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Volume 4 Number 10 April
21, 2006 |
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An ethics challenge What's more important: the outcome or what you do? After I wrote about Yahoo cooperating with the Chinese government to send dissidents to jail, Bob Lewis, a regular reader and frequent correspondent, took issue with my statements. Bob writes his own column, "Keep the Joint Running," and it's well worth a look for anyone who has to, well, keep the joint running. He ended his comments with a challenge: "So here's my challenge to you, for a future "I think you have three choices. You can (a) comply, and continue to serve as CEO; (b) refuse to comply, resulting in the board's certain decision to immediately replace you with someone else who will comply; or (c) resign so as to not have to comply, resulting in the board finding a CEO who will comply. If you can think of other alternatives, of course include those in your analysis as well, along with the deontological analysis that ignores consequences." Well, far be it from me to shrink from a challenge. And, in fact, the situation Bob proposes is a variation of scores of others that dot the ethical literature, although the "extra credit" challenge of the last sentence seems more like a final exam question. The best way to study the principles at stake here is to construct a non-real world scenario. The fact that we can't be part of it lets us stand back and examine the principles unimpeded by the overlay of our prejudices, fears, experiences, and even guilt. Also, Bob's scenario differs from many of the others in that the outcome would be the same whether you participate or not, and there is at least an apparent penalty to you if you don't comply. Let's construct another mind-experiment case. You're in a big city on business and, after dinner with some colleagues one night, decide to walk back to the hotel. On the way you take a wrong turn and end up in a seedy part of town. Coming around a corner, you encounter a bunch of menacing-looking gang members. You notice that lying on the ground are three members of a rival gang and it's apparent -- from the drawn guns perhaps -- that the ones who are standing are about to do something unpleasant to the three on the ground. You engage the gang members in conversation and they decide that they like you and tell you that they won't harm you. You're free to go. You try to plead for the lives of the three people on the ground. The gang members huddle and then tell you that because they like you so much, they'll strike a deal. If you take one of their guns and kill one of the three men on the ground -- which one is your choice -- they'll let the other two go. If you don't want to, then they will kill all three, and you're free to go. What do you do? If you kill the one person, despite your ethical qualms about it, you can make the situation better. If you refuse to comply, you make the situation worse. Now, we could tailor it to Bob's case and make it so that three people die either way, but if you don't comply, you get robbed and severely beaten. Or you can adjust it any way you want. The underlying principles are the same. What is at stake here is the tension between what is known as agent-neutral morality and agent-centered morality. Do you evaluate actions based on the outcome -- or do you base them on what you, yourself, do, regardless of the outcome? The tension is merely another version of the split between consequentialists, who base morality on the outcome, and deontologists, who base morality on some duty or obligation that the agent has to either engage in, or not engage in, a certain type of behavior. Many people think, as Bob seems to, that all deontologists (or agent-centered believers) would forbid your participation and that all consequentialists (or agent-neutral believers) would all come up with the same answer. Not necessarily. A deontologist could argue that there was an obligation to save as many lives as possible and that the saving of two lives provided ample justification to overcome the restriction against killing one person. The gang members lying on the ground might speed that along by arguing: "Hey, pal, are you telling us that you're going to buy your moral purity at the cost of two of our lives?" An agent-neutral believer, or consequentialist, could also reason that even though it's better to lose only one life, rather than three, his participation would create a personal evil for him -- and we are allowed to give preference to our own good in making that calculus. Therefore, even though two lives would be saved by killing that one person, that act, for him, was so evil that it erased any good achieved. So, would you shoot the one gang member -- or not? If so, how do you rationalize the killing of an innocent (as far as you know) person. If not, how do you rationalize not saving two lives when you could clearly do so? If you decide not to shoot the one gang member, I suspect you would argue that while you deplore the death of the three, you're not going to be a part of it. It matters to you what you do, despite the outcome. Many people find themselves attracted to agent-centered principles, and many other people find themselves attracted to agent-neutral principles. An awful lot of people in both camps bounce back and forth between the two. People who will say that they should bring about the greatest good for the greatest number (agent-neutral) will also say that we should do what's right regardless of the outcome (agent-centered). Bob's scenario just reiterates that tension in a different form -- although it's not as clear from his description what the stakes are. Will the information demanded by the government cause people to die, put them in jail, or will it merely violate an arbitrary privacy policy that we've put in place? In my scenario, the stakes are pretty clear. In trying to work your way through Bob's maze, you would need to consider the harm caused by acting versus the harm caused by not acting. You'd need to determine what moral principles are at stake and how stringent they are. So, to answer Bob's challenge, I don't know what I'd do. If it were merely a violation of an arbitrary privacy policy, I might just swallow my concerns and go along. If people were going to die, I hope I'd say "See you later. Let the new guy have that blood on his hands." The real question is where I would draw the line between those two points, and that's what I don't know -- and I don't think anyone else does either, until they get there. But, as I used to tell my students, this is why we study ethics and think about these questions in the abstract. If we're not prepared, we give in easily on the small points, and then move on even easier to incrementally larger points, until we find ourselves sliding on our backsides ever faster down a slippery slope. The trick is in knowing when to finally say "No" before we get to that point. |
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© Copyright 2006 Carlton Vogt |