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Thought Experiment 7: When No One Wins

4/13/2015

4 Comments

 
Picture
Auschwitz
From a simple math problem last week, to a rape and murder this week. You never know where these thought experiments will take you.

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     Private Sacks was about to do a terrible thing. He had been ordered to first rape and then murder the prisoner, whom he knew to be no more than an innocent civilian from the wrong ethnic background. There was no doubt in his mind that this would be a gross injustice - a war crime, in fact.
     Yet quickly thinking it over he felt he had no choice but to go ahead. If he obeyed the order, he could make the ordeal as bearable as possible for the victim, making sure she suffered no more than was necessary. If he did not obey the order, he himself would be shot and the prisoner would still be violated and killed, but probably more violently. It was better for everyone if he went ahead.
     His reasoning seemed clear enough, but of course it gave him no peace of mind. How could it be that he was both going to do the best he could in the circumstances and also a terrible wrong?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 19.
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I generally haven't found the answers in Baggini's book to be very helpful for these thought experiments so far (they're usually just a few paragraphs of raising more questions), but there is an important point about how to deal with problems like this in the response for this one. I thought I should share it with you now to help confine your thinking for the week. Baggini writes:

The temptation to imagine a third possibility - perhaps just shooting the prisoner and himself - is hard to resist. But resist it we must, for in a thought experiment we control the variables, and what we are asking in this one is what he should do if the only two possibilities are to carry out the order or to refuse to do so. The whole point of fixing the dilemma this way is to force us to confront the moral problem head on, not think our way around it.

So how would you confront this? What should Private Sacks do?
4 Comments
Michael Pustilnik
10/2/2021 04:41:10 pm

Private Sacks must refuse the order. Submission to evil and participation in that evil leads to worse outcomes overall. Tyrannies that commit ethnic cleansing only succeed if people submit to them. If no one obey the order of a tyrant, the tyrant will fall. By submitting to evil, Sacks becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

If Sacks obeys the order, and claims he did so out of fear of his life, it sounds to me like he is looking for an excuse to commit a rape that he wanted to commit anyway.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
10/3/2021 09:17:11 am

Hi Michael. Thanks for stopping by and commenting. Here's the answer I wrote to this thought experiment.

https://www.evphil.com/blog/response-to-thought-experiment-7-when-no-one-wins

Reply
Michael Pustilnik
10/8/2021 02:48:33 am

I read your response, and found it interesting.

The story of Ishmael is both horrifying and inspiring. It is certainly a testiment to human resiliency that Ishmael could recover from his life as a child soldier and become a human rights activist.
However, this is very different from the dilemma of Private Sacks. Ishmael was a conscripted child, who was given drugs by adults. Ishmael as a child soldier was not really capable of making any moral decisions, Private Sacks is presented as an adult. If we are charitable, Sacks is striving to make the correct moral choice under very bad circumstances. If we are less charitable, Sacks is using rationalization to justify the crime he intends to commit.

I see two major omissions in Sacks' reasoning.

First, Sacks is presenting reducing human suffering as the only criterion for making moral decision. So "the prisoner suffers less" and "Sacks survives" is enough to justify rape and murder. He is ignoring less tangible criteria. It is important to oppose tyranny and genocide rather than to support it. It is important to serve the cause of good rather than the cause of evil.

Second, Sacks is focusing totally on the short term consequences and ignoring the long term consequences. If Sacks goes ahead and commits the rape and murder, it is likely that he will be ordered to do exactly the same thing a day or two later. Genocidal tyrannies generally don't stop killing on their own. They keep killing until they are defeated by outside forces. If Sacks uses similar logic to justify a second rape and murder and then a third, then Sacks is basically a murdering monster. If the tyranny were to be later defeated and Sacks were captured and put on trial, he would probably receive the death penalty. And rightly so, in my opinion.

I might agree with Sacks commiting the crime if the conditions of the dilemma were changed. If the order was to commit a rape, but Sacks is allowed to choose whether or not to kill the victim, and he expects the victim to die if someone else commits the rape, then Sacks should obey the order. But Sacks should also be looking to desert the tyrant's army ASAP so that he doesn't face the same dilemma the next day.

Ed Gibney link
10/8/2021 09:16:23 am

Thanks for your extended thoughts Michael. That is certainly the point of these thought experiments—to get you thinking! All of these extra circumstances in the story of Private Sacks were omitted for this very reason; so you can change your opinions depending on which options are considered. I would say I generally agree with the if/then statements you've made. I would just consider this statement a bit more:

--> It is important to oppose tyranny and genocide rather than to support it. It is important to serve the cause of good rather than the cause of evil.

Perhaps Sacks can best oppose tyranny in the long run by being a witness to their atrocities and acting as reluctantly as possible in order to gum up the works of evil and slowly raise the conscientiousness of the perpetrators. Perhaps he himself would become a monster under these circumstances, and we wouldn't actually trust his story later that "I was only trying my best!" But in this theoretical realm, I can put myself in his position and wonder what I would try to do to stay alive and fight tyranny as best as possible.

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