Analogies of Death

Image by Brian Merrill from Pixabay

Analogies of Death

By Joel Levin

We often try to make sense of the world, particularly those parts of the world that are unfamiliar, by comparing them to the things more familiar, things we know something about. We say something is like something else, someone reminds us of someone else, that situation is not unlike one we have seen before in certain relevant respects. Analogies, through comparisons and rationales, provide us a guide to what otherwise would be the treacherous unknown. We might argue about our choice of analogies, that is, what is better suited or closer to what we are encountering at hand, and try to see what our best course, through comparison with the previous familiar, of proceeding might be. 

How might that work with some of the Covid-19 pandemic calculations, particularly the one overarching strategy of doing what is best for most of the people at the cost of letting a few people, those we label blithely as ‘co-morbid’, suffer? That is often the way things are framed in economic planning, whether, starkly, we should increase the general welfare for most individuals – opening schools, letting businesses operate, allowing people to use restaurants and hotels and airlines, returning to parks and sporting events – at the cost of a greater infection rate for the most vulnerable, those who will not do well in a scenario where so much of society is allowed, maskless and boundless, to wander freely. This is something like the problem of what utilitarians, perhaps unfortunately, called the “hedonistic calculus”, which is more often, and more fortunately, reduced to their slogan of achieving the greatest good for the greatest number.

So let us introduce a potential analogy: one involving the execution of an innocent man to achieve peace and prosperity in a society. Initially, of course, we are, more or less horrified, but our instincts need testing, of course. That said, how much is this like forcing the economy open at the cost of additional lives, as Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, to a large extent guided by the Presidential advisors, Dr. Scott Atlas and Peter Navarro, have done. 

How might we compare the two, opening the pandemic economy and executing, perhaps we could think of sacrificing, an innocent human, and think them analogous? We need to make a few assumptions about the execution of this innocent man. Let us begin by imagining the following thought experiment: there has been a murderous crime spree that has terrified a certain city. The number of victims is inconceivably large and the effects of the murders have been, more or less, to shut the city down. People are afraid to leave their house, send their kids to school, go to work, spend time in the parks, or even venture out for food or medicine. A large population has become miserable. 

Then, suddenly, a suspect is arrested and he seems without question to be the guilty man, the sole perpetrator of the terror. He is given an extremely fair trial, provided the best counsel, tried before the most sage of judges. After reasonable consideration by a surprisingly impartial jury, he is sentenced to death. In light of all the events, the appellant process works with dazzling speed and the suspect is scheduled to be executed in a matter of months from his conviction. The man to be executed is a lifelong depressive, with extremely low self-esteem, leading an existence obscure, forgotten and neglected. We will also assume two further things are true: first, being labeled the celebrity killer has been the highpoint of the suspect’s otherwise miserable life; and second, given his depressive and constant suicidal state, he is happy to be executed, even looking forward to it. One final critical fact needs to be mentioned: the governor, who holds the power to pardon the suspect, secretly knows (but cannot reveal) that the suspect is not the real murderer, but also secretly knows (again for reasons that cannot be revealed and could never be proven), that the real murderer coincidentally died at the time of the arrest of the suspect. (We might imagine the governor to be a physician, clergy or lawyer, who learned the information in a privileged manner, with the privilege surviving death, or perhaps, if not, the real murderer now being traumatically ill on long-term life support, clinging only to the privilege).

 Meanwhile, life in the city has returned to normal with the arrest and conviction of the innocent man, allowing people to go back to their jobs and schools and to the enjoyment of everyday life. Any normal benefits and detriments calculation (what philosophers and economists, following their common mentor, Jeremy Bentham, referred to as the “hedonistic calculus”) would suggest that the execution should go forward. For happiness, welfare, preferences, pleasures, or whatever we might want to measure, all indications of a better life have risen dramatically since the arrest, in aid of achieving the greatest good for the greatest number. All would be severely jeopardized if the suspect were freed. The thought that the terror would begin again would paralyze the populace. The governor could never be allowed to prove that the real killer is gone, with that inability creating dramatically negative consequences for all of society. Whether one is measuring happiness or welfare, the net gain by going through with the execution is indisputable. 

There is only one person who might be thought to lose by that, the suspect, and even he seems to be unconcerned. He enjoys being a celebrity, and is particularly happy to be thought the famous (for eternity, a la Jack the Ripper or Charles Manson) mass murderer, even if it is for something he didn’t do, as he has never really done anything with his life. This is perhaps something like the central character, the pretended death camp commandant, in Robert Shaw’s classic play, “The Man in the Glass Booth”. In any case, the suspect has such low self-esteem and such a marked indifference to living that there would hardly be any negative consequences (negative utility in the calculation) by executing him. Does that mean, in a clearly moral way, that the governor should not pardon the prisoner? Is the moral good achieved by letting the execution go forward.

 I want to offer two possibilities here, and suggest that, in general, how one chooses between them to a large degree decides how one navigates the entire ‘Covid-19 opening the economy’ debate: that of the self-righteous idealist and that of the expedient pragmatist. Who makes the better case? The idealist first.

The self-righteous idealist would simply say that executing an innocent man is (virtually) never acceptable, consequences be damned. The requirements of justice are not easily weighed and should not be weighed against other goods or goals. It is to our credit that we remain reluctant, for all the usual reasons, to weigh them, and perhaps think of them (the requirements of justice, however we configure them) not as holding a certain measurable weight when compared to other goods, but more like trump cards, where even a small amount of justice overcomes a larger amount of something else that otherwise seems larger. We see this in the criminal law rules limiting self-incrimination, unreasonable searches and seizures, and even double jeopardy. Having people confess, the clear case of self-incrimination, typically achieves the right result; while searches, reasonable or not, can turn up drugs, weapons and even bodies that implicate the right people and exonerate the wrong ones;  and botched or misguided first trials yielding an incorrect result may need to be tried again to get the outcome proper and accurate. Nevertheless, we give up all these advantages in the name of justice.

In a different way, we also see the need for some type of societal integrity, an integrity where there is a generalized belief that officials will always take truth into account, invariably include considerations of justice, and never allow expediency to replace of the right thing to do. From that point of view, what the governor must consider is that an official needs always to be doing the right thing, even if it is not particularly well-known or known at all, that he is doing the right thing. There needs to be a more or less generalized consensus that truth always matters (that is, the suspect is, in fact, innocent), that considerations of justice are present (that is, it would be unfair to execute him), and that expediency should not enjoy a simple path to evade ethical principles (that is, allowing people to enjoy a latte in peace at their local sidewalk cafe is not an end that should overcome the demands of justice). So says the idealist.

 What of the expedient pragmatist? His or her refrain, depending on generational patter, says “Be practical” or “Get real” or even “Grow up”. Life presents unpleasant choices in good times, heart-wrenching ones in bad. The pragmatist begins with the observation that life and death decisions are not the rarity, but common. We first disguise and then forget them. For example, we can turn our medical resources toward greater prenatal care, early vaccinations, and wellness programs, which increase life expectancy, or we can turn them toward surgical interventions, transplants, intensive care units, and late-stage therapies for terminal illnesses, which do not substantially change long-term outcomes or life expectancies. Confronting actual patients in need of treatment has tended to push greater societal health concerns aside, but the issue is practical and real and involves life and death. We make similar choices with the allocation of food safety, workplace environments (how dangerous is too dangerous), and any number of other myriad issues from concealed weapons and gun accessibility, highway speed and intoxication limits, and permission to allow our children to play football or drive or smoke. Turning off your grandmother’s ventilator is not the only such decision.

 For the pragmatist, all life-and-death decisions are matters of weighing, knowing that life is never generously eternal but miserly limited. It appears not only in different quantities but different qualities. One person’s life must necessarily be measured against that of another‘s, and eventually against a group of people’s, in order to get to a rational result, and hard decisions are the stuff of ethics, politics, public policy, and daily life. For example, we know that when we engage in long-term drug testing to ensure that not a single person is harmed, testing that can sometimes take years, a number of other people, perhaps a very large number, will die on the way waiting. So, it is not a hard decision but an easy one for the expedient pragmatist to make when looking at the innocent, if self-loathing, man facing death for a mass murder that he did not commit. Simply hang him. Consider that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions will be benefited, their lives improved, their chances for greater prosperity, health, education, friendship, personal fulfillment, and happiness enhanced, while only one person will be harmed. If, in fact, we do not take a paternalistic view of this, trying to figure out what would be in his own best interest, the suspect simply is indifferent to his fate, perhaps even wanting it. He will increase his own utility (welfare, happiness, preferences, etc.) by being executed. There is no problem here. As before, the answer is, simply: hang him.

That is the analogy. How does it fit with Covid? Both involve life-and-death moral choices, both pit so-called higher values – a just trial and the right to life – against the practicalities of running a society and an economy, as well as benefiting the many against the few (or fewer). Both have uncertainties – how impacted would the city be if the residents (thought they) knew the murderer even if he were now pardoned but easily identified, what would be the result with a partial lockdown in Covid lives saved versus lives lost through increased poverty, depression, substance abuse and domestic violence – that can yield estimates whose reliability is problematic. They both ask the few to stand aside for the many and the weaker for the stronger. The analogy seems appropriate.

 What, then, should we do? Is it merely a matter of moral taste, or simple self-interest depending on what group or idea or person you identify with? Is it really just another killing dilemma like the trolley problem – a runaway trolly is heading toward five individuals who are bound and will be killed, while on the side track there is a single bound person. You control the track switch. If you do nothing, five are killed but you are (seemingly) innocent. If you pull the switch, you will kill one person and (seemingly) be a murderer?  What should you do, leaving all of us without a reliable ethical guide? Perhaps, but one caution might suggest a way out. That caution is that we have proven repeatedly and in a blood-thirsty way to be bad at moral reasoning. Fine-tuning by the persistently gauche leads to bad tuning, out of tune tuning, so we ought to remain with the safe and, to stay with the metaphor, harmonious route. That would suggest we follow the self-righteous idealist.

 On a grand scale, wars, invasions, genocides, massacres, and a large vocabulary dedicated to how badly we treat each other offer overwhelming testament to our regular departure from ethical conduct under any ethical theory.  But here let us consider the small rather than the large. We might start with the quagmire of pragmatic counting. It works in three ways: first, we often do not have enough information to do the calculations accurately or completely and so tend to work on common sense presumptions that are, in fact, often far from common sense and more in line with our own parochial biases and petty preferences. Second, the cost involved in terms of time, research, and expertise, particularly when so much is at stake, gives us very little comfort. How do we count or measure suffering and its effects, or happiness and its depth and duration? Third, the effects of bad counting can be pernicious in the way bland moral truisms honed over centuries of human experience are not. These inaccuracies in counting in the face of moral dilemmas, where the counting contradicts the conclusions of the self-righteous idealist, is one that our world are all too familiar with.

 Consider the Stalinist view that only what is (politically) true matters, with truth being the sole province of an authority charged with protecting the public good. Then, saying what is wrong or doing what is wrong, even if well-intentioned, is the same as deliberately trying to lie or trying to do the wrong thing. Less obliquely, good intentions count for nothing. We certainly see the spillover in today’s politics, where well-intended or at least benign actions, from congressional bills to ordinary talk, when declared to be incorrect, are turned into the subject of severe criticisms by those involved, Stalinism writ large. We see this in criticism of religious authorities that lead to fatwas calling for death to the speaker (consider Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo) and civil ones (consider Anders Breivik and Timothy McVeigh) to simple dismissals of the views and then the moral worth of those we disagree with. This is Stalinism, and its logic underlies many of the vicious acts we see today, from the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge to Tiananmen Square to 911 to the genocides of Europe, then Cambodia, then Africa, then Europe again, then the Middle East, and now everywhere, not to mention every religious and ethnic conflict. Another way of putting this is that the dramatic mistakes of the pragmatist can too readily be quantum leaps worse than the mediocre mistakes of the idealist.
Hypotheticals and imaginary cases can have a certain unreal feel to them, particularly when the apocalyptic becomes ordinary and decisions with which we have little experience become the ones most immediately before us. The once-popular TV show “24”, where the protagonist had 24 hours to save the world, is perhaps the typical embodiment of this, although it only differs in frenzy from hundreds of successful stories involving those we now take to be our heroes, from James Bond to Rambo to Jason Bourne to the Avengers. The expedient, for those heroes, which (perhaps regrettably, perhaps not) involves murder, torture, killing innocents and bystanders, and yet more murder, becomes the norm, the routine, the way one is justified to behave. There might be times to jettison our moral principles, perhaps to save the world or at least five people bound on a trolley track, but almost all times when that appears reasonable, outside of war, seem to evaporate upon closer inspection. In fact, given the many institutional and political solutions available, the number of such situations seems, if anything, on the decline, while the contenders for the immorally expedient appear on the increase. Getting used to those apocalyptic moments has become one of the great mistakes of our time. Sacrificing the less-than-fully-human co-morbid is one of those moments.