks to an unspoken belief that there are too many people on the planet (I don’t disagree), I don’t think the people giving me that figure have thought through the consequences of 20-80% of the population actually dying. One student did mention that the allowable percentage would be based upon the freedoms lost, meaning, the more liberties that would be taken away, the more people we should let die because again, anyone’s possible and even preventable death does not supersede anyone’s right to liberty. Perhaps that 20% threshold isn’t being met?

 

While it can be argued that COVID-19 is not as deadly as Ebola, Americans have effectively said a loss of 2% of the nation’s population is perfectly acceptable in order not to have to wear a mask in public. While I understand wearing a facemask is uncomfortable, few people are willing to let a surgeon operate on them without one. In other words, if a surgeon can wear a face mask for several hours straight during surgery, why is the rest of the population so fragile that they cannot wear a mask in a supermarket for 20 minutes? Why is 20 minutes of someone’s time seen as too much to ask to save even one person’s life? Because masks and the other precautions aren’t effective? Then why hasn’t anyone criticized surgeons for wearing masks and washing their hands prior to surgery before the pandemic? 

 

I can understand vaccine hesitancy a little more. At the beginning of the rollout even I wanted to see what kind of side effects there were going to be as I had a bad experience with an injection in the military. (I had a sudden fever and passed out after a shot. To this day I do not know what they gave me that caused that reaction.) And, I can understand being hesitant of the vaccine’s long-term effects. But, I don’t understand being hesitant about the vaccine’s long-term effects when we do have a better idea of the long term effects of COVID-19 itself. Nor do I understand being told someone is worried about the vaccine’s long-term effects or being afraid of what’s in the vaccines when they are throwing back a Mountain Dew and a Hershey’s candy bar, as my students often do. There is also what I believe to be a reasonable suspicion of Big Pharma; while there is much money to be had by Big Pharma in the case of a pandemic like this, consider the fact that only Big Pharma had the capability to create a vaccine so quickly. Also, keep in mind that it does industries such as Big Pharma no good to intentionally kill the very people who would use their products, so that reasonable suspicion of Big Pharma only goes so far. At this point, it is a safe assumption that vaccine hesitancy and resistance is merely towing political lines and there is no actual valid reasoning against it, not when vaccines have been so effective in the past. I will not mince words here; it says something unflattering that almost half the U.S. takes its vaccine advice from a former hippie and Playboy model. (I’m referring to Jenny McCarthy, who started the anti-vaxxer movement back in 2007. And no, this is an ad hominin attack as McCarthy had no medical expertise back then and still doesn’t now.)

 

Now comes the catch-22: If vaccines did kill a small percentage of people, how many would be too many? How many lives lost are worth it to save more lives? Is there an acceptable death toll for vaccines but not for preventable infections? Hint – the answer is ‘yes’: Vaccines have not killed as many people as COVID-19, so it would make sense for the population to get vaccinated even if a few people would in fact die from the vaccine, as long as we’re making this comparison. There is no logical argument against how unsafe the COVID-19 vaccine might be as the numbers do not lie. Americans hesitant about vaccines because they’re allegedly unsafe is an outright hypocrite and again unapologetically towing political party lines. Getting COVID-19 is clearly more dangerous for everyone if a person is unvaccinated.

 

Now that we’ve cleared the air about what is acceptable in terms of losses, particularly those that are preventable, what I ask of people who will not take any precautions to stem the current (and future) pandemic(s) is this: I want to know who the toxic people are (both figuratively and literally) so I can avoid them. So, be honest and don’t hide behind rationalizations. Be honest in saying that you simply don’t care how many people die and that your individual freedom is more important. Be honest that human life does not matter to you. Be honest that what little is asked of you to protect human life is too much, that you are easily defeated, especially by a piece of cloth. But remember, you are the same people who (supposedly) are for the rule of law, and the rule of law is, at least in the U.S., that your rights end where mine begin. It’s literally in the Constitution. Read it from time to time.

On Villains and Villainy

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” – Gerald Seymour in Harry’s Game

When I first heard the Joker movie with Jaoquin Phoenix was being made, I admit I was disturbed in the slightest. Critics of pop culture have long criticized what has seemed like a gradual and unnecessary decent into what seems like an anything-goes mentality for entertainment’s sake. The inundation of sex, drugs, and violence in pop culture appears to be on one hand merely for the sake of titillation yet on the other hand a reflection of the Western world’s dark underbelly it seems the average citizen doesn’t want to concede exists nor accept their explicit or implicit role in.* It is, however, the glorification of the villain that has troubled me the most when it comes to pop culture. I can name countless movies, not to mention countless musical artists, whose villains and villainy outshine their protagonists.

[Perhaps the same can be said for the world at large.]

To be clear, I prefer my villains to be complicated, for their motivations to be more than evil simply because that’s who the villain cannot help being. Certainly, the new Joker movie is a reflective character analysis in this regard. Even the long string of Marvel movies were part of a story arc that centered around stopping a ‘mad’ Titan, Thanos, from wiping out half the life in the universe. His murderous methods aside – which we assume are wrong – it’s difficult to say what’s wrong with Thanos’ motivations for those of you who are aware of them. I think it’s fair to want interesting villains – the world is not black-and-white after all – but we’ve reached the point where in America’s culture at least, we’re literally rooting for the bad guy.

Case in point; at last night’s WWE’s Hell In A Cell Pay-per-View (I apologize for still keeping tabs on professional wrestling at my age), a character called The Fiend did not win the championship match and fans in the audience were audibly upset. This Fiend character is very popular among the internet wrestling community to the point that fans would rather see him crowned champion than have a face (good guy) retain the gold. I agree that the character is interesting and that the heel (bad guy) needs to win on occasion to maintain the delicate and eternal dance between good and evil alive for the sake of storytelling, but for a crowd to nearly riot when the heel doesn’t win indicates something is possibly wrong with either the Western psyche, the current rules of society, or perhaps a matter of definitions. (It is possibly all of these.) I can point to actual current events to make my case.

The election of Donald Trump to President of the United States in 2016 couldn’t make my point clearer, being of the opinion that Donald Trump is clearly a villain. Why; what has he done that is so wrong? I could name a number of things and not be nearly exhaustive: Asking foreign powers to interfere in U.S. elections, accepting the word of despots over his own intelligence community, cavorting with said same despots, backing out of treaties with traditional allies and treating them with contempt, rolling back environmental and civil protections, coddling white supremists and stoking xenophobia, ignoring the U.S. Constitution (this is perhaps because he’s clearly never read it), embezzling from his charities, doing nothing about gun violence, and generally acting like a third-grade schoolyard bully. While I understand the frustration of many modern American voters with the federal government, I was aghast to find out a large swath of the U.S. thought Donald Trump was the answer. In my opinion, I can’t say Donald Trump has never done any good as U.S. president – even a broken clock is right twice a day by accident – but does the good outweigh the bad? No, because all things considered, the person in question wouldn’t be a villain. Inevitably, then, we’re forced to think about what exactly makes someone a villain.

What is a villain? The definition of ‘villain’ is broad throughout various dictionaries, meaning anything from the antithesis of the protagonist in fiction to generally someone doing harm to others in reality. In either case, a villain is typically breaking the law. They are considered dangerous or have behaved heinously towards any given person or group of people. A villain is often considered immoral, and therein lies a problem.

To some people, Donald Trump is a hero, a freedom fighter even. He is a protagonist to all those who feel they’ve been ignored, stepped on, or otherwise aggrieved by the federal government. The current president of the U.S. doesn’t play by the established laws, traditions, or unwritten social contract. This makes him a terrorist to some (in that word’s broadest sense) and a hero to others who feel that the current laws, traditions, and unwritten social contract need to be revised or reset to reflect some unspecified glory somewhere in America’s history. (Possible interpretation: When they felt more entitled.) So if a villain can also be a hero, there must either be something wrong with our definition or perhaps there is no such thing as a villain, objectively speaking.

It’s easy to contend there is something wrong with the definition. Scores of English words are too broad in their definition to be of much use or are outright confusing; ask anyone studying the English language. I contend that in modern U.S. culture, the definition of ‘villain’ is so ambiguous as to be vague to the point that many people would not know when they are behaving as a villain. (I’m not sure which is worse, a villain who knows they’re a villain or one who doesn’t know they’re a villain.) It also seems wrong to label anyone who offends us or that we simply don’t like as a villain, but that does seem to be the manner in which many Americans now operate.

Do villains exist, objectively speaking? Not if all cultures are relative, something we have to assume if not all cultures can agree that murder is wrong. (There’s always a caveat.) Villains can exist within a given culture, certainly, as there is no doubt that people have existed that have flouted the laws of a society they are seemingly a part of. Again, though, this allows a villain to be a hero to society’s downtrodden or any one outside of a society that would like to see that society fail. So it’s hard to say villains actually exist anymore than we can now say heroes exist. Now we can see that heroes merely prop up the rules of society, and this would make them villains in someone’s eyes somewhere.

My original feelings towards the Joker movie have to be misgiven. After all, what does his nemesis Batman do but prop up the rules in Gotham City? Imagine Batman having grown up in 1930’s Germany; what would he have been but a Nazi superhero come WWII? Thank goodness he’s not, but Batman must be seen as a villain by some law enforcement agencies; there are procedures for catching and detaining criminals and subsequently putting them on trial. When this sense of fairness is broken can we agree this is something villainous? In the Joker movie, the central figure that is Arthur Fleck is driven insane by a thousand unfair psychological cuts, so can we blame him for the anarchy that ensues?  Can we blame a mass shooter who goes on a rampage because they think they’ve been treated unfairly?

Hopefully you are saying ‘yes’ because you agree that murdering innocent people, people who have not directly affected the shooter, are being murdered and we have to agree this is wrong no matter what society we belong to. Breaking two fairness rules – making two wrongs – does not result in a right, correct? Unfortunately, any given mass shooter or lawbreaker will have sympathizers. (To say nothing of laws that should be broken either because they are apparently unethical or quite ridiculous.) It would make more sense for a mass shooter to only kill the people that have affected them assuming the punishment fits the crime against them and we’ve never seen that.

If we invoke this rule of fairness which we, Western culture, seem to have forgotten as of late it might be easier to gauge who the villains are when the doctrine of fairness is broken. Given the current impeachment inquiry regarding Donald Trump, his proponents can argue for an investigation into the Bidens ad nauseum, and I’d be okay with that, but so should there just as well be an investigation into Trump as well. The fact that Donald trump obstructs justice in a manner that most of us cannot violates the fairness doctrine. I think it therefore reasonable to construe him as a villain. Then again, his proponents see this ‘unfair’ characterization as exactly what’s wrong with current American culture (despite these same people not wanting to do anything about solving the problem of mass shootings, which I view as villainous). I can’t imagine asking a Donald Trump supporter what they think made Obama such a villain because it seems like their definition is going to wind up being arbitrary. In fairness, though, I am willing to hear them out. Villains on the other hand hear no one out and simply assume they are entirely in the right.

A Modern Day Trolley Problem

The Trolley Problem (aka the Trolley Dilemma) is sometimes used thought experiment used by psychologists and philosophers to gauge a person’s moral compass. The though experiment goes something like this:

Suppose there is a runaway train car (a trolley) that is rolling down the tracks towards five people tied to the tracks, or are lying on the tracks and are otherwise unable to move. You are off in the distance observing this and happen to see a lever next to you that if pulled will switch the runaway train car from its current course onto another set of tracks. However, on the diverted track there is single person tied to the tracks and will be killed if you pull the lever. Question is: Do you pull the lever to save five people and kill one or take no action and let five people die?

Keep in mind this is the Trolley Problem in its simplest iteration. There are several variations of this thought experiment which involve intentionally pushing a fat man onto the tracks to save five people (the Fat Man version) or intentionally pushing the man (a “fat villain”) who tied up the potential victims onto the tracks to avert the deaths of the innocent. Let’s not concern ourselves with these versions or ask questions about the characters of all the potential victims. For the sake of realism, however, we are going to alter the details of the thought experiment to a more likely scenario than initially presented. We’re going to do this because the Trolley Problem such as it is described above doesn’t present a realistic situation one would find themselves in and be forced to make a moral judgement. What I’d like to do is introduce a modern equivalent to the Trolley Problem, changing the problem to something more akin to what philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson had in mind with her “brilliant surgeon” version of the Trolley Problem.

Here’s my version: Suppose you are a politician and if you don’t vote on a particular bill, five random people will lose their health care coverage and die from pre-existing conditions. If you do vote for this particular bill, the five people will keep their health care coverage but another single random person will lose their coverage and die from their pre-existing condition. In summary, if you don’t vote – if you take no action regarding the bill – five people will die. If you do vote for the bill – take action on the bill – one person will die and five will be saved. Do you vote for the bill or not?

Philosophically, what you as the politician is likely to do is based upon whether you are a utilitarian or a deontologist. That is, if you seek to do the greatest good, as a utilitarian you’re going to vote for the bill. If, on the other hand you think that committing certain actions like intentional harming someone are wrong, then you’re not going to vote for the bill. Of course, the obvious flaw with the deontologist’s position is that not voting for the bill – an inaction – is just as bad as intentional harm if it is your intention to abstain from the vote. In other words, an inaction is just as bad as an action if one intends towards the inaction. (The major flaw in Deontology is that intentions matter.) There is a choice to be made – vote or don’t vote – and once it is made, there is intention behind the given choice; this fact cannot be escaped. The deontologist likes to think that by not intending to ‘intentionally’ cause harm, they are absolved from whatever harm does happen. Obviously, this is madness as not voting for the bill – intentionally – causes harm and makes the deontologist’s actions morally impermissible.

This deconstruction of the deontologist’s position philosophically compels you to vote for the bill, thus taking the utilitarian route (if there’s no false dilemma here, which there may well be). Without knowledge of any of the random people involved, without knowing whether saving the five will result in a better or worse world, you should vote for the bill on the assumption that the death of five people is likely to wreak more sorrow and havoc than the death of one person. All things being equal among the random people, you are compelled to vote for the bill on purely philosophical grounds if you want to be considered a morally just person (such as morality is construed in the Western Industrialized world). However, what people are likely to do is much different in reality. 

In reality, most people take the deontologist’s route and think they are avoiding taking an action that intentionally harms a single person. This outcome was confirmed by a 2007 online experiment conducted by psychologists Fiery Cushman and Liane Young and biologist Marc Hauser. They concluded that by taking a positive action (doing something) that resulted in a positively negative consequence evoked emotions that clouded ‘better’ judgement. But why should this be the case? Why would ‘taking action’ result in feelings that assume the outcome will be worse than taking no action at all? Why does an apparently personal investment in an outcome change what a person will decide to do?

We may want an evolutionary psychologist to weigh in here or we may hypothesize that people generally ‘don’t want to get their hands dirty’ for fear of negative consequences, meaning, precisely, being responsible for one’s actions. As those of us familiar with the workings of Western culture know, we tend to forgive inaction that leads to harm as we work from the assumption that such consequences weren’t malicious in nature. Only, if one knows the consequences – that five people will die through the inaction of not voting – it is difficult to reason why this outcome isn’t just as malicious as voting. Again, the deontologist works from the premise that an action can be wrong and an inaction not wrong, but I’ve already argued this is demonstrably false as inaction is in fact an action because the decision itself is based on intention. The deontologist intends not to intentionally kill someone not realizing the initial intention intentionally kills five people. No matter what angle you view such moral dilemmas from, given only two choices, the deontological reasoning falters.

None of this takes into account other reason why you might vote or not vote. Perhaps you view situations like this and feel the need to do something, and therefore decide to vote. Or perhaps you’re a misanthrope and are indifferent to the people dying. There may also be the way such dilemmas are presented (for example, in the way they are written or are viewed in a virtual world) that may influence decision-making. Regardless of the one of the two choices made – if that’s all that are given – it still tells us something about the moral compass of the person making the choice. In my example, a deontologist has no firm philosophical ground to stand on. They are, in other words, irrational.

And this is why the Trolley Problem, formulated in 1967, is still relevant today. It would be wise to know when a populous is too irrational, if for no other reason than to prompt a re-evaluation of, say, educational programs. Of course, there is the other side of the coin in which people in powerful positions rely on an irrational populous, so such moral tests would be wise for them to administer as well so they might be aware of when citizenry might be becoming too smart for them to fool. Thought experiments, long considered the realm of lowly philosophers, are beneficial to everyone. And when they’re not, they still make for good conversations when you’re high.

Bugged

As is habit, I was going to take my evening ‘sabbatical’ last night when events took a surreal turn. I turned on the light and saw a small beetle on the floor. Without thinking, I tore off a piece of tissue paper and scooped the little guy up and threw him into the toilet. However, I did take the time to think that I’d throw the toilet paper so that the bug could not swim out from underneath it when it hit the water. Basically, between the time I scooped the beetle up and the time I was sending him into the toilet, I had consciously set out to drown him. I didn’t even bother to immediately flush the toilet and put the bug out of his misery much less out of my mind so that I didn’t have time to reconsider what I’d just done. Surely, most people don’t second guess themselves on such things.

But I’m not most people. As the beetle struggled mightily, I thought to myself Why am I watching him drown? Why am I killing him when I could have easily taken him outside? After all, the bug had done nothing to harm me; I just didn’t want it in the house. And so I took extreme measures against a life. I thought about this for a moment. It was certainly within my power not to kill the beetle. I could take it outside and it could go on doing whatever it does, no harm no foul. I reconsidered my actions, got a glass and scooped the bug out of the water and set him on the front porch. Too late; he was dead. This made me feel terrible.

I usually take bugs out of the house with the exceptions being roaches and ants, which I kill for (presumably) very good reasons. (Actually, I don’t always kill roaches, but I probably should.) But in almost all other cases, I relocate insect outside of the house. Why? For one thing, it is awfully arrogant for me to assume some kind of special status based upon my particular form of life. What makes a human being any more special than a beetle? Because we can think and have emotions and reflect upon these mental events? Because we are not bugs or some other species of animal we have run roughshod over, humans automatically ascend to arrogance in thinking that another form of life doesn’t have an inner world, much less an inner world worthy of respect. (Note that this kind of thinking has long been the excuse for genocide or otherwise treating differing ethnicities poorly.) We don’t know what it is like to be any other life form, so I do not ascend to the arrogance the rest of my brood display. Unfortunately, I happen to be of a species that needs to kill and eat other living things to survive. (Yes, Virginia, even plants are living things.) That makes me sad when I think about it.

Another reason I take bugs back outside the house is because it is so much easier to kill something we tower over than it is to respect its life. But consider the hypothetical situation in which giant hostile aliens with advanced technology descend upon the Earth and begin to lay waste to humanity. Why wouldn’t any such aliens laugh at us while we scurry for cover or plead for mercy? I am not trying to say it would be some kind of cosmic retribution, rather I am saying that’s just how the animal kingdom works, based on how we humans react to it. If we have no mercy for bugs or other life forms, we cannot plead for mercy (at least not without being pitiful) when the Hangman comes for us. That is, unless we really are the special animals we keep telling ourselves we are.

So I try to respect life, not because it will allow me to reason with or plead for mercy with the hostile aliens, but because it is the road less travelled and because I have the power to refrain from killing. Isn’t that supposed to be one of humanity’s nobler traits? I’m not going to say I am the most noble human being ever to live, but surely any bug would rather deal with me late in the evening than deal with most of the rest of you lot.

Utilitarianism vs Deontology

Having just read a chapter in The Best of Super Heroes and Philosophy titled “Why Doesn’t Batman Kill the Joker?” written by Mark White, I am prompted to revisit the apparent moral dilemma between consequences and taking certain actions. The chapter likens Batman’s moral dilemma not to kill his arch enemy to the well-known “trolley problem,” one of the more ingenious (in its simplicity) thought experiments in moral philosophy. When it comes to Batman’s dilemma, the Utilitarian view would contend that Batman should kill the Joker so that the least suffering and greatest happiness is achieved through such an action; by Batman killing the Joker, future lives will be saved. [While there is no guarantee the Joker will kill again after any given victim, his history indicates that he most likely will.] The other side of that coin is the Deontologist’s view that Batman should not kill the Joker because the act of killing is in and of itself wrong. Batman appears to agree and has long contended that killing villains would make him no better than them. As it relates to the trolley problem, a Deontologist would let the trolley take its course and kill five people (assuming nothing is known about the five potential victims versus the one potential victim on the other track) since there is nothing wrong with inaction.

It is with the Deontologist’s view that I cannot abide by, seeing how they try to make a distinction between action an inaction, a distinction I disagree with. In this case, the Deontologist would say that Batman cannot kill the Joker because killing is inherently wrong while not killing the Joker, though the Joker will likely kill again, alleviates Batman of responsibility for the Joker’s future victims. The Deontologist is contending that to take certain actions (such as killing) are wrong across the board while inaction (such as not killing a homicidal maniac) does not leave someone like Batman responsible for the consequences. But whether Batman does something or not, both are actions. Killing the Joker would be one action and going off and doing something other than killing the Joker is also an action, with ‘inaction’ being something of a misnomer. Unless one is dead it is impossible to take no actions. For Batman to take an action other than the action of killing the Joker is just as bad, if not worse, than killing the Joker since the sum total of all the Joker’s killings – which are inherently wrong on the Deontologist’s view – would be much more inherently wrong than Batman making a single exception to his rule about not killing criminals. The Deontologist may object here and say that each instance of killing is wrong and cannot be added together to arrive at a seemingly consequentialist conclusion, but such a defense is arbitrary; there is no objective evidence that prevents the wrongness of an action to become greater the more one does it. If the defense is arbitrary, it is tempting to look at the problem from a practical point of view since this is how people act in the real world: If I’m Batman and I know that if I don’t kill the Joker, countless lives will remain at risk. But if I kill the Joker, I could more ably live with one act of wrongness than letting the Joker continue his numerous acts of wrongness.

Of course, not killing the Joker may make Batman extremely happy, so happy in fact that he may think that he is actually being a Utilitarian. For if Batman were to become so distraught over killing the Joker he could not go on being Batman, this would ultimately cause the world a greater amount of suffering than if he were to kill the Joker. However, most of Batman’s enemies are nowhere near the level of homicidal mania the Joker displays, so for Batman to think in these kinds of Utilitarian terms appears to be a weak defense. (This view may also be downright egotistical considering there are so many other superheroes around, one of which you would think would kill the Joker. Where’s Marvel Comic’s The Punisher when you need him?) One way or another, Batman is going to wind up morally culpable for whatever the Joker does after the next time Batman refuses to kill him.

On a related note, the death penalty as it is practiced is institutionalized on Utilitarian grounds while those seeking to abolish the death penalty take the Deontologist’s position, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of a criminal’s wrongdoing and potential to be a grave threat to the general public. And again I would argue to not take certain actions against such a criminal would amount to such vast wrongness that the wrongness of a few applications of the death penalty pales in comparison. It’s akin to choosing the lesser of two evils. Sure, one will be wrong either way, but the Deontological position is ultimately worse than the Utilitarian position. In the trolley problem, passively allowing five people on the train tracks to die is five times worse than flipping a switch and intentionally killing one person. Not flipping the switch to kill one person is still an action, meaning one is still responsible for the results, intentions be damned. (Those who think intentions actually make a difference in these types of situations are those who subconsciously and overwhelming value an individual’s right to autonomy, which conveniently absolves one from helping in situations help could be given. Of course, it is not practical to provide help every time one could and we let Deontologists – and ourselves – off the hook on these grounds.)  

When given a choice in Batman’s situation between being a Utilitarian or a Deontologist, Batman should opt for killing the Joker, given that the Deontologist’s position is facetious. Yes, if you ever have the choice to be Batman, be Batman. Just remember that Utilitarianism requires you to kill the Joker.