A response to PragerU's "If There is No God, Murder Isn't Wrong"

With a little under two weeks to go before Best American Short Stories 2019 drops, I thought I'd use my blog to indulge in a non-literary but still-important-to-me topic. If you follow this blog for literary reasons and aren't really into God and moral philosophy, I'll see you on October 1st. This is a response to a video that some friends of mine were talking about the other day, and I thought I'd collect all my thoughts in one place to aid our conversation. You, the reader, are welcome to join in.

Prager "U" and the video in question

If you're not familiar with PragerU, the quick version is that they're more of a conservative media company than a university, whatever their name might imply. They create videos with relatively simplistic versions of Christian or politically conservative arguments, done in such a way to get millions of people who agree with those ideas to re-post the videos on social media. A friend of mine posted one the other day, mostly to say how stupid he thought it was. This was the video:

Another friend, who is deeply trained in classical philosophy, saw that post and asked what the external basis was for morality without a god. He wasn't so much agreeing with the video as asking what, if my other friend found it objectionable, we might substitute for God-given morality. It's a reasonable question, and one I've been chewing on for 25 years since I left Christianity behind me. I think I've got three responses, and not just because three is always the number people pick when they want to support a thesis.

Synopsis of Prager's arguments

Denis Prager, the "dean" of PragerU, basically argues that without God to dictate what morality is, all views about morality, even when it comes to nearly universally accepted premises like "it's wrong to murder," are just opinions. You can say that nearly everyone agrees with the idea, but that's not the same as being able to point to empirical data for why you believe in something like gravity or that the Earth is round. There's no firm foundation. Morals are relative, and if society began to reject the notion that murder is wrong, we'd be unable to make a grounded argument for why that was evil.

When I raised this with Mrs. Heretic, she had the same reaction I'd guess a lot of people do. She thought it was a stupid thing to say and that plain, old "common sense" ought to tell us it's wrong to murder even if we don't believe in God. I'm not entirely sure she didn't suspect I was concocting some kind of sophistry to convince her there is no such thing as morality, since she knows I don't believe in God. It took me a while to get across that the argument is simply that without reference to an objective criteria we all agree on, you can't say "murder is wrong" like you can say 2+2=4. You'd lose the "self-evident" nature of moral arguments the founders were so fond of. You couldn't argue about more advanced moral issues either, like abortion or immigration or welfare, because you'd have no postulates to build a proof from.

I'm sympathetic to Prager's argument, because it has a lot of intuitive appeal. C.S. Lewis and Christian apologists after him have used an offshoot of this argument to argue for the converse. Rather than arguing that we need God to have morality, they have argued that the near universal existence in human society of morality is proof of God as the giver of that moral code within our consciences. I used to really buy into that belief, and it took me a long time, even after I no longer accepted it, to be able to explain why. So here I go.

Argument #1: Christians are in the same shaky boat

If Christians want to argue that without God, we have no moral absolutes, that's fine, but this overlooks that they're in a very similar logical quandary themselves. They have to face a question about the nature of good and evil and its relationship to God that has plagued Christian theologians for centuries. The video sort of glossed over it by saying that murder is evil because God says it is (and then showing a cartoon depiction of the Ten Commandments).

But here's the conundrum: is murder wrong because God says it's wrong, or is it wrong because it's objectively and independently wrong, and God merely happens to have the right moral beliefs, beliefs He chooses to share with us? Some hard-core Calvinists have held that morality is whatever God says it is, and that if God had chosen to say murder and rape were good, they would be good. Most theologians balk at that, because that would seem to mean that God didn't choose moral precepts out of his own character. But if we say that God commands us to do what is good because it is objectively good, then that means there is a good and an evil that predates and "outranks," if I may use that term, even God. It means murder is wrong because it's wrong, not because God says it is.

There's really no good way out of this dichotomy for Christians. If we go through door number one, then morality isn't really "moral," it's still relative or "opinion" as PragerU puts it. The only thing different about this opinion is that the supreme ruler of the universe holds this opinion. It's an extreme example of "might makes right," the kind of thing we see at the end of the Book of Job when God's answer to Job's question of why bad things happen to good people is essentially, "Shut up and be glad I didn't make it worse, because I am strong and wise and you are not."

Door number two feels right to most people, I believe, but it also makes God's rightness on moral matters contingent. God did not create good and evil. God did not tell us to murder because he happens not to like it, but because murder is wrong. It was wrong before God said anything about it. It was wrong for all 60,000 years when homo sapiens was developing the ability to record its moral precepts. If that's the case, then doesn't it really make no difference whether we believe in God or not? Shouldn't our proper interest be in the good and evil that existed before the Ten Commandments? Are we not capable of being our own priests, communicating in some sense with moral rights and wrongs that are independent of God?

You could argue that even though right and wrong are what they are without God saying anything, He is, by his completely good nature, the only being capable of revealing their nature to us. That kind of ruins Lewis's argument for morality proving the existence of God, then, because that is essentially saying we don't understand right and wrong without God, when Lewis would like to say that God plants and understanding of morality in all of us and uses that to help us find our way to Him. If Lewis's argument is true, then we will maintain a conscience whether we believe in God or not.

And lo and behold, we find cultures all over the Earth who have developed morality independently of Judeo-Christian values. Those moral codes do what moral codes are supposed to do--regulate the behavior of individuals in such a way that society becomes possible. If only God's edicts can create reliable morality, whence all these other long-standing societies?

Argument #2: So what if morality is just opinion?

I agree that murder isn't "Evil" with a capital "E." There is no Platonic perfect morality, of which our Earthly morality is just a shadow, and on which all our best moral ideas are modeled. Murder is only "evil," which is to say that society regards it as such. It's an opinion, even if it's one held by nearly everyone. For me, it's evil because it does not lead to the kind of world I want to live in, which is my main rule for deciding whether I find something moral. But others may have different reasons for thinking it wrong, and a few stragglers out there might not find it immoral at all. So why don't I find this a threat to the good of mankind, if I can't prove those who think murder isn't evil are wrong?

Consider for a moment the 1988 movie "Mac and Me." (If life has been good to you, this will be the first and only time you will ever consider it.) I cannot "prove" that it is a bad movie. There is no formula that proves it, no empirical data. But 100% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes agree that it is bad. How did we arrive at such a unanimous consensus if there is no ultimate, unshakable basis for stating what is good and bad in a movie?

I guarantee this is the only time this movie has been cited in a moral argument. 

I would contend that moral reasoning works something like aesthetic reasoning. In aesthetics, we may not be able to come to scientific statements about what is good or bad or beautiful or ugly, but we still have some hazy understanding of  what we mean, and this hazy understanding actually helps produce consensus a lot more than you'd think. Yes, 38% of the audience said they liked the movie (I would be willing to bet at least half of those are trolls pretending they loved it). We won't get total unanimity. But we can get close. Murder is the Mac and Me of the moral world. Nearly everyone who isn't just trying to troll others happens to have the same opinion. If the goal of morality is to help people know what they should and should not do, then isn't the "right ballpark" of morality good enough, even if we don't have a map to show us exactly where we are?

Prager argued that utilitarian ideas of morality fail, that they are "wishful thinking." We can't argue that people will do what is moral because they either fear punishment or wish to live in a pleasant world. Mao, Hitler, and Stalin killed, and no utilitarian argument stopped them. Here, I don't think Prager is being entirely honest. He just admitted that plenty of Christians have done evil things, even done them in God's name. But then he talked right past that and spoke of how there is a reason that the rejection of Judeo-Christian beliefs has coincided with an increase in murder. He claimed that Judeo-Chrisitan societies were the first to accomplish a host of social goods, implying that without Judeo-Christian beliefs, we can't really hope to advance the social good.

I don't deny the many good things Christians have accomplished. But they sure took their sweet time getting there for many of them. Before some Christians began opposing slavery, people arguing from the same Judeo-Christian beliefs also expanded it on a scale that had never been dreamed of before. Prior to expanding the vote to women, Christians excluded them from the vote. Why did it take so long? Maybe because for all his belief in how clear God makes morality, there aren't that many things that are really terribly clear from the Bible. Should we outlaw slavery? Christians made arguments both ways, both quoting from the same book. Should women be allowed to vote? Same thing. If God is the source of all morality, He's done a lousy job of making it clear what we ought to do and not do. Even today in America, there are liberal Christians arguing for more state welfare and conservative ones quoting Saint Paul's "if a man will not work, he will not eat," arguing for far less.

God doesn't make morality any clearer. Morality is inherently difficult, and more of a general grid on a map than a specific dot. It's a region of a graph, not one coordinate. But the map isn't really any foggier without God than with Him. Instead, we have to try to figure out what a person we cannot know and certainly cannot create proofs for wants, rather than trying to figure out what we want ourselves.

Reason #3: We already made morality without God once

Like all agnostics, I believe humanity evolved without supernatural intervention. Therefore, as unlikely as it sounds, that means human beings evolved as moral creatures. There was likely an evolutionary reason for this. Most mammals seem to show some signs of empathy, and I think empathy may help explain some of our success over the last 65 million years. If you're looking for a bedrock on which to build your moral principles, empathy might be as close to one as you've got. (Of course, this still doesn't make anything simple. If you try to go through life operating on the "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" heuristic, you'll soon find yourself in a morally difficult position of having to decide which "other" you should be doing unto when there are competing camps of "others" who want things.)

Evolved morality is not the same as God-given. This is more along the lines of behaviors that have worked in the past to help us propagate as a species than it is an unassailable principle upon which arguments can be built. We don't understand exactly how it evolved or why, but it's not too great a stretch to see how it can be evolutionarily useful as a species for one person to risk his or her life for another. Within bodies, it happens all the time, with some cells sacrificing for others. In insects, it happens at the organism level. It would not require supernatural interference for humanity to evolve selfless behavior, even to desire to behave selflessly. And nearly all mammals almost HAVE to have empathy at some point, because as milk-eaters in our infancy, we all rely on a mother who is willing, for a time, to put her interests aside for those of her children. Without this selflessness, nearly all mammals would die before having a chance to pass on genes.

Even non-mammals evolve behaviors of how to behave. Insects have incredibly sophisticated social lives. They know what is expected of them and how to act without God. And although some theists insist that "instinct" is just a word for what we don't understand and that God may have been the one to put the moral instinct there, I would respond that while I accept and enjoy the existence of beautiful mysteries, that is not the same as accepting God as an explanation for them.

It's really not very hard to imagine an evolutionary basis for morality. There are much more difficult questions for a non-theist than this one, actually. Humanity saw what was good (little "g"), did it, and when it evolved to a point where it could codify its already-existing practices, thought it important enough to put moral codes in the mouth of God. We invented right and wrong, not God.

Summary

Prager claimed that every non-theist he has ever debated admitted that without God, morality is "just an opinion." I don't know that all philosophers would agree to his dismissive characterization, but I certainly don't object to the claim that morality isn't certain. At least, it's not certain if your aim is to construct philosophical dialogues that proceed by getting someone to accept one point and then building from there, one abstract brick at a time. But maybe that's not really how moral philosophy ought to work. People are living beings. Moral philosophy ought to be about how to live as a human among humans, not how to turn morality into a geometry problem. I think it's actually a good thing that we can't always reduce moral problems to math. As C.S. Lewis once put it when explaining that the complexity of the Bible was a good thing, because it kept believers from reducing its truths too much, "No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish."

If Thanos is the force of moral evil in Infinity War, what is the force of moral good?

Critics and fans were both worried that Infinity War might fall into the trap that Avengers: Age of Ultron ran into, one where it had too many characters, and the plot either failed to get them all in and out in ways that developed each of them in meaningfully or it would slog as they all ran into each other. Those who are praising Infinity War-which seems to be the majority of people--find that the movie managed to avoid the pitfalls of having dozens of protagonists by making the central narrative focus instead upon the one villain, Thanos.

Thanos is both complicated and, in many ways, sympathetic. He is willing to use power to remake the world not for himself, but for others, at least as he sees it. He believes the universe has a problem with its intelligent life: it is the nature of sentient life to use up its resources, leading to famine, war, plague, and pestilence. His solution is a cataclysmic culling of the population. He wants to wipe out half the population of intelligent life in the Universe, and he fights to obtain the six infinity stones that will give him the power to do it effortlessly. He is willing to be brutal in order to obtain the stones--the torture of his quasi-daughter Nebula is unsettling--but by obtaining the stones, he is able to complete his objective of taking out half the universe by simply snapping his fingers. There is no suffering for any of those who are randomly chosen to die. They simply disintegrate softly.

Thanos and Malthus

Thanos's philosophy is so reminiscent of 18th-Century thinker Thomas Malthus, I was sure I wasn't the only one who noticed it. Sure enough, Googling "Thanos and Maltus" overwhelmed me with results. A lot of them dealt with the links between Malthus and Thanos better than I could. (see here, here, and here, for example, or even here for a quiz on whether a quote is from Malthus or Thanos.)

Malthus wrote his most influential work right before the industrial revolution. He saw a frightening increase in not just the population, but of the indigent population, and he theorized that people increase faster than resources to feed them. Therefore, if civilizations did not intentionally manage their own populations, they would inevitably find themselves in cyclical, cataclysmic events that culled the population for them: wars, famines, etc. Britain once used this thinking to justify not giving aid to the poor.

The only beauty contest Malthus would ever win

The main rebuttal of Malthus' thinking is that a technological society can break free of the limitations on its resources. Our world has done this on a number of occasions. The Industrial Revolution was one. A second was the revolution in food production of the 60s and 70s, which is one reason why zero population growth hasn't been an important agenda item for any politician in recent memory. In a knowledge economy, people are not just a thing to feed; they are themselves the resources that find ways to feed them. Losing one person might mean losing the one person who can figure out the solutions to our problems.

It's worth noting that at least one review seriously treated the question of whether Thanos has a point. It's possible that we will soon come to an end of our ability to solve our problems with technical solutions, and we may end up with a Malthusian conundrum after all. Thanos is a villain who presages a problem we all sense may face soon. 

What's the good guys' answer? 

The Avengers/Guardians/Dr. Strange don't offer the "knowledge economy" response as their reason for why Thanos is wrong. Most don't offer much reason at all. Their objections are instinctive and not deeply thoughtful: "You're insane," that kind of thing. Those to whom Thanos explains himself somewhat: Dr. Strange, Tony Stark, Gamora, tend to critique his plan rather crudely, by simply asking "so your solution is genocide?" or something like that.

The closest we get to an antithesis to the villain's belief comes, we shouldn't be surprised, from Captain America, the moral center of the Avengers since they first formed. Thanos is a utilitarian thinker. He believes the individual should be sacrificed for the good of society. Captain America, from his first scene, refuses to listen to a plan that involves sacrificing one member of the group for the rest of them. This is consistent with Captain's character; he has, through many movies, refused to surrender individual autonomy for the good of the state. Some even think he took his beliefs too far in Civil War, and should have been more willing to listen to a UN plan to control the Avengers. (He is never more American than in his resistance to the UN.)

So maybe Captain is the voice of moral good in the movie: all human (or whatever Vision is) life has value. We treat every single person as though their  individual lives have as much value as all of us. It is worth risking many to save one. To lose one person is a tragedy as great as losing everyone. By treating life--every life--as though it has this much meaning, we are morally centered in a coherent way where it makes sense to fight Thanos.

Only, as Vision points out, Captain America doesn't really believe his own philosophy. Captain America once sacrificed himself for the greater good (in a scene that really makes no sense and has been mocked over and over). Vision keeps trying throughout the movie to convince Scarlet Witch to use her powers to destroy one of the infinity stones that lies in his head, even if it means killing him in the process. Vision can see that there is a place for sacrifice, for putting the good of everyone ahead of the good of one person.

So there are limits to Steve Rogers's way of thinking. Steve himself is too stubborn to see the contradictions in his own thought, but it works for him. His certainty gives him clarity and the ability to work with resolution. He is like Thanos, in a way, in  his admirable resolution and his ability to carry on in a single direction in spite of obvious flaws in his philosophy.

Rogers/Captain doesn't refute Thanos's utilitarianism on utilitarian grounds the way an economist would. Rather than saying that Thanos's strategy will not achieve its end because humans and others like them can be resources for solving problems as well as consumers that cause problems to solve, Steve objects to Thanos's utilitarianism on idealistic grounds: life is valuable, even life that is inconvenient for the rest of us.

Roger's idealism is neatly counter-balanced in the film by Doctor Strange. Strange is willing, he says, to sacrifice others for the common good. He tells Iron Man he won't hesitate to sacrifice either him or Spider Man to protect the stone in his keeping, because too much is at stake. Strange is a utilitarian, although of a more limited variety than Thanos. His willingness to sacrifice some lives to save others is pitted against Thanos's willingness to do the same, even if Thanos's method is far more shocking and extreme.

But Doctor Strange makes an unexpected pivot. After holding his own against Thanos perhaps better than any of the other good guys (except the mighty Thor at the very end), Strange unexpectedly offers his infinity stone to Thanos if Thanos will spare Iron Man's life. It seems like the most foolish act in the movie (except dumb-ass Star Lord losing his shit when they almost had the gauntlet off Thanos's hand), but we are led to believe that it is actually part of Doctor Strange's plan.

Strange, we know, traveled forward in time to view over 14 million different possible future outcomes. The good guys only win one of those outcomes, and Doctor Strange is making choices to try to bring about that one outcome. Neither the audience nor the other heroes know the plan, but it evidently involves a logic in which a Rogers-like idealism on Doctor Strange's part can somehow stop Thanos.

Sacrifice

We don't know how this is going to work. I don't even really know yet if Infinity War was a great or just a good movie. I kind of need the next installment to tell me. As Doctor Strange is being disintegrated by Thanos at the end after Thanos has all six stones, he tells Iron Man that "this was the only way." We are back to the notion of sacrifice. Strange has sacrificed the many for the one, his belief in utilitarianism for idealism, and himself for Iron Man.

The idea of sacrifice is at the heart of the story now, although in an enigmatic way. Thanos had to sacrifice his daughter to obtain one of the stones, and we find that he--unexpectedly--actually loved her. Vision keeps insisting he be allowed to sacrifice himself. He finally convinces the woman he loves to destroy the stone and himself with it, but the sacrifice ultimately fails.

Since I assume that not all of the heroes (and half the world) who died at the end of the movie are going to stay dead, I'm wondering if we're going to end up in territory where those who sacrifice themselves come back from the dead. I'm wondering if we will get an ancient and mystical answer to a modern philosophical question.

The Marvel movies of the last decade have been an incredible cultural achievement. Just keeping the business side working while still making movies that nearly everyone found fun to watch was an amazing achievement. But the movies have only occasionally challenged our notions of good and evil. Civil War was the best at this, but most of the movies have given us good and bad where it was easy to know where your allegiances should be placed. If the sequel to Infinity War manages to satisfactorily offer an answer to the utilitarian-idealist question it has raised, the series will have become something more than just an impressive business model. It will have been a true work of art for our times.

Ontological ethics

When Christianity no longer held water for me in my mid-twenties, I spent a lot of time trying to dream up alternate systems for ethical decision-making. Not that Christianity provided the greatest system for making tough choices to begin with (in applying the Golden Rule, for example, how do you decide who the most important "other" is to do unto when there are competing interests?), but I had a hard time coming up with something to replace it, and pretty much all my attempts failed.

One of the more promising-seeming attempts to me was something I thought I might term "ontological ethics." That is, when a morally ambivalent situation arose, I could look to a pre-existing statement about my identity, about who I was, to guide me. This is, I think, something of the thinking behind the mission statements or identity statements that some organizations write. They hope to be guided in tough times by a statement of identity. Many have argued that this was what made Johnson and Johnson's highly ethical reaction to the 1982 Tylenol scare so admirable and why the company enjoyed such a good reputation afterwards.

I saw an example from literature I thought might provide a model. Well, only sort of from literature. It was Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, but I was primarily thinking of the Valjean from the musical, not the Hugo novel. That's because the primary ethical test Valjean faces in the musical is one he puts in rather pointed and ontological terms.

I confess. I like musicals 

If you've forgotten, the context is this: Valjean was a criminal who was released on parole. He broke his parole and became a wealthy factory owner and mayor, but the obsessive inspector Javert is determined to find Valjean. He believes he has found him in the mayor, but is unable to coax Valjean to reveal his true identity. Javert lays a trap for Valjean: he lets Valjean think that he has found a man Javert believes to be Valjean, and that Javert intends to send this innocent man to prison for life.

Valjean gives serious thought to letting the man go to prison. He is not without good reasons:

I am the master of hundreds of workers
They all look to me.
Can I abandon them, how would they live,
If I am not free?
If I speak, I am condemned,
If I stay silent, I am damned.

From a utilitarian standpoint, Valjean is probably better off letting the other man take the fall for him. It's a difficult time for working folks, and Valjean is a benevolent factory owner. His arrest and the loss of all he has built will probably mean empty stomachs for many children dependent on the wages his workers earn. From a "greatest good for the greatest number" reckoning, Valjean should shut his damn mouth.

But Valjean has decided before this particular ethical dilemma that he is not ruled by utilitarian choices. He was saved by an idealistic decision made by a priest that was the antithesis of utilitarian thinking. Therefore, Valjean determines that:

My soul belongs to God, I know
I made that bargain long ago
He gave me hope when hope was gone,
He gave me strength to carry on...
Who am I? Who am I?
I'm Jean Valjean.

That's great, but maybe a little too neat

I was very attracted to this resolution Valjean arrived at by applying an ontological solution. It seemed incredibly profound. But maybe a little too profound. This resolution was kind of a contrived and stacked solution. Of course he's able to answer his dilemma by simply answering the question of who he is: that literally is the question. Try to think of a single ethical dilemma you've faced where simply determining who you literally are so easily resolves the problem. I bet you've never faced such a thing.

(Side note: I'm probably misusing the term "ontological." Although ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with being, I think it's more concerned with fundamental questions of existence, like what it means to exist and how we can know if something really exists. Questions like "who am I?" are more personal questions asked in modernity, and are more pop psychology than philosophy. A Google search reveals only a very moderate use of the term "ontological ethics," and if it were a more philosophically valid term, I imagine it would have a lot more currency. I don't see anyone using the term in the way I meant it twenty years ago.)

Three levels of a similar dilemma

Let's say you're a Marine, sworn to uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In scenario one, you are a corporal ordered to lead your squad up a hill, and you believe the attempt will fail and you will all die without serving any useful purpose in the defeat. In scenario two, you are a General ordered by the Pentagon to carry out a strategy you believe will be ineffective and lead to many more deaths on both sides of the war than an effective strategy might. In scenario three, you are the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and you are being told to plan and prosecute a war you know the President has rigged evidence in order to start. It's an unjust war, you believe, but one the President feels needs to be fought for larger geo-political ends that justify the means.

The Corporal

As a corporal taking the hill, you aren't being asked to do an ideologically unethical thing (assuming the conflict you are in has passed whatever just war tests you apply to it--you're here, after all, so I assume you believe in the war on some level). You're being asked to do an unethical thing from a utilitarian or practical standpoint. Sacrificing lives for a cause is noble; doing it for nothing is stupid and unethical. Of course, there are possible complications. You might be wrong. Maybe the officers know something you don't know. Maybe they're counting on you to lead your squad so well you accomplish the impossible. Maybe this bad choice is the least bad choice they have.

You could refuse if you're sure the plan is bad and will kill people for nothing. But then you'd go to the brig, and someone else more enthusiastic about following bad plans will take your place. You could follow it out fully and hope for the best, but then you'd be the one who has to live with dead Marines and thinking you could have done something to help them.

There are also alternatives that try to avoid the worst effects of either choice, a Captain Kirk-like searching for the choice that avoids the no-win scenario: You could pretend to carry out the orders with alacrity, but find all kinds of procedural reasons to slow-roll the plan. You could hope that if you slow-roll it long enough, it will get cancelled.

Valjean himself ends up with a mixed response. He turns himself in, but when Javert will not give him three days to wrap up his affairs, Valjean clocks him and escapes again.

The General

The General is in an incredibly tough spot. His objection to his orders is in a murky area between ideological objections and practical ones. He could refuse his orders. As a General, he may be able to simply retire, and he could then write an op-ed in retirement about why he thinks the war is being handled wrong. But again, it's likely someone else will take his place who is a lot more gung-ho about carrying out what he thinks is a broken plan.

He has many of the same half-measure options the corporal does. He could carry out his orders according to the letter of the law, but refuse them in spirit. He could find dozens of subtle ways to undermine the strategy. He could use his position on-the-ground to slightly alter his tactical orders from what the Pentagon wanted. If he does it well, he might alleviate some of the worst parts of the Pentagon's plans. If he just quits, his influence will be limited to whatever credence the public gives to his post-service testimony.

The Chairman

The Chairman's position is the most problematic. He has the most evidence of a clear, idealistic moral wrong, but he also has the most leverage to be able to mitigate the effects of the wrong. He could, of course, quit his job, take his case to the public, and hope the court of public opinion vindicated him. But what if the President, in spite of fighting a war against his objections, rather likes the Chairman and takes his opinion seriously? What if the Chairman, by staying at his post, can at least change the kind of war America fights, if not the raw fact that there is a war?  Should he give up his best shot at influencing the situation in order to make a point?

What all three quandaries have in common

None of these moral dilemmas can be solved by applying the Valjean test. You can't say "Who am I?" and come up with an answer that will point you in the direction of a solution.

But maybe there is something similar that could be useful

If you've ever taken a multiple choice test, you're probably familiar with the strategy of answering the same thing to two different questions, because you know it's the right answer to one of them, and you figure it's better to know you're getting one of two right rather than take a chance of missing them both.

While I don't think real life offers us many instances where we can just ask ourselves who we really are and get a useful answer to a moral question, it's possible that we can develop a heuristic that will at least limit our possible errors. It's a different question from "Who am I?" It's "If I have to make a mistake, what kind of mistake would I rather make?" For the corporal, for example, his possible mistakes are: 1) Stand up for the safety of his troops and be wrong that the mission was really doomed, or 2) Err on the side of following orders, and find out that his suspicions were correct, and his Marines died without accomplishing anything discernible.

To use an example more common to many of us, let's say someone is asking us for money. We suspect they're scamming us, but there's maybe a twenty percent chance the story we're getting is real. Is it worse to trust someone and be a sucker or to doubt someone and miss a chance to help?

If we decide for ourselves what kinds of mistakes most suit who we are, and we stick to making those kinds of mistakes, we may not improve our chances of getting it right in any one situation. We might, however, limit the types of mistakes we are likely to make over the long term. Assuming that out of 1,000 truly difficult decisions, one type of action or the other is likely to be the right one in about 500 of them, we can, by being consistent, be right at least 500 times. And we'll find it easier, perhaps, to have failed on our own terms. Changing the kind of mistake we're willing to risk making with each situation, however, makes it possible we will be wrong more than half the time. (It also makes it possible we'll be right more than half the time, but do you want to take those odds?) It can also leave us bitter when we make choices that don't suit our own inner voices.

Still not sure this is satisfying

I don't know if twenty-some years of pontificating on this has led me to a more satisfying solution than I started out with. For one thing, it's possible there are some people with such a developed ability to weigh outcomes, they really can make the correct decision more than half the time. I wouldn't want to preclude people from making decisions differently from one situation to the next if they can really do it well. For me, though, I tend to be so often paralyzed by tough choices I almost just never even make them. At least having some rough algorithm might get me to make the decisions.

F***ing the pig and why I'm rethinking what I want to write

The show Black Mirror is a little bit hit-or-miss to me, but when it hits, sometimes it just crushes it. The premises of some shows are so compelling, I had my first long conversation about one of the episodes before I'd even seen it. Just the description of it was enough to draw me in.

Jump off here if you've never seen the show

Anyone who's seen the pilot episode will probably remember it forever. In it, the British Prime Minister is awakened to hear some shocking news: someone has kidnapped a popular young princess, and is threatening to kill her unless the Prime Minister has sex with a pig that same day and broadcasts the act live on television for the world to see. There are technical provisions in place that prevent faking the act. 

There is a provision that makes it less preposterous: The Prime Minister can wear a condom. 

A friend of mine told me this premise in a bar one night to entice me to watch the show (it worked), and we spent the next two hours dissecting this thought experiment. We added wrinkles to it: what if, instead of a princess, she's a poor woman with kids? What if it's ten people whose lives are at stake instead of one? Fifty? A hundred? A million? What if it's a school full of kids? 

My friend tended toward the "no negotiations with people who make me fuck pigs" end of the spectrum. I had to add a lot of people with lives hanging in the balance before he would consider carnal knowledge of a pig. (I might claim some hypocrisy here. He loves bacon.) 

The show itself isn't really about the morality of what the right decision is. It's more about the media and how media-driven public perceptions can change in an instant and determine what politicians do. At the beginning of the day, the public supports the Prime Minister's decision not to pork the pork, but after an effort to trick the kidnapper fails and the princess pays the price, the same public begins to demand he do it. The Prime Minister ultimately bows to public pressure and does the deed, but he does it so save his political career, not to save the woman. But I didn't know all this when talking about it in the bar with my friend, so we treated it like it was more or less an ethics problem: given the situation--hostage, demand, pig--what is the right course of action for the Prime Minister? I've been thinking this over for almost a year, now, and I'm still not sure what the right answer is.

Turns out, The University of Alabama has been running an advanced program in theoretical ethics for decades. 

The no argument

My friend had some good reasons to say "no" other than just not wanting to do it. First, how do you know that anyone sick enough to come up with this plan would actually release the princess? But more to the point, let's say you do what the pig perverts ask and they do release the girl. You've saved her life, but what if there are other people who then try the same thing? Now, ransoming humiliation out of politicians can become an easy way to get any politician with an agenda you dislike out of politics. You've opened the floodgates to all kinds of evil. 

The yes argument

I wanted to agree and vote no on this, but there was something that didn't sit right with me. Try changing a few parts of the situation, and you might come up with a different conclusion:

-What if, instead of schtooping a swine, the kidnappers say you must give up your life in her place? You must drink poison on national television or the woman will die with suffering. Wouldn't most people say that yes, one ought to sacrifice oneself for another? Or at least that doing so would be noble? So why is it noble to give your life to save another, but not to just be humiliated to save someone? Does pride mean more than life?

-What if it's not the Prime Minister being asked? What if it's just some random schmo, and the kidnappers have picked him as the patsy at random from a phone book? They just want to humiliate a random person. What should he do?

-What if there were no public shame element to it? Let's pretend a woman has a rare form of cancer, and scientists have discovered that pigs produce a chemical that defeats the cancer. However, they only produce it when a human male has sex with them, and so far, the hospital hasn't found any volunteers. So there are no cameras and no agendas--just the need to have intercourse with a pig to save a life. 

-Even my friend had to admit that the argument for sexing Sooey became stronger when you started adding victims, especially if the victims were children. This, of course, brings about the difficult question of how many people become enough to fuck a pig and how many is few enough to not do it. 

I couldn't help feeling there was a good moral argument that at least the first time this happens, the morally correct action is to take whatever drugs you need to take so you aren't in your mind and your equipment works, and to fuck the pig. 

Okay, I might have been encouraged to take this position because every time I said, "I think you've got to fuck the pig" in that bar, I enjoyed watching the bartender who was eavesdropping on us shake his head. But I don't think I was only ready to say there was a good argument for banging the bacon because it got a rise out of the bartender; I think that it might actually be the right thing to do. Snort coke, take an entire bottle of Viagra, hire porn stars to whisper in your ear, and do the deed. After that, resign your post in politics and retire to a monastery somewhere to live our the rest of your life. 

Two caveats: 1) Only the first person this happens to should comply. Once is noble sacrifice. Twice is inviting an outbreak of copycat crimes. (And actually, now that Black Mirror has done this idea, I don't think anyone in the real world ought to go along with it. It could very easily become a popular form of criminal mischief, like an extreme form of SWATing.) 2) Nobody can blame you if you say no. If the kidnapper's requirement was to stab yourself in the eyeball, I don't think I could make myself do that, either. How do you overcome the body's instinct not to do some things? I don't know if all the drugs in the world could get me to do it. Even if I could bring myself to try, I'd probably fail. 

More important than the yes or no

The bigger deal to me as a writer is that I can't remember having had that animated and engaged a conversation about a "literary" story in a long time. Literary fiction seems to feel that setting up a moral choice that a character must make where there are competing moral claims is beneath it somehow. That's for science fiction. It's too plot-based. Yet people love reading for these reasons. Moreover, it's clear to me what the social value is of a story meant to engender a debate over the right or wrong path in a certain situation. I'm not always sure what the social value of literary fiction is. Lit fic seems to produce a million versions of the same story, where we open a window into the psyche of a character faced with a private form of crisis, and we try to convincingly render the psychological process in the character that leads to some kind of internal change. It sometimes feels like literary fiction is the same story over and over, just with a never-ending quest to find an overlooked type of character to tell it about and a new form to fit the story into.

I've never really read sci-fi, unless you count Vonnegut. I took a course in high school on sci-fi and fantasy, where I read a lot of the best-known sci-fi short stories from a hundred years ago when I was a teenager. Since then, I've never really examined the genre. I'm rethinking this. I've written before that I'm not totally sure literary fiction is the right genre for me. All the stories I've written in the last five years have been lit fic, but maybe it's time to change that. Maybe this is the year where I take a break from the road I've been on, read some new stuff and re-think what I want to do with writing. It makes sense that I would try to write the kinds of stories I myself find compelling. 

Human rights in a resource-strapped world: The good and the bad of Hulu's "A Handmaid's Tale"

I resisted watching A Handmaid's Tale for a long time, even though everyone was talking about it and it seemed to be the darling show of the moment. Much like "Cat Person" was the right short story at the right time politically and culturally, Hulu's remake of Margaret Atwood's novel has benefited from coming to be at a time when significant segments of America feel the gains of women of the last two generations are under a counter-revolutionary attack from a conservative right. Donald Trump is seen as a marker of this counter-revolution. Handmaid has become a focal point, an easy-to-identify signifier in a cultural war. Women are dressing up in Handsmaid's garb to make a point about the lack of female voice in a misogynistic culture.

My resistance to watching it, in spite of how much everyone was talking about it, was similar to why I waited so long to watch the Christmas comedy Elf. It seemed like a story that kind of wrote itself, and I found it hard to believe it could hold enough surprises to be interesting for long. I knew the basic idea of the book: the American government is replaced by a radical theocracy. A core concept of that theocracy is the total disenfranchisement of women. The increasingly shrinking number of fertile women are used as breeding stock by the ruling class. I didn't see how there would be much I wouldn't expect.

But much like Will Ferrell can make me laugh at a joke even when I know it's coming by being utterly committed to the character, Handmaid drew me into a story I mostly knew was coming through its wonderful attention to detail and the ability of the actors to painfully incarnate the emotions of people in hopeless situations. For the women of Gilead, the Puritanical government that has replaced the United States, the time to fight back openly has passed. The women must live with the bitter knowledge that they have missed their chance to either fight or run away to Canada. (Side note: Did the Canadian government sponsor this series? Because they come off looking REALLY good in it.) Scene after scene delivers believable emotional pay-off. "The ceremony" is truly creepy time after time. It's rape, but done slowly and with community approval.

You can know it's coming and still be haunted by it

What makes the show compelling is watching how women who have been stripped of all rights and all agency struggle to find ways to fight back, to form meaningful emotional bonds, and to keep hope. I couldn't help but be reminded of the novel The Underground Railroad, which I've alluded to a few times on this blog. Both Cora the runaway slave and Offred the human baby incubator are in a political environment with so little room to maneuver, the best choice by far is to attempt to run north.

Offred has, perhaps, a little more leverage than Cora. Modern day "slavery wasn't that bad" advocates like to contend that slave owners were motivated by profit not to harm their property too severely. But white slave owning fear of rebellion was often a stronger impulse than fear of lost capital. A slave owner would sacrifice a few slaves to prevent the lot from turning. In Handmaid, no amount of rebellion seems to be enough to condemn a handmaid to death, at least not while she is still fertile. The need for babies is too strong to waste one of the few working uteri still in existence. When Ofglen is discovered to have committed "gender treason" (being gay), her partner is summarily executed, but Ofglen is sent back (after having her clitoris removed to prevent temptation) to breed more children. Offred continually finds ways to obtain leverage, whether it's playing on Serena Joy's desperate hope for a baby or Commander Waterford's need for companionship and sexual titillation. There are limits to what leverage can get her, and the season ends with us about to find out what those limits are. But she's got something to work with.

Missed opportunities

Still, the show so far leaves me wanting. We know that the environment is under duress from pollution. This is what has caused infertility among most women, and it has also apparently had an impact on the food supply. In an early episode, Offred is warned about getting certain kinds of fish that might be high in toxins. When visiting foreign dignitaries inquire about Gilead, it is a point of pride that Gilead has made strides growing oranges.

We aren't actually told this in so many words, but it's a good bet the the stress on the environment and resources had a lot to do with Gilead getting a chance to come to power in the first place. How could any militia group overthrow the world's most powerful military? Not without a lot of concern from the people that the way things are going isn't getting it done.

And herein is the first thing I haven't quite found satisfying in Handmaid. There are some really intriguing flashback moments of how it all went down, none more satisfying than the realization that Mrs. Waterford herself, although a highly intelligent and successful writer, was actually an architect of the rules meant to subjugate women and make it illegal for them to read. She was never able to publish a book on the subject, but she was the one who conceived of treating fertility as a national resource. But so far, I haven't yet found the explanation of how the revolution put Gilead in place to be understandable. I feel like the show sort of yadda-yadda-yaddas its way through parts of it by having Offred trot out the old saw about being in a bath where the water gets turned up bit by bit until you're boiled alive.

That's unsatisfying, because it's an argument used by those who fear progress as much as those who fear backsliding. What about this particular crisis made it possible for people to accept this grim society? What made it possible to erase respect for human rights to the point the handmaids lost their right to choose sexual partners?

I don't feel like the writers quite have a handle yet on their own cosmos. In adapting the book to the screen, a certain looseness has crept in. If this were a movie, and the writers made the choice to focus on the lives of the handmaids and leave the nature of the origins of calamity something of a black box, that would be fine, but in a series that aims to go on and on, the audience is going to need to feel that this world is realer. Why has this society failed to find technological solutions to its problems? Why does there seem to be no fertility treatment? Why, if it has the discipline to treat female fertility as a national resource in order to save itself, is it so carefree about male fertility? (We learn that many midwives are assigned to infertile male commanders, meaning they go through month after month of wasted ceremonies. Does nobody check the men?)

Moral certainty is a little too certain

When Offred manages to tell the visiting Mexican ambassador the truth about the lives of midwives, that they are beaten and raped and monitored, the ambassador says she's sorry. "Don't be sorry. Do something," Offred says. The ambassador responds that she can't do anything, because her country is dying. In her large hometown, a live human hasn't been born in six years. Mexico needs to trade with Gilead to obtain handmaids of its own or it will die. Offred replies, "My country is already dead." We, the audience, are meant to side with her moral indignation and believe that Offred's view is the right one. What good is it to save humanity if, in the process, we lose what makes us human?

Contrast this with the moral upside-downness of  possibly my favorite dystopian story, the musical Urinetown. In the world of the musical, years of drought have made water extremely scarce. It is illegal to urinate anywhere but in a public restroom, and there is a charge to go there. Anyone who is caught going outside the public facility is sent to Urinetown, which, in the interests of not ruining the musical if you haven't seen it, let's just say is sort of like jail.

There is a revolution against this system. Heroes rise up in the cliched way that heroes do, and the people replace the heavy-handed government with a leader who promises to share the water with the people.

The audience is meant to side with this peasant's revolt, but we're being played. The peasants' motto, "Don't give us tomorrow, just give us today" should have tipped us off. The leader who takes over after the revolt is too kind-hearted. She gives the limited water away too freely, and within a short period of time, society is on the brink of collapse because its water reserves are gone. The leader who toppled the government is now killed and replaced herself.

Is Urinetown defending dictators? I don't think so. But it is questioning the unproblematic easiness of the story where right topples might. There is a cost to an easy morality. If you apply absolutely a moral principle, even a seemingly obvious one like "people should be able to pee freely," there are costs to your absoluteness. Offred might be correct to say that her country is dead if it has lost its sense of human rights, but if the shadow group Mayday leads a revolt to topple Gilead, how will it prevent the literal death of humanity that is under duress?

This is an uncomfortable line of questioning. I'm uncomfortable writing it. Of course Gilead is wrong. That's the success of the show's close rendering of the lives of the midwives. Our empathy is activated, rightly, to feel that no matter what issues society is facing, this can't be the answer. But the show is also cheating a bit by not really putting us face to face with the issues society is facing. We only see the privileged world of the well-to-do, those who are given a handmaid. What's life like for the rest of the world? If you saw the blight there, would you feel more of a sense of understanding for how Gilead made the choices it did?

I wish people who wrote about Christians knew a few

As a side note, I was disappointed in the realization that there is a secret hotel used by the politically powerful where all of the sins of the flesh Gilead keeps under wraps are permitted. There is booze, music and dancing, and sex slaves. By making such a world, the show is demonstrating an essential contempt for the villains. This contempt doesn't make the villain more odious, it makes the villain pathetic and less frightening. Gilead would be a more formidable--and interesting-- foe if moral hypocrisy wasn't so predictably rampant. The presence of this hotel is a sign of the prejudice of the liberal mindset against religion and people who take their religion seriously. Of course there are hypocrites, but there are also Christians in America jumping in right now to fill the breach by fostering the children of families torn apart by the heroin epidemic. There are Christians who feed the poor and take medical care to other countries. The same Christians we revile for voting for Trump may have also brought medical care to Haiti, the place Trump called a "shithole." I'm not saying religion is the answer. I am no longer a Christian myself. I'm saying that it's less clearly the problem than some liberals like to pretend it is.

The intellectual argument...

I can construct an argument about why it is wrong, even if the human race depends upon it, to force the handmaids into childbearing against their will. One way to make the case is through the trolley problem, a thought experiment in ethics. In one scenario, there is a trolley car coming down the track, and there are five people on the track tied up who will be killed by the trolley. You are standing by a switch that can change the trolley to another track. But there is one person on that track tied up who will be killed. Do you pull the switch?

Almost everyone agrees the answer is yes, but critics of pure utilitarianism will add that the reason isn't simply because it's a question of saving five people versus saving one. You cannot treat people as tools, even if they are tools to accomplish something good. People are ends, not means. Flipping the switch to save five people was morally sound, and you cannot be held responsible for the unintended consequence of it killing someone else.

A variation of the scenario makes the concept of humans as ends not means clearer. A trolley is headed toward five people tied up on the track. You are standing next to a fat man on the platform. If you shove him onto the track, you are certain (I guess you're an engineer of trolleys or something) that the fat man's weight will slow down the trolley enough to stop it from killing the other five. Do you throw the fat man onto the track?

The answer is no. It's one thing for Spock, in Star Trek II, to decide that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" and sacrifice himself. It's entirely different to sacrifice someone else without consent based on that philosophy.

You might argue, based on a purely utilitarian position, that my refusal to throw the fat man on the track amounts to superstition. Sacrificing one to save five is just good math. I should do it and not hesitate. But think of what that leads you to. Do you take a healthy man and harvest his organs to save five others?

The extreme example of the problems with strict utilitarian thinking is in the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." In Ursula K. Leguin's imagining, an entire society lives in paradise, but their paradise is all predicated on one condition: the never-ending torture of a child.

...and the argument of the belly

I can make these arguments and we can see the strength of them in a society where we are all generally well-fed. Offred can make her appeal to empathy, and it will resonate with an audience in which perhaps more people are dying of diseases caused by over-eating than they are dying of being malnourished. But do these arguments ring hollow to people who are dying? If you were hungry, and the world looked like it was dying, would Gilead make more sense to you?

I hope the answer is no. I hope society would not try to build the paradise of the many on the suffering of the few. But it's foolish to try to pretend the rationale to do so isn't strong. There are five people on the track screaming, and you can save them if you just ignore that one person.

Great ethical leadership

The other day, I was discussing these very ideas with a friend of mine who is an officer in the Marine Corps. He is also a Harvard graduate, a voracious reader, and a Christian. I was keenly interested in what the Marine Corps had taught him and what he thought about making decisions in a combat scenario. If his platoon was outnumbered, and he couldn't extract them without leaving some Marines, should he sacrifice some to save most of the platoon? Given that the military believes in not leaving anyone behind, to what extent do you follow that commitment? What if you are being pursued, and there is one slow guy who, if you wait for him, will get you all killed?

He gave great answers, and he admitted that sometimes, you might be essentially throwing the fat guy off the platform, and your justification will come down to semantics. You might have to ask one group to sacrifice itself in a delaying action to save the rest of the unit. The important point to him, though, was that you don't call it a suicide mission. You call it a delaying action. You tell them to fight to the last man, to try to come out of it alive. Importantly, he felt that everyone, by signing onto the Marine Corps, had essentially given consent to be sacrificed, so it was different to him than throwing a fat man off a platform without him knowing.

On the other hand, he realized that war itself is sort of like throwing a fat man off a platform: we are killing some people against their will in the hope that it will make the world better for everyone else. In the end, he recognized that making decisions is context-dependent. There is a principle that "we leave no Marine behind." Without it, the entire band-of-brothers bond that the Corps depends on would be broken. But this is not an absolute principle. You don't kill unlimited numbers of Marines in a hopeless effort to save one person.

Preserving human rights in an resource-constrained environment requires a great ethical leader. You cannot have the pure utilitarian who cynically shakes down the poor, like in Urinetown. But that cynical utilitarian cannot be replaced with a doe-eyed idealist, either.

The best leader, in the fat man scenario, will convince the fat man to jump in front of the trolley to save others. The best leader will build a monument to the fat man and get people to call him Steve instead of just "the fat man," because damnit, the man had a name. The best leader will also fix the trolley so it doesn't run over people tied up on the tracks, so nobody else ever has to jump in front of it to stop it. That's a lot of ask of a leader, but that's the only way to avoid the extremes of a prosperous Gilead or an impoverished Mexico.

We have precious little of that kind of leadership in the real world. I'd like to see it emerge in Handsmaid's Tale, rather than a simple tale of good triumphing over evil.