I'm going to respond to some comments that Lydia McGrew left on this post:
Concerning Typhoid Mary, you are not acting contrary to what is medically best for her by quarantining her. It's rather surprising you should bring that up in any way in the context of your recommendation that doctors kill their evil patients to harvest their organs for their innocent patients! Or even in the context of deliberately refusing to treat Himmler (as, say, ER doctors) with the intent of letting him die. This has pretty much nothing to do with quarantining a patient.
I bring it up because it forced you to introduce a more qualified position on patient care than you originally presented. Now you've conceded that it's not just a question of acting in the best interest of each individual patient. Rather, there are situations when we must take into account the impact on others. Since you didn't volunteer that qualification, I had to smoke it out of you.
It's strange that you are so resistant to the example of killing baby Himmler but are actually quite open to the example of a fireman with ESP who leaves baby Himmler to die in a fire.
Lydia, there's often a morally relevant distinction between killing a person and refusing to intervene in an ongoing situation that will result in fatalities, absent intervention. There are lots of hotspots around the world. I could hop on a plane, go to one of those places, and kill some bad guys. My action would save innocent lives.
But I don't have a general obligation to be a vigilante. The fact that I didn't intervene to save the victims by killing the perpetrator is not equivalent to my killing the victims. Likewise, if the perpetrator is caught in quicksand, I don't have a duty to pull him out so that he can proceed to kill even more innocent people. But I didn't kill him–the quicksand did. I didn't put the quicksand there to trap him.
Of course, there are situations in which we do have an obligation to intervene. There's no single criterion. There are multiple criteria. Likewise, what's obligatory may depend on the particular circumstances.
You also said at one point that it just wouldn't be legitimate to ask Himmler's mom to kill him as a baby because she has a duty and an emotional attachment to him, which seems to mean that you aren't _entirely_ closed to killing baby Himmler outright.
I also said: That's different than killing the child in the daycare. There are many evils we have no moral opportunity to prevent. In that case, we must let them happen. If they are to be prevented, God must prevent them, because he hasn't given us a morally licit opportunity to do so.
But for some reason you ignore that. Likewise, I also said:
Conversely, advance knowledge of Himmler's future gives the fireman many opportunities to intervene during Himmler's formative years to redirect his course in life. There are alternatives to letting him die. Depends on how much we insulate the hypothetical.
Which I reiterated in a later post:
In addition, you're ignoring something I said before in response to the same basic objection: you have a lot more options when Himmler is four than when he is forty. As an adult, as head of the SS, with the Final Solution underway, saving his life guarantees the death of millions. But at the age of four, there are many potential opportunities to influence his development for the better and deflect him away from that horrendous career.
Yet you continue to ignore that. You don't appear to be making a good faith effort to accurately represent my stated position.
Yet in this post, you act as though you think innocent baby Himmler should be treated as an innocent child. But in that case, the fireman has a duty to rescue the innocent child. The active-passive distinction can't be combined, in anything but a really weird, ad hoc manner, with the innocence consideration to give us the conclusion that it's
a) right for doctors actively to kill adult Himmler when he is not a present threat, partly because of what he intends to do later,
b) wrong for anyone actively to kill baby Himmler when he is not a present threat, because of what he will otherwise grow up and do later,
c) right for a fireman with prophetic powers to stand by and deliberately do nothing while baby Himmler burns to death in a fire from which he could have been rescued, because of what he will otherwise grow up and do later.
If baby Himmler is innocent, he's just innocent. and the normal duties of doctors, firemen, etc., toward him hold.
If, however, their carrying out their normal duties toward him rather than deliberately withholding their aid so that baby Himmler dies makes them "enablers" of his later evil actions, it's difficult to see how there can be an absolute prohibition on killing him as a baby outright to prevent his later evil actions.
Because your objection is reductionistic, as if there's one universal criterion. I see no reason to accept that. You can only accuse me of inconsistency by oversimplifying my stated position.
I'm not an open theist, nor flirting with the idea that future statements have no fixed value. But words like "taking the lives" of other children or "insuring genocide" and the like simply abrogate free will. One can know, truly, future events that hinge on the contingent free choices of other rational creatures, but it does not follow from this that one's contributing causal actions guarantee, insure, or even are the same as (as if one is oneself "taking the lives" of their victims) those actions. To say so is simply to abrogate the fact that the later choices are _free_.That they are free doesn't mean that there is no truth value to what those choices will be. It does mean that other people's actions in saving my life don't "guarantee" or "insure" what I do later.
Well, you haven't begun to demonstrate how your affirmation of foreknowledge is consistent with your denial of inevitability. Moreover, you haven't offered a refutation of the reasons I gave. You simply assert their mutual consistency.
There can be, but those are cases of what the Catholics call "remote material cooperation," and they are as a class pretty un-cut-and-dried. Whereas the duty of firemen to save people from fires or of doctors in the ER to treat those in front of them is much more cut and dried. Your entire approach involves turning morality on its head: The good and normal actions of people who have voluntarily entered helping professions are being treated as material cooperation with the evil later actions of their patients or the people they rescue (given advance knowledge), and you are then using that to argue that their straightforward act of doing good to that person is morally dubious, that they would be justified in deliberately letting that person die despite their role in society. Indeed, given the strength of your rhetoric ("enabling," "taking the lives," "complicit," etc.), it's difficult how you can avoid arguing that the doctor or fireman has a _duty_ to _at least_ allow the person who will later do evil to die when he finds out that this is the person whom he would otherwise help.
That completely reverses the order of moral duties and the clarity of moral duties.
Ironically, it's your own position that represents a moral inversion, when–at best–you treat innocent and guilty alike, and–at worst–treat the guilty better than innocents.
You also have a bad habit of overgeneralizing. I daresay most folks don't volunteer to become firemen or trauma physicians to save the life of Himmler or Pablo Escobar. Rather, they enter those professions for the common good. To do good for garden-variety patients or ordinary at-risk citizens.
Likewise, they don't normally take future outcomes into account when making decisions because they don't have ESP.
It doesn't follow that if they had advance knowledge, that would (or should) have no affect on their decisions. Their motivations for entering these professions are based on ordinary circumstances involving normal knowledge, not extraordinary circumstances involving paranormal knowledge.
It's difficult how you can avoid arguing that the doctor or fireman has a _duty_ to _at least_ allow the person who will later do evil to die when he finds out that this is the person whom he would otherwise help. That completely reverses the order of moral duties and the clarity of moral duties.
Which simply begs the question. Ted Bundy lands in the ER with internal bleeding. If I patch him up, he will abduct, rape, torture, and murder a coed next month. ESP alerts me to that eventuality. Therefore, I give him placebo treatment instead.
According to you, that "completely reverses the order of moral duties and the clarity of moral duties." Really?
The moral duties to whom? Ted Bundy or his next victim? I doubt the coed would share your sense of moral clarity.
What makes you think the order of moral duties was ever based on that scenario?
To be quite honest, I'm having a lot of trouble telling where you are coming from concerning the fireman and letting baby Himmler die in the fire. I don't have time to go back and look up the quotes, but you have _definitely_ indicated in some statements that it *would be morally permissible* for the fireman to do that.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you are in fact ambivalent about those statements at other times or what, but I do not consider that to be in any way, shape, or form a misrepresentation of your position as you have _at times_ stated it. Now you are either backtracking or...something. Implying that I am somehow misrepresenting you. I _think_ your discussion of "opportunities to influence his future career" is meant to deny the premise of the hypothetical--namely, that the fireman _actually does know_ that if he saves this child, he'll grow up to commit genocide. That's why I haven't said anything about it before. Because it's kind of pointless when one gives someone a hypothetical to comment on to then discuss a scenario that changes the basis of the hypothetical. I asked if you held the fireman to be morally justified in letting baby Himmler die if he _knows_ he'll grow up to commit genocide otherwise. You are now emphasizing the idea that maybe the fireman or others could change that outcome because there are so many years in between. But that isn't what the hypothetical was asking about. And I had previously understood you to be saying (and I think you _were_ saying) that it would be morally legitimate for the fireman to stand aside and let four-year-old (or whatever young age) Himmler die in the fire if he knew that. In fact, at one point you referred to "taking the lives" of other children if the fireman _does_ save little Himmler under those circumstances. So I don't think that I am misrepresenting you at all. And I think that's a pretty bad consequence of your position. It also seems to create a severe tension with your leaning hard on the innocence-guilt distinction when it comes to actively _killing_ baby Himmler. As I said, if innocence (at that age) is so vital in your system, it should _also_ (at a minimum) mean that firemen, doctors, parents, teachers, and others who are normally responsible to care for and rescue the child are just as responsible as they would always be.
Lydia,
Deletei) I can't backpedal from an example that wasn't mine to begin with. My hypothetical involved Himmler as an adult. That's the default association. Himmler was head of the SS, and that's what he's famous for (or infamous for).
This isn't something I'm "now emphasizing." Rather, I mentioned it as soon as you introduced that counterexample. I couldn't very well mention it before you put that counterexample on the table for discussion.
ii) You introduced a counterhypothetical. Fine.
However, you can't necessarily substitute a different hypothetical, but keep all the other variables in place. It's not me denying the premise of the hypothetical. Rather, your own hypothetical generates different options and additional moral considerations.
When Himmler is head of the SS, the options are far more limited than Himmler as a 3-year-old. There's nothing ad hoc about taking those differences into consideration.
iii) Furthermore, hypothetical like that oscillate between foreknowledge and counterfactual knowledge. The outcome which the fireman sees is the future that will transpire if he intervenes to rescue little Himmler. And that maps onto the actual future in our own world, where Himmler did, in fact, grow up to be head of the SS.
Conversely, if he doesn't intervene, thereby allowing little Himmler to perish in the fire, then that isn't what happens in our world, or even the nearest possible world (i.e. most similar), but a very different alternate future. By not intervening, he makes that outcome counterfactual.
iv) Likewise, you keep acting as if my position should be reducible to a single criterion, invariant in every situation. I never suggested that.
v) If I'm "ambivalent," it's because there are different ways of approaching the issue in that context.
Moreover, we have borderline cases in ethics which leave us ambivalent. Most of us don't have clearcut answers for every hypothetical scenario.
However, ambivalence regarding borderline cases doesn't transfer to ambivalence regarding cases that lack those moral complexities. Borderline cases confront us with conflicting obligations. It then becomes a question of which duty should take precedence.
Given, moreover, the artificially of hypothetical scenarios, sometimes there's no good answer. It isn't hard to create moral dilemmas in the abstract. The question is whether God, in his providence, will put us in that situation.
vi) There are, of course, tragic choices in wartime where the death of children is unavoidable. Human shields. Collateral damage. That's typically justified by appeal to the double effect principle, or variations thereof.
I guess I would find it helpful for you to say definitely if it's your position that it would (given the requisite kind of counterfactual foreknowledge) be morally permissible for the firefighter to allow the young Himmler to perish in the fire. Yes, it's my hypothetical, but I think it gets at some important principles. You certainly have said things in other threads that have _strongly_ seemed to indicate a "yes" answer to that question, but now you are stating that this is a misrepresentation of your position. In that case, perhaps your position has changed since you said, inter alia, and seeming to think this was a morally viable position, "The fireman might view his prescience as a heaven-sent opportunity to avert the Final Solution. Divine authorization." And even stronger, "Furthermore, by saving this child's life, he's taking the lives of other children (hundreds of thousands) in the future."
ReplyDeleteNo, Lydia, my position hasn't changed. That's because I offered a multiple-choice answer the first time you posed that hypothetical. And I've been consistent on that.
DeleteIt's a misrepresentation of my position when you chronically oversimplify what I said. I'm noncommittal, because the hypothetical is open-ended. It creates several options.
Not every hypothetical points in one direction. Not every hypothetical yields a single answer or best answer.
If you arbitrarily restrict the scope of the hypothetical so that the only way to save hundreds of thousands of future children from the gas chambers is to let this one child die, then that might well be morally permissible. In fact, that would be weaker than what's permissible under just-war criteria. That's one end of the spectrum.
But as I've repeatedly explained, your hypothetical doesn't box the fireman into one of two options.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are hypothetical situations where we have to let Los Angeles go up in a mushroom cloud because we have no morally licit option to prevent it. We could prevent it, but only by morally illicit means.
I certainly agree that there are hypothetical scenarios where we could be morally required to let Los Angeles go up in a mushroom cloud because we cannot morally prevent it. (E.g. The terrorist says, "Shoot this kid or I blow up Los Angeles.") However, I think you are badly mistaken if you would say that the scenario I presented (where, yes, I did intend to restrict the fireman's options for influencing the future) is such a scenario. That is because rescuing a child from a fire is _not_ a wrong action and is, in fact, the fireman's duty in the context, whereas shooting a child _is_ a wrong action. Nor is the fireman's resolute refusal to act there similar to collateral damage in just war, for a great many reasons, not least of which is that the fireman is *the very person* who is responsible to save people from the fire, that he could save this particular person from the fire, that he came with the intent (until he found out what future "who" was in the fire) of saving people from the fire, and so forth.
ReplyDeleteI think this is all very much bound up with your idea that we are strongly responsible for wrong things that _other_ people do later as free actions, so that our own current _good_ actions actually become irresponsible, etc., even if those are good actions we are normally responsible to carry out--a fireman saving someone from a fire, for example. From my perspective, the fireman isn't responsible _at all_ to try to "save" thousands of children from the gas chambers by letting one child on his watch perish in the flames. That isn't a "saving" option at all. It isn't like saving thousands of children from the gas chambers by doing something totally morally neutral: "Hey, look, you can save hundreds of thousands of children from the gas chambers by writing a letter giving this information to the allies about a military target" or whatever.
Moreover, again, when you say, this, "If you arbitrarily restrict the scope of the hypothetical so that the only way to save hundreds of thousands of future children from the gas chambers is to let this one child die, then that might well be morally permissible," you are making an inconsistent use of innocence, since you have made it clear that you are _extremely_ reluctant to say that the fireman would be justified in actively _killing_ the young Himmler. Again, if young Himmler's innocence means it would be _definitely wrong_ to kill him, individually, deliberately, then his innocence should mean that it is also wrong for the fireman to stand by and say to the aghast spectators, "I'm sorry, but I have special knowledge, and this is just the way it has to be" while letting the baby perish in the flames. To let innocence matter in the judgement of active killing but not decide the judgement of deliberate abrogation of the fireman's normal rescue duties makes for a highly confused overall position.
I think you entangle yourself in all sorts of "responsibilities" that are morally extremely questionable by this idea that just carrying out one's ordinary duties of help, rescue, sustaining, etc., other human beings even _can_ involve one in responsibility for their later sins. Which of course takes us back to the doctors and the jihadi.
"That is because rescuing a child from a fire is _not_ a wrong action and is, in fact, the fireman's duty in the context."
DeleteWhich ignores the distinction between what's permissible/obligatory under ordinary circumstances and what's permissible/obligatory when there are overriding considerations come into play.
"Nor is the fireman's resolute refusal to act there similar to collateral damage in just war, for a great many reasons…"
Actually, it's dissimilar inasmuch as the fireman merely allows the child to die in a lethal situation the fireman didn't create, whereas in just war/collateral damage situations, a bomber creates the lethal situation, positively killing everyone within the blast zone.
"From my perspective, the fireman isn't responsible _at all_ to try to "save" thousands of children from the gas chambers by letting one child on his watch perish in the flames."
And that certainly presents your own position in stark relief.
"you are making an inconsistent use of innocence, since you have made it clear that you are _extremely_ reluctant to say that the fireman would be justified in actively _killing_ the young Himmler."
Lydia, it is unethical for you to willfully misrepresent my position by persistently disregarding my stated qualifications. As I've explained on several occasions now, it is not a case of applying a single criterion in every case.
"Again, if young Himmler's innocence means it would be _definitely wrong_ to kill him…"
Once again, that oversimplifies what I said.
"then his innocence should mean that it is also wrong for the fireman to stand by and say…"
No, Lydia, you can't just sweep away the distinction between allowing harm and doing harm. Depending on the situation, that can be a morally salient criterion.
"to the aghast spectators…"
If the spectators were privy to his ESP, they'd be equally if not more aghast by the preventable fate of all the future children.
"To let innocence matter in the judgement of active killing but not decide the judgement of deliberate abrogation of the fireman's normal rescue duties makes for a highly confused overall position."
Lydia, you are willfully building on a false premise by pretending that I said innocence was the only criterion, when I've explicitly and repeatedly denied that, then imputing inconsistency to my position based on that false premise.
"I think you entangle yourself in all sorts of "responsibilities" that are morally extremely questionable…"
And you entangle yourself in all sorts of "responsibilities" that are morally extremely questionable by morally compartmentalizing the actions of an agent without due regard to their impact on the life and health of others.
Since you've demonstrated an unwillingness to honestly represent my actual position, I think it best that we draw this exchange to a close.
Put another way: when, the very first time you ask, I give you a carefully qualified answer, and you proceed to selectively quote my response, minus all the caveats I built into my answer, that misrepresents my position. If I say "Don't commit murder!" and you quote me saying "Commit murder!", it's true that I used those words, but omitting the negation changes the meaning of what I said.
DeleteI'm genuinely sorry that you think I've misrepresented you, as that was never my intent. Naturally, one quotes only portions of what the other person says when responding, in order to focus on what one is planning to comment on. Moreover, I think it has been most efficient to focus on what I actually _disagree_ with--for example, that it _ever_ would be right for the fireman to stand back and leave the child to die in the flames on the basis of knowledge of what the child would otherwise grow up and do. I have tried to clarify that I _do_ mean to say that this is actual knowledge and that the fireman doesn't have some other way to change the future. It is precisely in that scenario that we disagree, which is why I have focused on it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the active-passive distinction can be extremely important (and am glad to hear you say so). I just don't agree that it can do the work that you think it can do in these scenarios (that is, killing the young Himmler vs. letting him die in the flame). I actually think that I do understand your position. We just have a disagreement.
Again, I have not intended any misrepresentation and don't _think_ that I have engaged in one.
My initial feeling that I needed to speak up was occasioned by your position concerning doctors' actively killing an evil patient (such as a jihadi). I thought it worthwhile to register strong disagreement there at what I actually consider a very _seriously_ wrong moral recommendation and, at least, have done so.
FWIW I've followed this exchange in its entirety from thread to thread and think it's one of the better examples of measured, yet strong disagreement with carefully reasoned, mature and well developed argumentation from both sides.
ReplyDeletePretty exemplary overall I'd say.