101 Ethical Dilemmas

Martin Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134139408
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Will meat eaters get into heaven? Do trees have rights? Is it ever right to design a baby? What would you do? Would you always do the right thing? Is there a right thing? In this second edition of his thought-provoking and highly engaging introduction to ethics, Martin Cohen brings us eleven brand new ethical dilemmas including:

The Dodgy Donor Clinic

The Famous Footbridge Dilemma

The Human Canonball.

From overcrowded lifeboats to the censor's pen, Martin Cohen's stimulating and amusing dilemmas reveal the subtleties, complexities and contradictions that make up the rich tapestry of ethics. From DIY babies and breeding experiments to 'Twinkies courtroom drama' and Newgate Prison, there is a dilemma for everyone. This book may not help you become a good person, but at least you will have had a good think about it.

Discussions

Dilemmas 1 and 2
The lifeboat and Sinking further

To what extent should an individual risk their own well-being for the well-being of others (and in this case a responsible captain risks the lives of others under his command)? This is a slightly glorified version of the biologist Garrett Hardin’s socalled ‘lifeboat’ scenario. In a bit of applied utilitarianism, it is designed to show that rich countries do not have any obligations to poor countries, as they would endanger the well-being of their own populations were they to attempt to admit the world’s poor in the rich world’s ‘lifeboat’. If the world’s wealth was shared out equally, it might only mean that everyone had too little. Hardin argues that ‘altruism’ can only apply on a small scale.

Professor Hardin is not interested too much in rescuing individuals, as he sees the problem as one of too many people anyway. The ‘population problem’ is the ‘root cause of both hunger and poverty’, he insists. Or rather, he says, it is the ‘180 separate national population problems’. (That’s enough for another book, albeit not a very interesting one.) The only important ethical principle here is that no one must try to solve their population problem by exporting their excess people to other countries. Expanding his famous metaphor, Hardin continues, saying that each rich nation is a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people, some of whom feel sorry for the people in ‘more crowded’ lifeboats. These ‘heart-on-sleeve’ people, he says, should ‘get out and yield their place to others’. Yes, Bert can help Tom – by jumping overboard! The net result of conscience-stricken people relinquishing their unjustly held positions, Hardin concludes with Nietzschean zeal, is the elimination of their kind of conscience from the lifeboat. ‘The lifeboat, as it were, purifies itself of guilt.’

But there is one other possibility open to Bert. He can rescue Tom, and save the lifeboat too – by pushing the captain overboard. And wouldn’t that be ethical? No wonder Professor Hardhearted’s position is that social systems are rendered unstable by such altruistic tendencies . . .

On the larger scale, survival of some necessitates and requires the non-survival of the rest. (Biologically speaking – think ‘fruit flies’.) The ‘starvation hunger process’ is essential to the balancing of the human population. However, like the lifeboat, the global example risks foundering on the practical question of whether the boat/rich world will really sink – or is it just a question of squashing up a bit, maybe taking a risk on behalf of others, which is a slightly different question.

And the bit of captain’s schoolboy Latin? Doubtless Flintheart is saying impossibilium nulla est obligatio – nobody is obliged to do what is impossible, one of the fundamental principles of the old Roman civil law. Naturally, not all philosophers agree on that.

Dilemma 3
The psychologists’ tale

One of the great challenges of philosophy is the riddle posed by the ancient oracle at Delphi, the simple injunction: ‘know thyself’. Aren’t most people basically good, with just a few secret sadists and repressed killers lurking amongst us?

Unfortunately, it seems the difference is often only skin deep, not at all as many philosophers imagined. Just in the last few generations we have seen the good people carrying out the slaughter of the First World War, the concentration and extermination camps for the enemies of the Third Reich, the prison camps and mass starvations of the Stalinists, not to mention the ‘saturation bombings’ of civilians all over Asia, the carefully planned genocidal killings in Rwanda, Cambodia and the Balkans – the list goes on and on. Perhaps more chilling than the bald facts are the details caught forever in the photographs – of the passers-by pausing to spit or throw stones at Jews on their way to the concentration camps, or the proud small-town American folk posing in their Sunday best by poplar trees, from which hang, in the words of the song, that ‘strange fruit / swinging in the Southern breeze’. The fruit here being the mutilated corpses of blacks, some of the estimated 5,000 lynched in the seventy or so years leading up to the Civil Rights victories in the 1960s.

Stanley Milgram of Yale University devised a simple test to see whether people need to be ‘bad’ before they can be persuaded to do bad things. Alas, it seems not. They can be persuaded to ‘adjust’ their moral beliefs very easily. In one experiment, Milgram asked students to give another student an electric shock every time they got answers wrong, in a sort of memory test. The ‘experimenter’ encouraged them to keep ‘punishing’ the students in the interests of science – even when they started to scream and writhe in pain. (It is of only small consolation that the student being electrocuted was in fact an actor and part of the experiment. The indifference of the ‘ordinary person’ inflicting the pain was real enough.)

Philosophers have traditionally been suspicious of unguided human nature, with the noteworthy exception of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – who was a rogue himself. Most of the Ancients thought that only a few people could be trusted to be ethical: and that societies needed a ‘virtuous man’ to rule over them. Confucius, like Aristotle, meant by this, a ‘noble’ man, others reinterpreted it to be a ‘superior man’ with certain qualities instead: wise, courageous, humane. Plato is almost alone in including women in his definition of suitable ‘guardians’. The superior man both thinks and acts well – virtuously – modelling his behaviour on the great men of the past. He understands that life is a quest for perfection and learning, a quest that is unending and necessarily never completed. Confucius identified the pitfalls on the way, the Tao, as greed and aggression, resentment and pride, and self-interest. The best protection is education – knowledge. A key component of which is offered in the Analects (c.550 BC). In reply to an entreaty to sum up the moral life in a single word, Confucius offers: ‘Reciprocity’. By which he meant, do not inflict on others what you yourself would not wish done to you.

Some centuries later, Mohammed recommended the velayat-e faqih – the clerical rule of Guardians in Islamic lands. In the twelfth century, Moses Maimonides, the Spanish North African rabbi-philosopher (1155–1204) advised in his Guide to the Perplexed (c.1190) that virtue is simply a means of becoming good at following the religious code. That other great Chinese philosopher, Mencius (371–289 BC) however, differed from Confucius significantly, as he thought people were born good, but were corrupted by their miserable lives (and circumstances). From his perspective the crucial thing is to look inward for virtue, to find our original nature.

Benevolence is the heart of man, and straightens his road. Sad it is indeed when a man gives up the right road instead of following it and allows his heart to stray without enough sense to go after it. When his chickens and dogs stray, he has sense enough to go after them, but not when his heart strays.

So the answer is? With only three ethical dilemmas so far, we have only just scratched the surface of the complexity and downright contradictoriness that is the human psyche.

Mrs Goebbels does ‘the right thing’

Actually, the Nazis often appear in ethics books as examples of people who were clearly evil. They can be offered as an illustration of the reality of evil to even the most blasé of would-be relativists. Funny thing is, lots of ordinary Germans, people who we can no more explain away as ‘evil’ than we can Zimbardo’s students, did not seem to realise this, even as evidence of the horrors of the National Socialists and indeed their hypocrisy and failure could be measured in the piles of bodies lying in the streets during the regime’s ‘last few days’ in 1945.

Mrs Goebbels, ‘Magda’, sums up the apparently inexhaustible ability of people both to whitewash their own motives, and the ostensibly magnificent aspirations of the Nazis, in the last days in the Berlin bunker. As her husband, the terrifying propogandist, was preparing their suicide, along with their six little children, she wrote a letter to her son by an earlier marriage living in another part of the country. In it, she explains that she had decided to put an end, ‘the only possible, honourable end’, to her National Socialist life. ‘I want you to know that I stayed with Papa [Goebbels] against his will, that as recently as last Sunday the Führer still offered to help me get away. But I did not have to think twice. Our glorious idea is in ruins, and with everything I have known in my life that was beautiful, noble and good.’

Gobbles himself, the insatiable propagandist, could not resist penning, in neat letters, his own postscript:

‘One day the lies will crumble and the truth will triumph. That will be the hour when we will tower over everything, pure and spotless . . . ’

The next day, Magda, wearing her golden Nazi Party badge (given to her by Hitler just three days before) poisoned her six small children with hydrogen cyanide, and was in turn shot by her husband, who then turned the gun on himself.

Dilemma 4
Custom is king

Actually, no one could agree over the UN Declaration of Human Rights either. The Saudis expressed the doubts of many other countries by objecting to the inclusion of women’s rights and ‘freedom of religion’ particularly. They thought these were not ‘universal’, or ‘natural’ at all. Certainly their customs tell a different story. But the opposition between nature and culture is an ancient one, presented by the Sophists (fifth century BC) as between pysis, nature, and nomos, law or custom, and it is hard sometimes to know which one is worse. But here are the facts backing up our alternative declaration:

1 We assert the fundamental right to torture and kill people in all sorts of ingenious and cruel ways.

People generally have favoured the use of torture, over the ages merely devising new and more horrible forms of it. Dungeons were part of the process too, ingeniously constructed to destroy the will of the prisoner. One in the Bastille in Paris was constructed to be a downwards pointing cone so that it would be impossible to lie down, sit, let alone stand.

After confessions of misdeeds have been obtained through torture, a painful death is also the historical norm, with burning probably the most cruel and yet the most easily arranged. In 1252, the church gave torture its seal of approval when Pope Innocent IV issued a papal bull authorising the setting up of the ‘machinery for systematic persecution’, the so-called Inquisition, as a way of obtaining confessions to heresy. Four years later, with licensed secular torturers struggling to keep up with demand, Pope Alexander IV authorised church officials to use torture too. For twelve generations the Inquisition did an imaginative job in providing an advance view of Hell for the people of Europe on Earth too.

Even so, throughout the Middle Ages, there was one ‘out-of-step’ European country, England, which declined to adopt the use of torture as a judicial method – other than the ‘pressing of prisoners’, as described in Dilemma 89. Barbaro, a Venetian ambassador of the sixteenth century, observed that the English were concerned that torture of the innocent ‘spoils the body and an innocent life’ and strangely thought it better to ‘release a criminal than punish an innocent man’!

Today, torture is alive and well in many countries.

2 We assert the inalienable right to own slaves and declare that some people are fit only to be slaves.

Another historical constant is the use of slaves, be they slaves from birth, from conquest or whatever. Aristotle and Plato both produced justifications for slavery centred on the lower abilities of slaves, seen as more akin to animals. Both Christianity and Islam have been apologists for the practice, despite Mohammed setting free his own slaves and instructing that all men should be brothers and treated as equals. (Well, that’s half the human race freed, anyway.)

For 300 years, the infamous African slave trade was based on and facilitated by African customs of selling their neighbours. The peculiar contribution of the Europeans was to develop a theory of racial superiority to justify their own involvement. The prevalence of this custom can be shown by the fact that when the British undertook a census of India in 1841 they found a mind-boggling 10 million slaves. (They passed laws forbidding the custom in 1862.) Today, there are still thought to be at least 200,000 child slaves sold by African nations alone. Countries like Benin maintain this is a ‘custom’, in which children are given ‘work experience’ abroad. In 2001, the world’s interest was briefly kindled when one such modern day slave ship, the Etireno, en route to Gabon, was accused of having thrown 250 children overboard (as surplus to orders).

3 We claim the natural right to kill babies for any reason we care to think of.

Killing newborn babies (infanticide) is another worldwide customary norm with, until very recently, only the odd country like Egypt and Cambodia having divergent customs suggesting that ALL children must be reared. Usually it was girl babies that were killed, but it could be, as in Madagascar, any child born on an ‘unlucky day’.

A long line of ethical thinkers from Seneca to Peter Singer write of killing ‘defective’ children. They even see it as a wise and prudent action suitable for use as a policy benchmark. Singer et al. seem to see childbirth as a bit like getting coffee from a vending machine. The babies are all infinitely replicable, some are just ‘better’ than others. Preventing the birth of ‘defective’ children is only like blocking off a button marked ‘weak coffee’ on the human slot machine. (And no wonder feminists object to the way women are portrayed in the fertility debate.)

Customary rights

When the Icelanders accepted the moral guidance of the Christian church, they insisted on just two cultural exceptions: they wanted to be able to continue to eat horses, and to kill children. Curiously, it was the Christian emphasis on the dreadfulness of children dying ‘unbaptised’ that had more effect in changing practice than anything else.

4 And demand the right to kill the old and infirm and eat their bodies afterwards.

Killing old people was widespread until recently, but never universal. Herodotus’ story of the Massagetae, who boiled their old folk with beef, and ate the mixture as a treat, is perhaps the best known, but there are many other equally queasymaking stories. One tribe in Niger were said to kill their old people, smoke and pulverise the bodies, and then compress the powder into little balls with corn and water. These unedifying burgers were kept for long periods as a basic food. Some people rationalise this today by saying that it reflected the cruel necessity of life in harsh conditions, citing stories of Inuits (like the Hudson Bay Inuit who strangle the old), or the Tupis (of Brazil, who killed any elderly person who became ill, and then ate the corpse) or the Tobas (of Paraguay, who were reputed to bury their old folk alive) to illustrate both the necessity and the good intentions of the tribes. However, these customs were never universal – some tribes had found other solutions. American Indian tribes like the Poncas and Omahas, as well as some Incas, created a role for the old and infirm by leaving them at home, with supplies, while the rest of the tribe hunted or gathered. The old watched the cornfields and scared away birds, so they were of use and the ‘cruel necessity’ is exposed somewhat.

Eating people is not wrong, as such. A Miranhas cannibal explained to the anthropologists Spix and Martius, that ‘it is all a matter of habit. When I have killed an enemy, it is better to eat him than to let him go to waste. Big game is rare because it does not lay eggs like turtles. The bad thing is not being eaten, but death . . . you whites are really too dainty!’

See also Dilemma 75 for some peculiar tales of Herodotus.

Dilemmas 5–7

This type of ‘personal dilemma’ is very common – hardly any of us will avoid finding ourselves in such a dubious situation, be it just an opportunity to travel without paying on the train, or leave the shop with some unintended purchases. We are caught between the two horns of ‘personal interest’ and ‘impersonal principles’, which is precisely where Thomas Nagel thought most ethical dilemmas were to be found. Not that Kant would have any of it – he denied that there were any dilemmas at all, that a ‘perfect duty’ always could and always should be obeyed. Otherwise it would not be perfect. The danger of allowing that there might be ‘irresolvable dilemmas’ is that the only ‘logical’ response might be that unspeakable ethical hobgoblin: relativism. In this fear, Kant is temporarily in unlikely alliance with the utilitarians, whose system was also supposed to make impossible such ambiguities. Even so, John Stuart Mill himself acknowledged that:

There exists no moral system under which there do not arise unequivocal cases of moral obligation. These are the real difficulties, the knotty points in the theory of eth...