Episode 01 "THE MORAL SIDE OF MURDER"
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Justice.
This is a course about justice and we begin with a story.
Suppose you're the driver of a trolley car
and your trolley car is hurtling down the track at 60 miles an hour
and at the end of the track you notice five workers working on the track.
You try to stop but you can't. Your brakes don't work.
You feel desperate because you know
that if you crash into these five workers
they will all die. Let's assume you know that for sure.
And so you feel helpless until you notice
that there is, off to the right, a side track.
And at the end of that track
there's one worker working on the track.
Your steering wheel works.
So you can turn the trolley car, if you want to,
onto the side track
killing the one but sparing the five.
Here's our first question.
What's the right thing to do?
What would you do? Let's take a poll.
How many would turn the trolley car onto the side track?
Raise your hands.
How many wouldn't?
How many would go straight ahead?
Keep your hands up, those of you who would go straight ahead.
A handful of people would. The vast majority would turn.
Let's hear first, now we need to begin to investigate the reasons why you think
it's the right thing to do. Let's begin with those
in the majority who would turn
to go onto the side track. Why would you do it?
What would be your reason?
Who's willing to volunteer a reason?
Go ahead, stand up.
Because it can't be right to kill five people when you can only kill one person instead.
It wouldn't be right to kill five
if you could kill one person instead.
That's a good reason. That's a good reason.
Who else? Does everybody agree with that reason?
Go ahead.
Well, I was thinking it was the same reason on 9-11.
We regard the people who flew the plane into the Pennsylvania field as heroes
because they chose to kill the people in the plane
and not kill more people in big buildings.
So the principle there was the same on 9-11.
It's a tragic circumstance, but better to kill one so that five can live?
Is that the reason most of you had those of you who would turn? Yes?
Let's hear now from those in the minority,
those who wouldn't turn.
Yes.
Well, I think that's the same type of mentality that justifies genocide and totalitarianism.
In order to save one type of race, you wipe out the other.
So what would you do in this case?
You would, to avoid the horrors of genocide,
you would crash into the five and kill them?
Presumably, yes.
Yeah.
Okay, who else?
That's a brave answer. Thank you.
Let's consider another trolley car case
and see whether
those of you in the majority
want to adhere to the principle
better that one should die so that five should live.
This time you're not the driver of the trolley car, you're an onlooker.
You're standing on a bridge overlooking a trolley car track.
And down the track comes a trolley car.
At the end of the track are five workers.
The brakes don't work.
The trolley car is about to careen into the five and kill them.
And now, you're not the driver.
You really feel helpless
until you notice, standing next to you,
leaning over the bridge,
is a very fat man.
And you could give him a shove.
He would fall over the bridge, onto the track,
right in the way of the trolley car.
He would die, but he would spare the five.
Now,
how many would push the fat man over the bridge?
Raise your hand.
How many wouldn't?
Most people wouldn't.
Here's the obvious question.
What became of the principle
better to save five lives even if it means sacrificing one?
What became of the principle that almost everyone endorsed in the first case?
I need to hear from someone who was in the majority in both cases.
How do you explain the difference between the two?
Yes.
The second one, I guess, involves an active choice of pushing the person down,
which, I guess, that person himself would otherwise
not have been involved in the situation at all.
And so to choose on his behalf, I guess,
to involve him in something that he otherwise would have escaped
is, I guess, more than what you have in the first case,
where the three parties, the driver and the two sets of workers,
are already, I guess, in the situation.
But the guy working, the one on the track, off to the side,
he didn't choose to sacrifice his life any more than the fat man did, did he?
That's true, but he was on the tracks.
This guy was on the bridge.
Go ahead. You can come back if you want.
All right. It's a hard question.
You did well. You did very well.
It's a hard question.
Who else can find a way of reconciling
the reaction of the majority in these two cases? Yes.
Well, I guess, in the first case, where you have the one worker and the five,
it's a choice between those two, and you have to make a certain choice,
and people are going to die because of the trolley car,
not necessarily because of your direct actions.
The trolley car is a runway thing, and you're making a split-second choice.
Whereas, pushing the fat man over is an actual act of murder on your part.
You have control over that, whereas you may not have control over the trolley car.
So, I think it's a slightly different situation.
All right. Who has a reply? Is that as...
No, that's good. Who has a way...
Who wants to reply? Is that a way out of this?
I don't think that's a very good reason, because you choose to...
It's either way you have to choose who dies,
because you either choose to turn and kill the person,
which is an active, conscious thought to turn,
or you choose to push the fat man over, which is also an active, conscious action.
So, either way, you're making a choice.
Do you want to reply?
Well, I'm not really sure that that's the case.
It just still seems kind of different, the act of actually pushing someone over onto the tracks and killing him.
You are actually killing him yourself.
You're pushing him with your own hands.
You're pushing him.
And that's different than steering something that is going to cause death into another...
You know, it doesn't really sound right saying it now, but I'm up here.
It's good. What's your name?
Andrew.
Andrew. Let me ask you this question, Andrew.
Yes.
Suppose, standing on the bridge, next to the fat man, I didn't have to push him.
Suppose he were standing over a trap door that I could open by turning a steering wheel like that.
Would you turn?
For some reason, that still just seems more wrong.
Right?
I mean, maybe if you accidentally leaned into the steering wheel or something like that.
But, or say that the car is hurtling towards a switch that will drop the trap, then I could agree with that.
Fair enough. It still seems wrong in a way that it doesn't seem wrong in the first case to turn, you say.
And in another way, I mean, in the first situation, you're involved directly with the situation.
In the second one, you're an onlooker as well.
All right.
So you have the choice of becoming involved or not by pushing the fat man.
Let's forget for the moment about this case.
That's good.
Let's imagine a different case.
This time you're a doctor in an emergency room.
And six patients come to you.
They've been in a terrible trolley car wreck.
Five of them sustained moderate injuries.
One is severely injured.
You could spend all day caring for the one severely injured victim.
But in that time, the five would die.
Or you could look after the five, restore them to health, but during that time, the one severely injured person would die.
How many would save the five?
Now as the doctor.
How many would save the one?
Very few people.
Just a handful of people.
Same reason, I assume.
One life versus five.
Now consider another doctor case.
This time you're a transplant surgeon.
And you have five patients, each in desperate need of an organ transplant in order to survive.
One needs a heart, one a lung, one a kidney, one a liver, and the fifth a pancreas.
And you have no organ donors.
You are about to see them die.
And then it occurs to you that in the next room, there's a healthy guy who came in for a checkup.
And he's...
You like that?
And he's taking a nap.
You could go in very quietly, yank out the five organs, that person would die.
But you could save the five.
How many would do it?
Anyone?
How many? Put your hands up if you would do it.
Anyone in the balcony?
You would?
Be careful, don't lean over too much.
What?
How many wouldn't?
All right, what do you say? Speak up in the balcony, you who would yank out the organs.
Why?
I'd actually like to explore a slightly alternate possibility of just taking the one of the five who needs an organ, who dies first,
and using their four healthy organs to save the other four.
That's a pretty good idea.
That's a great idea.
Except for the fact that you just wrecked the philosophical point.
Well, let's step back from these stories and these arguments
to notice a couple of things about the way the arguments have begun to unfold.
Certain moral principles have already begun to emerge from the discussions we've had.
And let's consider what those moral principles look like.
The first moral principle that emerged in the discussion said,
the right thing to do, the moral thing to do,
depends on the consequences that will result from your action.
At the end of the day, better that five should live, even if one must die.
That's an example of consequentialist moral reasoning.
Consequentialist moral reasoning locates morality in the consequences of an act,
in a world that will result from the thing you do.
But then we went a little further, we considered those other cases,
and people weren't so sure about consequentialist moral reasoning.
When people hesitated to push the fat man over the bridge,
or to yank out the organs of the innocent patient,
people gestured toward reasons having to do with the intrinsic quality of the act itself.
Consequences be what they may.
People were reluctant.
People thought it was just wrong, categorically wrong,
to kill a person, an innocent person,
even for the sake of saving five lives.
At least people thought that in the second version of each story we considered.
So, this points to a second categorical way of thinking about moral reasoning.
Categorical moral reasoning locates morality in certain absolute moral requirements,
certain categorical duties and rights, regardless of the consequences.
We're going to explore in the days and weeks to come,
the contrast between consequentialist and categorical moral principles.
The most influential example of consequential moral reasoning is utilitarianism,
a doctrine invented by Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century English political philosopher.
The most important philosopher of categorical moral reasoning is the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
So we will look at those two different modes of moral reasoning,
assess them, and also consider others.
If you look at the syllabus you'll notice that we read a number of great and famous books.
Books by Aristotle, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others.
You'll notice too from the syllabus that we don't only read these books,
we also take up contemporary political and legal controversies that raise philosophical questions.
We will debate equality and inequality, affirmative action,
free speech versus hate speech, same-sex marriage, military conscription,
a range of practical questions.
Why? Not just to enliven these abstract and distant books,
but to make clear, to bring out what's at stake in our everyday lives, including our political lives,
for philosophy.
And so we will read these books, and we will debate these issues,
and we'll see how each informs and illuminates the other.
This may sound appealing enough, but here I have to issue a warning.
And the warning is this,
to read these books in this way,
as an exercise in self-knowledge,
to read them in this way carries certain risks.
Risks that are both personal and political.
Risks that every student of political philosophy has known.
These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us,
and unsettles us,
by confronting us with what we already know.
There's an irony.
The difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know.
It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings,
and making it strange.
That's how those examples worked,
the hypotheticals with which we began, with their mix of playfulness and sobriety.
It's also how these philosophical books work.
Philosophy estranges us from the familiar.
Not by supplying new information,
but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.
But, and here's the risk,
once the familiar turns strange,
it's never quite the same again.
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence.
However unsettling you find it,
it can never be unthought or unknown.
What makes this enterprise difficult,
but also riveting,
is that moral and political philosophy is a story,
and you don't know where the story will lead,
but what you do know is that the story is about you.
Those are the personal risks.
Now what of the political risks?
One way of introducing a course like this,
would be to promise you,
that by reading these books,
and debating these issues,
you will become a better, more responsible citizen.
You will examine the presuppositions of public policy.
You will hone your political judgment.
You will become a more effective participant in public affairs.
But this would be a partial and misleading promise.
Political philosophy, for the most part,
hasn't worked that way.
You have to allow for the possibility,
that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen,
rather than a better one.
Or at least a worse citizen,
before it makes you a better one.
And that's because philosophy is a distancing,
even debilitating activity.
And you see this going back to Socrates.
There's a dialogue, the Gorgias,
in which one of Socrates' friends,
Calyces, tries to talk him out of philosophizing.
Calyces tells Socrates,
philosophy is a pretty toy,
if one indulges in it with moderation,
at the right time of life.
But if one pursues it further than one should,
it is absolute ruin.
Take my advice, Calyces says,
abandon argument.
Learn the accomplishments of active life.
Take for your models,
not those people who spend their time on these petty quibbles,
but those who have a good livelihood,
and reputation, and many other blessings.
So Calyces is really saying to Socrates,
quit philosophizing, get real,
go to business school.
And Calyces did have a point.
He had a point, because philosophy distances us
from conventions, from established assumptions,
and from settled beliefs.
Those are the risks,
personal and political.
And in the face of these risks, there is a characteristic evasion.
The name of the evasion is skepticism.
It's the idea, well it goes something like this,
we didn't resolve, once and for all,
either the cases or the principles we were arguing when we began.
And if Aristotle, and Locke, and Kant, and Mill
haven't solved these questions after all of these years,
who are we to think
that we, here in Sanders Theater, over the course of a semester,
can resolve them?
And so maybe it's just a matter of
each person having his or her own principles,
and there's nothing more to be said about it.
No way of reasoning.
That's the evasion.
The evasion of skepticism.
To which I would offer the following reply.
It's true, these questions have been debated for a very long time.
But the very fact that they have recurred and persisted
may suggest that though they're impossible in one sense,
they're unavoidable in another.
And the reason they're unavoidable,
the reason they're inescapable,
is that we live some answer to these questions every day.
So skepticism, just throwing up your hands
and giving up on moral reflection,
is no solution.
Immanuel Kant
described very well the problem with skepticism when he wrote,
skepticism is a resting place for human reason,
where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings,
but it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement.
Simply to acquiesce in skepticism, Kant wrote,
can never suffice to overcome the restlessness of reason.
I've tried to suggest through these stories and these arguments,
some sense of the risks and temptations
of the perils and the possibilities.
I would simply conclude by saying
that the aim of this course
is to awaken the restlessness of reason
and to see where it might lead.
Thank you very much.
In a situation that desperate,
you have to do what you have to do to survive.
You have to do what you have to do.
You have to do what you have to do, pretty much.
If you've been going 19 days without any food,
someone just has to take the sacrifice,
someone has to make the sacrifice and people can survive.
All right, that's good. What's your name?
Marcus.
Marcus. What do you say to Marcus?
Last time,
we started out last time with some stories,
with some moral dilemmas,
about trolley cars,
and about doctors and healthy patients
vulnerable to being victims of organ transplantation.
We noticed two things
about the arguments we had.
One had to do with the way we were arguing.
We began with our judgments in particular cases.
We tried to articulate the reasons or the principles
lying behind our judgments.
And then, confronted with a new case,
we found ourselves re-examining those principles
revising each in the light of the other.
And we noticed the built-in pressure to try to bring into alignment
our judgments about particular cases
and the principles we would endorse on reflection.
We also noticed something about the substance of the arguments
that emerged from the discussion.
We noticed that sometimes we were tempted to locate
the morality of an act and the consequences in the results
in the state of the world that it brought about.
And we called this consequentialist moral reasoning.
But we also noticed that in some cases
we weren't swayed only by the result.
Sometimes, many of us felt,
that not just consequences but also the intrinsic quality
or character of the act matters morally.
Some people argued that there are certain things
that are just categorically wrong,
even if they bring about a good result.
Even if they save five people at the cost of one life.
So we contrasted consequentialist moral principles
with categorical ones.
Today, and in the next few days,
we will begin to examine one of the most influential
versions of consequentialist moral theory.
And that's the philosophy of utilitarianism.
Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century English political philosopher,
gave the first clear systematic expression
to the utilitarian moral theory.
And Bentham's idea,
his essential idea, is a very simple one.
With a lot of morally intuitive appeal.
Bentham's idea is the following.
The right thing to do,
the just thing to do,
is to maximize utility.
What did he mean by utility?
He meant by utility the balance
of pleasure over pain,
happiness over suffering.
Here's how he arrived at the principle of maximizing utility.
He started out by observing that all of us,
all human beings, are governed by two sovereign masters,
pain and pleasure.
We human beings like pleasure and dislike pain.
And so we should base morality
whether we're thinking about what to do in our own lives,
or whether as legislators or citizens,
we're thinking about what the laws should be.
The right thing to do individually or collectively
is to maximize, act in a way that maximizes
the overall level of happiness.
Bentham's utilitarianism is sometimes summed up with the slogan,
the greatest good for the greatest number.
With this basic principle of utility on hand,
let's begin to test it and to examine it
by turning to another case, another story,
but this time not a hypothetical story,
a real life story,
the case of the Queen versus Dudley and Stevens.
This is a 19th century British law case that's famous
and much debated in law schools.
Here's what happened in the case.
I'll summarize the story,
then I want to hear how you would rule,
imagining that you're the jury.
A newspaper account of the time
described the background.
A sadder story of disaster at sea
was never told than that of the survivors of the yacht Minunet.
The ship founded in the South Atlantic,
1300 miles from the Cape.
There were four in the crew.
Dudley was the captain.
Stevens was the first mate.
Brooks was a sailor.
All men of excellent character,
or so the newspaper account tells us.
The fourth crew member was the cabin boy,
Richard Parker, 17 years old.
He was an orphan.
He had no family.
And he was on his first long voyage at sea.
He went, the news account tells us,
rather against the advice of his friends,
he went in the hopefulness of youthful ambition,
thinking the journey would make a man of him.
Sadly, it was not to be.
The facts of the case were not in dispute.
A wave hit the ship, and the Minunet went down.
The four crew members escaped to a lifeboat.
The only food they had
were two cans of preserved turnips.
No fresh water.
For the first three days, they ate nothing.
On the fourth day,
they opened one of the cans of turnips and ate it.
The next day, they caught a turtle.
Together with the other can of turnips,
the turtle enabled them to subsist
for the next few days,
and then for eight days, they had nothing.
No food, no water.
Imagine yourself in a situation like that.
What would you do?
Here's what they did.
By now, the cabin boy, Parker,
is lying at the bottom of the lifeboat,
in the corner,
because he had drunk seawater
against the advice of the others,
and he had become ill,
and he appeared to be dying.
So on the 19th day,
Dudley, the captain, suggested
that they should all have a lottery,
that they should draw lots
to see who would die to save the rest.
Brooks refused.
He didn't like the lottery idea.
We don't know whether this was because
he didn't want to take the chance,
or because he believed in categorical moral principles.
But in any case,
no lots were drawn.
The next day,
there was still no ship in sight,
so Dudley told Brooks to avert his gaze,
and he motioned to Stevens
that the boy, Parker, had better be killed.
Dudley offered a prayer.
He told the boy his time had come,
and he killed him with a penknife,
stabbing him in the jugular vein.
Brooks emerged from his conscientious objection
to share in the gruesome bounty.
For four days,
the three of them fed on the body and blood
of the cabin boy.
True story.
And then they were rescued.
Dudley describes their rescue
in his diary,
with staggering euphemism,
quote,
on the 24th day,
as we were having our breakfast,
a ship appeared at last.
The three survivors were picked up by a German ship.
They were taken back to Falmouth in England,
where they were arrested and tried.
Brooks turned state's witness.
Dudley and Stevens went to trial.
They didn't dispute the facts.
They claimed they had acted out of necessity.
That was their defense.
They argued, in effect,
better that one should die,
so that three could survive.
The prosecutor
wasn't swayed by that argument.
He said murder is murder,
and so the case went to trial.
Now imagine you are the jury,
and just to simplify the discussion,
put aside the question of law,
and let's assume that you as the jury
are charged with deciding
whether what they did was morally permissible or not.
How many would vote
not guilty,
that what they did was morally permissible?
And how many would vote
and how many would vote guilty,
what they did was morally wrong?
A pretty sizable majority.
Now let's see what people's reasons are,
and let me begin with those who are in the minority.
Let's hear first from the defense
of Dudley and Stevens.
Why would you morally exonerate them?
What are your reasons?
Yes.
I think it is morally reprehensible,
but I think that there is a distinction
between what's morally reprehensible
and what makes someone legally accountable.
In other words, as the judge said,
what's always moral isn't necessarily against the law,
and while I don't think that necessity
justifies theft or murder or any illegal act,
at some point your degree of necessity
does in fact exonerate you from any guilt.
Okay, good.
Other defenders, other voices for the defense.
Moral justifications for what they did.
Yes.
All right, thank you.
I just feel like in a situation that desperate,
you have to do what you have to do to survive.
You have to do what you have to do.
You have to do what you have to do, pretty much.
If you've been going 19 days without any food,
someone just has to take the sacrifice,
someone has to make the sacrifice,
and people can survive.
Let's say they survive,
and then they become productive members of society
who go home and start a million charity organizations
and this and that and this and that.
I mean, they benefit everybody in the end.
I don't know what they did afterwards.
They might have gone and killed more people.
Whatever.
What if they went home and they turned out to be assassins?
What if they went home and turned out to be assassins?
You'd want to know who they assassinated.
That's true, too.
That's fair.
I want to know who they assassinated.
All right, that's good.
What's your name?
Marcus.
Marcus.
All right, we've heard a defense,
a couple of voices for the defense.
Now we need to hear from the prosecution.
Most people think what they did was wrong.
Why?
Yes.
One of the first things that I was thinking was,
oh, if they haven't been eating for a really long time,
maybe they're mentally off.
Maybe they're mentally affected.
And so then that could be used as a defense,
a possible argument that, oh,
they weren't in the proper state of mind.
They weren't making decisions they might otherwise be making.
And if that's an appealing argument,
that you have to be in an altered mindset
to do something like that,
it suggests that people who find that argument convincing
do think that they were acting in a way.
But I want to know what you think.
You defend them.
I'm sorry, you vote to convict, right?
I think they acted in a morally appropriate way.
And why not?
What do you say, here's Marcus,
he just defended them.
He said, you heard what he said.
Yes.
That you've got to do what you've got to do
in a case like that.
Yeah.
What do you say to Marcus?
That there's no situation
that would allow human beings to take
the idea of fate or the other people's lives
in their own hands,
that we don't have that kind of power.
Good.
Okay, thank you.
And what's your name?
Britt.
Britt?
Yes.
Okay, who else?
What do you say?
Stand up.
I'm wondering if Dudley and Stephen
had asked for Richard Parker's consent
from an act of murder.
And if so, is that still morally justifiable?
That's interesting.
All right, consent.
Wait, wait, hang on.
What's your name?
Kathleen.
Kathleen says, suppose they had asked,
what would that scenario look like?
So, in the story, Dudley is there,
pen, knife in hand.
But instead of the prayer,
or before the prayer,
he says,
we're desperately hungry.
We're desperately hungry.
We're desperately hungry.
As Marcus empathizes with.
We're desperately hungry.
You're not going to last long anyhow.
Yeah.
You can be a martyr.
Would you be a martyr?
How about it, Parker?
Then,
then what do you think?
Would it be morally justified then?
Suppose Parker,
in his semi-stupor,
says, okay.
I don't think it would be morally justifiable,
but I'm wondering.
Even then, even then it wouldn't be.
No.
You don't think that even with consent,
it would be morally justified.
Are there people who think,
who want to take up Kathleen's
consent idea,
and who think that that would make it morally justified?
Raise your hand if it would.
If you think it would.
That's very interesting.
Why would consent
make a moral difference?
Why would it?
Yes.
Well, I just think that if he was making his own original idea,
and it was his idea to start with,
then that would be the only situation in which
I would see it being appropriate in any way.
Because that way you couldn't make the argument that
he was pressured, you know,
it's three to one or whatever the ratio was.
Right.
If he was making a decision to give his life,
then he took on the agency
to sacrifice himself,
which some people might see as admirable,
and other people might disagree with that decision.
So, if he came up with the idea,
that's the only kind of consent
we could have confidence in, morally,
then it would be okay.
Otherwise,
it would be kind of coerced consent,
under the circumstances,
you think.
Now,
is there anyone who thinks
that even the consent of Parker
would not justify
their killing him?
Who thinks that?
Yes.
Tell us why. Stand up.
I think that Parker would be killed
with the hope that the other crew members would be rescued.
So, there's no definite reason that he should be killed,
because you don't know who,
when they're going to get rescued.
So, if you kill him,
it's killing him in vain.
Do you keep killing a crew member until you're rescued,
and then you're left with no one?
Because someone's going to die eventually.
Well, the moral logic of the situation
seems to be that,
that they would
keep on picking off the weakest,
maybe, one by one,
until they were
rescued.
And in this case, luckily,
they were rescued when three, at least,
were still alive.
Now, if
Parker did give his consent,
would it be alright, do you think, or not?
No.
No.
It still wouldn't be right.
And tell us why it wouldn't be alright.
First of all, cannibalism, I believe,
is morally incorrect.
So, you shouldn't be eating a human anyway.
So, you,
so, cannibalism is morally objectionable,
so then, even on the scenario
of waiting until someone died,
still it would be objectionable.
Yes, to me, personally.
I feel like
it all depends on
one's personal morals,
and, like, we can't sit here and just,
like, this is just my opinion,
and, of course, other people are going to disagree.
Well, we'll see.
Let's see what their disagreements are,
and then we'll see if they have reasons
that can persuade you or not.
Let's try that.
Alright.
Let's,
now, is there someone
who can explain,
those of you who are tempted by consent,
can you explain
why consent
makes such a moral difference?
What about the lottery idea?
Does that count as consent?
Remember, at the beginning,
Dudley proposed a lottery.
Suppose that they had agreed
to a lottery.
Then,
how many would then say
it was alright?
Suppose there were a lottery,
cabin boy lost,
and the rest of the story is over.
Then how many people would say
it was morally permissible?
So the numbers are rising
if we had a lottery.
Let's hear from one of you
for whom the lottery would make a moral difference.
Why would it?
I think the essential element,
in my mind, that makes it a crime
is the idea that
they decided at some point
that their lives were more important than his,
and that,
I mean, that's kind of the basis
for really any crime, right?
It's like,
my needs, my desires
are more important than yours,
and mine take precedent.
And if they had done a lottery
where everyone consented
that someone should die,
and it's sort of like
they're all sacrificing themselves
to save the rest.
Then it would be alright.
A little grotesque, but...
But morally permissible?
Yes.
And what's your name?
Matt.
So,
Matt, for you,
what bothers you is not
the cannibalism,
but the lack of due process.
I guess you could say that.
Right?
And can someone who agrees with Matt
say a little bit more
about why a lottery
would make it,
in your view,
morally permissible?
Go ahead.
The way I understood it originally
was that that was the whole issue,
is that the cabin boy
was never consulted
about whether or not
something was going to happen to him,
even with the original lottery,
whether or not he would be a part of that.
It was just decided
that he was the one
that was going to die.
Right.
That's what happened
in the actual case.
Right.
But if there were a lottery
and they'd all agreed to the procedure,
you think that would be okay?
Right.
Because then everyone knows
that there's going to be a death.
Whereas, you know,
the cabin boy didn't know
that this discussion
was even happening.
There was no, you know,
forewarning
for him to know that,
hey, I may be the one that's dying.
All right.
Now suppose
everyone agrees to the lottery,
they have the lottery,
the cabin boy loses
and he changes his mind.
You've already decided.
It's like a verbal contract.
You can't go back on that.
You've decided
the decision was made.
You know,
if you know that you're dying
for the reason
for others to live,
you would,
if someone else had died,
you know that you would consume them,
so that's fine.
Right.
But then he could say,
I know,
but I lost.
I just think that that's the whole moral issue
is that there was no consulting
of the cabin boy
and that that's what makes it
the most horrible
is that he had no idea
what was even going on.
That had he known what was going on,
it would
be a bit more understandable.
All right. Good.
Now I want to hear,
so there are some who think
it's morally permissible,
but only about 20%.
Led by Marcus.
Then there are some who say
the real problem here
is the lack of consent.
Whether the lack of consent to a lottery,
to a fair procedure,
or
Kathleen's idea,
lack of consent
at the moment
of death.
And if we add consent,
then more people are willing
to consider
the sacrifice morally justified.
I want to hear now finally
from those of you who think
even with consent,
even with a lottery,
even with a final
murmur of consent by Parker
at the very last moment,
it would still be wrong.
And why would it be wrong?
That's what I want to hear.
Yes.
Well, the whole time I've been
leaning all towards the categorical
moral reasoning.
And I think that
there's a possibility I'd be okay
with the idea of a lottery
and then the loser taking it into their own hands
to kill themselves
so that there wouldn't be an act of murder.
But I still think that
even that way it's coerced.
And also I don't think that there's any remorse.
Like in Dudley's diary,
we were eating our breakfast.
It seems as though he's just sort of like,
you know, the whole idea of
not valuing someone else's life.
So that makes me
feel like I have to take the categorical stand.
You want to throw the book at him.
When he lacks remorse
or a sense of having done anything wrong.
Right.
So, all right, good.
Other, any other
defenders of a,
who say it's just categorically wrong,
with or without consent?
Yes, stand up.
Why?
I think undoubtedly the way our society
shaped murder is murder.
Murder is murder in every way.
And our society looks at murder
down on it in the same light.
And I don't think it's any different in any case.
Good, let me ask you a question.
There were three lives at stake
versus one.
Okay.
The one, the cabin boy,
he had no family.
He had no dependents.
These other three
had families back home in England.
They had dependents.
They had wives and children.
Think back to Bentham.
Bentham says we have to consider
the welfare, the utility,
the happiness of everybody.
We have to add it all up.
So it's not just numbers three against one.
It's also all of those people at home.
In fact, the London newspaper at the time
and popular opinion sympathized with them.
Dudley and Stephens.
And the paper said if they weren't
motivated by affection
and concern for their loved ones at home
and dependents,
surely they wouldn't have done this.
Yeah, and how is that any different
from people on the corner
trying to have the same desire
to feed their family?
I don't think it's any different.
I think in any case,
if I'm murdering you to advance my status,
that's murder.
And I think that we should look at that
all in the same light.
Instead of criminalizing certain activities
and making certain things seem more violent
and savage,
when in the same case,
it's all the same.
It's all the same act and mentality
that goes into murder,
necessity to feed your family.
Suppose it weren't three.
Suppose it were 30.
300.
One life to save 300.
We're in wartime.
3,000.
Suppose the stakes are even bigger.
Suppose the stakes are even bigger.
I think it's still the same deal.
Do you think Bentham is wrong to say
the right thing to do
is to add up the collective happiness?
Do you think he's wrong about that?
I don't think he's wrong,
but I think murder is murder in any case.
Well, then Bentham has to be wrong.
If you're right, he's wrong.
Okay, then he's wrong.
All right.
Thank you.
Well done.
All right, let's step back
from this discussion
and notice
how many objections have we heard
to what they did?
We heard some defenses of what they did.
The defenses had to do with
necessity, their dire circumstance,
and implicitly at least,
the idea that numbers matter.
And not only numbers matter,
but the wider effects matter.
Their families back home,
their dependents.
Parker was an orphan.
No one would miss him.
So if you add up,
if you try to calculate
the balance
of happiness and suffering,
you might have a case for
saying what they did was the right thing.
Then we heard at least three different
objections.
We heard an objection that said
what they did was categorically wrong.
Mike, here at the end.
Categorically wrong.
Murder is murder.
It's always wrong,
even if
it increases the overall happiness
of society.
A categorical objection.
But we still need to investigate
why murder
is categorically wrong.
Is it because
even cabin boys have certain fundamental rights?
And if that's the reason,
where do those rights come from,
if not from some idea
of the larger welfare or utility or happiness?
Question number one.
Others said
a lottery would make a difference.
A fair procedure,
Matt said.
And some people were swayed by that.
That's not a categorical objection exactly.
It's saying
everybody has to be counted as an equal,
even though at the end of the day,
one can be sacrificed
for the general welfare.
That leaves us with another question to investigate.
Why does agreement to a certain procedure,
even a fair procedure,
justify whatever result flows
from the operation of that procedure?
Question number two.
And question number three,
the basic idea of consent.
Kathleen got us onto this.
If the cabin boy had agreed himself,
and not under duress,
and not beheaded,
then it would be all right to take his life to save the rest.
And even more people signed on to that idea.
But that raises
a third philosophical question.
What is the moral work
that consent does?
Why does an act of consent
make such a moral difference
that an act that would be wrong,
taking a life without consent,
is morally permissible
with consent?
To investigate those three questions,
we're going to have to read some philosophers.
And starting next time,
we're going to read Bentham
and John Stuart Mill,
utilitarian philosophers.
It's the right thing to do.
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