anderson@ittvax.UUCP (Scott Anderson) (04/05/84)
I have great respect for Laura Creighton's intelligence, which
is why I was surprised at the foolishness of her last article--
the one about black, white, and grey. Perhaps I misunderstood.
Laura says:
Before anyone can identify something as grey one must first be able
to recognise white and black. In the field of moral judgements this
requires being able to determine what is good and what is evil.
However, once one has determined this there can be no justification
for choosing the grey -- one should go for the white. Moral
blackness involves pretending to oneself that one is ``merely
grey'' rather than recognising that one is persuing evil to a great
extent.
Of course one should "go for the white," but the problem is that there
isn't any hard decision in the real world in which one of the possible
options is entirely white. Each choice invariablely has good effects
("white" for those of you who need color-coding) and bad effects (black)
and so the result is, metaphorically speaking, grey. In making a hard
decision, one examines, as deeply as one can, all the effects of each
choice, and then one tries to pick the one that has the most good (white)
and the least bad (black). One chooses the lightest shade of grey.
An example is in order. Using only Laura's postulate that "Life is
good" and the theorem "anything which preserves or enhances life is
good," I submit the following hard decision: While camping with two
friends that are hyperallegic to @i(Hymenoptera) (bees, wasps, ants,
etc.), you stumble on a large hornets nest and everybody gets stung
badly. Both friends are lying on the ground in the throes of
anaphylactic shock, and cardiac arrest and death are imminent. Because
of the severity of the attack, you don't have enough epinephrine
(adrenalin) to save everyone, but you have SOME. Give the injection to
either person and that person might live (you never know; there's no
such thing as a sure bet). Give half to each and they'll probably both
die. Give the injection to George (a "good") and Sally dies (a "bad"),
and vice versa. Or give some to both--betting on a double good versus
a double bad. We've got three choices and there are NO white ones.
They're all grey. Welcome to the world that Hamlet (as in "To be or
not to be") and Sophie (as in the movie @i(Sophie's Choice)) live in:
a world of hard choices.
Just because you have an opinion about what the right answer is
(whatever "right answer" means), does not mean that the option you
chose was white and the options you rejected were black. It does not
mean that anyone who disagrees with your choice and makes a different
one is wrong. In the example above, the Don Quixote/Sir Lancelot in me
might well up and I'd save Sally over George merely because she had two
X chromosomes. "That's a silly reason," you say. But would I be
wrong? Well, Sally would be alive, and that's not all bad.
I believe that the answer to 99% (or some high proportion) of all abstract
moral questions is: it depends. It depends on the particulars of the
concrete case--the people involved, their feelings, strength, means, etc.
For some sets of people, the answer may be "yes," while for other sets
the answer may be "no." (What's the question? I don't know.)
I believe that abortion is such a question.
Scott D. Anderson
decvax!ittvax!andersonlaura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (04/09/84)
Black/White/Grey again... First of all, it is important to realise that ethics is not what you dust off and take out in times of emergencies. A system of ethics which works perfectly well in a situation where there are floods, earthquakes, people in lifeboats, loved ones who stand to profit by your death, and all of the other situations which populate ethics textbooks - but has nothing to say about how to live in normal circumstances is next to useless -- since most people do not ever have to live under these conditions and nobody has to live under those circumstances very long. (you will either revert the circumstance back to normal or you will die.) Now onto the bees. The bees are part of the sort of disasters which insurance companies label ``acts of God''. (So everybody go home and read your insurance. A few years ago, my grandmother's cottage was flooded out, lifted off its foundation, and moved into the next lot. Despite having flood and fire protection, we had to pay to have it moved back, because ``getting moved of your foundation'' was an ``act of God''.) Okay. It doesn't particularily matter if the term is inaccurate (personally, I can't see God, even if he exists, clapping his hands with glee as he summons up the water that will move the cottage intothe next lot), as long as the sense is preserved. Having your friends on the ground dying of beestings is an unnatural condition. It is necessary to go back and look at it from the long view when one starts thinking about who one should administer anti-toxin to. It is not that you will be killing these people if you do not administer the drug to them -- they are already dying and indeed it is an act of benevolence on your part to save them at all. (the situation is different if you raised the bees and released them to attack your friends, or if you poked at the hive and were responsible for their anger -- especially if you did so knowing full well that there was not enough anti-toxin and expecting your friends to be stung). However, most people would *want* to save their friend's life (and if the do not want then they have no business calling themselves a friend of the other person) and indeed want to save the lives of strangers when it does not risk their own. (Some people want to save the lives of strangers even at a risk to their own life, which is another story.) Therefore, you start administering the anti-toxin. If certain of your friends die because there is not enough drug, then you will wish that you had had the foresight to bring enough drug, and that the bees had not attacked. The same thoughts will hold if you *had* enough drug but your friends died before you could administer it, or died despite your administering it. It is never nice to have a friend die. But the thing to remember is that you did not kill your friends by not administering the drug. Your intention was never to kill person X to save the life of person Y even though person X may die -- the intention is to save everyone, and the responsibility for the death belongs to whoever upset the bess or god/the way the universe is if nobody disturbed them. The great injustice for those of us that do not have a happy hearafter to look forward to is that we have to die at all. God/the nature of the universe demands that. This does not make anybody responsible for the fact that I have to die, but only (conceivably) for the exact death that I will have, if I die by my own hand or by the hand of another. Abortion is not such an issue, since people who have abortions really do intend the death of the fetus as a means to whatever they want. And a pregnancy is not an ``Act of God'' in the way that an flood or other emergency is. There is only one way to get pregnant, and it doesn't require divine intervention. (except, if you believe Scripture -- ONCE.) It may be that as you discover you are pregnant you may wish that you had not had any sex, but this is akin to having wished that you hadn't stirred up the bees that bothered your friends, or, given that you did not parctise birth control, that you had not been lazy and left the supplies of the drug at home, even though you knew that your friends were allergic and it would have been easy to have brought the drugs with you, but you chose not to. -- Laura Creighton utzoo!laura "Not to perpetrate cowardice against one's own acts! Not to leave them in the lurch afterward! The bite of conscience is indecent" -- Nietzsche The Twilight of the Idols (maxim 10)