Whoa! Anybody get the number of that truck?

Número Tres  9-28-09

So now that medical ethics are looking good, we are presently examining situational ethics.  Allow me to remind everyone of what I said at the end of last week’s post:

If a woman were in a prison camp during wartime and had a chance to return to her family in another country if she got pregnant, she could get pregnant and when it was discovered, she would be sent back to her family because she was an additional burden on the medical resources of the camp.  This sounds as though it might work, based on an assessment of the situation, doesn’t it?  If you were in prison a thousand miles from home and could be allowed to leave and return to your family by simply getting pregnant, would you do it?  You could ask a sympathetic guard to “help” you get pregnant.  Once it was done, you would be free, and you would not have harmed the guard.  You could be with your family again, and no one would have been harmed.  Remember that? All right, let’s examine the situation.  Here’s what we know:

• There is a woman in a prison camp during a war. The camp is nowhere near her home.

• She wants to go home.

• That could happen if she got pregnant because of the limited medical resources of the camp.

Okay, let’s take this from the hypothetical into the real.

• She talks the situation over with a friendly guard and over a period of weeks, they have sex several times and she does get pregnant.

• It is discovered and she is indeed sent home.

• She confesses to her husband that she is pregnant by a camp guard and that she did it so that she could come home after it was discovered.

• Her husband says that he believes her and welcomes her back. 

He tells her they will raise the child as their own.  He will be a brother to the son they already have.  Back at the guard’s house, things have not gone so well.  His wife has heard about the affair and she is very angry and hurt that he would do such a thing without even discussing it with her.  She moves out and divorces him.  Over the next ten years, she moves from one man to another, not staying with any for very long simply because she no longer trusts men.  Her son joins a gang at the age of fourteen (his mother doesn’t discover it for almost a year) and two years later is murdered by a member of a rival gang.  His father does not find out that he is dead for six months.  By that time, his ex-wife has committed suicide with a pistol because she is so distraught over the death of her son and the shipwreck she has made of her marriage.  The father begins to drink very heavily and dies of a stroke at the age of 43.

But everything is fine at the woman’s house, right?  At first, it did seem that the woman’s method for getting out of the prison camp was a good one.  Her husband was attentive and concerned about the pregnancy and was present at the birth of the baby, a boy.  At about the time the child begins to walk, the husband can no longer conceal his pain about his wife’s affair with a man she hardly knew specifically for the purpose of getting pregnant – if that is actually what happened.  The husband believes that his wife fell in love with the guard and that the story about the pregnancy and about being sent home is just so much hot air to conceal the real reason.  He tells her so. She is devastated that he does not, and has never believed what she told him when she got home.  She withdraws into the spare bedroom almost all the time she is home, partly from shame and partly due to the pain she now has over the problem she has created in her family, and they stop having sex.  Her plan worked; she was sent home for being pregnant and she is with her family.  Why are things not the way she imagined they would be?  Their separation continues, and the woman withdraws from the world so completely that a few months later she is placed in a mental hospital, where she remains for the rest of her life.  Three months after that, the husband murders the younger child in a fit of rage and he goes to prison for thirty years.  The elder son is raised by a foster family who try to help him understand what has happened to his family, and to love him enough to make him feel connected to them, but he never really understands, and one night the boy sets fire to the foster family’s house.  All the occupants, including him, die in the fire.

So that’s all good, right? No one was really hurt by what happened and the situation worked out just fine.  If you are beginning to wonder just how you got into this gothic horror story, I have news for you; you walked right into it.  The fact is that situational ethics is little more than a stab in the dark in the direction the person making the choice thinks is the correct direction – and that is assuming that the person deciding is actually trying to make an informed, honest and selfless decision.  Without the ability to predict consequences, or even a serious look at the possible consequences, almost anything might happen, and this doesn’t even take selfishness on the part of the decision-maker into account.

Fr. Joseph Fletcher, author of Situation Ethics: the New Morality would perhaps be surprised to learn that love, as defined by him and subsequently exhibited by people, is not a firm basis for ethical decisions.  Even though Fr. Fletcher is clear that the love involved is agapé (the Greeks have four words for love; eros, or romantic love; philia or brotherly love; storge, or parental/filial love, and agapé or what has been called “Christian charity” – it means the love that God has for us and the love that we are to bear to everyone who is not a member of our family – assuming that we are Christians), the analogy, and it can truly be called nothing more than an analogy, does not hold, because people, even if they know what agapé is may not know how to truly express it.  Add selfishness to this problem and you have a poor basis for ethical decisions.

So in the end, you get not a new morality, but a very old one indeed – almost as old as the race, in fact.  Most of the time you do get a decision that makes you feel good, and this is so important to some people that they will make major changes to their ethics to be able to feel good about ethical decisions.  That is probably the major driver keeping situational ethics afloat, because if the people who use the system took the time to examine their decisions in light of the consequences thereof, many of them would be appalled.

My friends are probably very, very tired of hearing me say this, but it describes a real situation; those pesky unintended consequences will get you every time. It’s difficult enough to make and live with ethical decisions using guidelines provided by philosophy or religious faith; in those situations the decision maker knows that at least he or she has done what was possible to ensure that the decision was not made just to affect the outcome of the situation to their advantage.  Without this, it would be difficult to label any moral decision as ethical, period.  Lacking points of reference, people always decide in the direction they want things to go, even if they know that things probably won’t go that direction anyway.

There are good and sufficient reasons why this is the case, and I may address them at some later time.  At the moment, suffice to say that that is the case; people are inherently selfish and they often do things that are self-aggrandizing for the most trivial of reasons.  In fact, they sometimes do things that are selfish without even considering that they are acting selfishly.  One of the things at which human beings are very experienced is self-deception.  People are not and have never been inherently good at heart, for all the fact that altruism seems to be popular.  Please remember this.

So having investigated situational ethics and found that such a code of ethics is even more prone to deceitfulness and narcissism than is a code based on moral precepts from just about anywhere, including ancient Babylonia and the Aztec Empire, let’s examine postmodernists, who consider themselves to be so free of interfering influences.  They are so iconoclastic that they regard physical science as being too observer-dependent (in other words, they regard the physical sciences to be rife with both experimenter bias and outright fraud) to be a reliable descriptor or recorder of the universe and its phenomena.

This is truly a unique position, and in my personal view equals or surpasses the government of Cambodia under Pol Pot for idiosyncratic excess, in addition to missing the “mark” (which for every branch and quirky backwater of philosophy has always been to be able to nail IT – meaning discovering what is real and what is not) by such a wide margin as to seem to have been aimed in a different direction entirely.  Once you have rejected objective truth of any kind, the precepts of large concentrations of different human cultures, physical science and even the ability to actually be sure that you know anything, then culturally and philosophically, my friend, you live alone on a desert island.  You are infinitely more alone than Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks in Cast Away.  You are not only alone and lonely; you are that way willingly and willfully.  Furthermore, you have intentionally, painstakingly cut yourself off from anything that might redeem you, redeem your situation or make you whole again.

To use an historical term, you are a sophist.  You are, figuratively at least, the follower of a Greek philosopher named Protagoras.  Since there is no way actually to know anything, all you are interested in is the deconstruction (for those people unacquainted with postmodernism, feel free to substitute the word destruction here; deconstruction is just a word that postmodernists use to make themselves feel better about what they do) of everything you come across that is already solidly in place in the world – cultures, institutions, family, ethnic identity, national patriotism, religion.  The list goes on and is exhaustive. No metanarratives are exempt.  You may now feel that such a movement could not possibly last long, given its propensity for shooting itself not just in the foot, but in every part of the body, perhaps including the brain, but since it has already lasted more than forty years in the total absence of anything to counter it (well, okay: there has been some effort to counter it, which might better be characterized as an effort to subvert it – more on that later), it’s as durable as you like.

One problem that surfaces here is that in the West, philosophy has gone the way of the dinosaur.  That would make it difficult to counter any argument, no matter how self-contradictory and self-defeating.  I am a prime witness to this.  This weblog actually began a bit more than a year ago with the idea in my own head that there were people in the world who could not see the truth because they had somehow been convinced that it lay somewhere else despite objective evidence that it was right under their noses and obvious enough to be scary if they only looked down at it.  Then later I discovered that there were others, mostly young people, who rejected what I considered to be truth for more than one reason.  First among the reasons seemed to be that we, the older people of the world who were responsible for inculcating the precepts of culture and society, were lying to them.

Many of them seemed to believe that they would not survive to be as old as we already were and it was primarily our fault that this was so.  The reasons for this impression among young folks seemed to be that we had been using up the resources of the planet as fast as ever we could and not thinking at all about them and their needs when they would be adults.  After thinking that over for a while, I had something that I wanted to say, but (please don’t laugh – not yet, at least) I didn’t know what it was.

Since the idea of rejecting everything in our world and essentially telling everyone that they are full of it is so contrary to what parents typically want their children to believe, I began thinking about these problems and their importance to me, and ultimately to all of us.  When I was growing up, I was led to believe that I was only limited by physics and the contents of my mind in what I could do when I grew up (I couldn’t, obviously, be Superman or become a vapor (and retain my faculties), or travel in time, because there were physical [and physics] problems involved that prohibited that).  If today’s children are being told thy may die because we haven’t taken care of the world, then there is going to be hell to pay when they find out that ain’t gonna happen.

I knew that children these days were taught in school that the world was in danger from climate change, and I wondered how this had been phrased to make them believe that they would die unless drastic measures were taken immediately to save the planet.  However it was phrased, those doing the phrasing certainly deserved to be pilloried in the stocks for unnecessarily lying to and frightening the children.  The earth has already been a good deal warmer than it is at the moment and all it did was to open up more land to settle and farm and open new vistas for exploration.  It was about a thousand years ago, or perhaps a bit more (around 980 A.D. or thereabouts), and during this period there were trees growing in Greenland.  The Icelanders, Danes and Norwegians who colonized Greenland used them to build houses.  In the end, I realized that everybody is not speaking the same language any longer.  It’s still English, but word meanings and the import of certain statements were changed and even ignored in the newer interpretation of the language.  After looking afield a bit more I discovered that some of those who were foremost in the movement to stop humans from generating so much carbon dioxide (CO2) were either couching their statements in the most inflammatory language they could muster, or they were frankly lying about what was happening to our planet.  It’s difficult to describe my feelings at that moment. I was ashamed and angry; I was determined and fearful; I was confident and I was nothing of the kind.  Basically, I had no idea what to do. 

Before we go any further, I should say that because I am a Christian, I am of the opinion that we as a race, could not do anything to the planet, including global thermonuclear war, that would trash the place so thoroughly that we couldn’t all still live here (or at least that the survivors couldn’t live here, assuming nuclear war).  In addition, I am prepared to defend my position against all comers, so if you are among those who believe that we are doomed as a race, then send me a comment and you may have an entire post dedicated to your comment.  If there is a way to reply to your comment, I will E-mail you my argument.  Having said that and laid my own cards on the table, I can go on with what I was working toward.

Without putting too fine a point on this, and without making it look more important than it should be, one thing I must say here is that while science has not failed us, some, in fact I believe I should say many, scientists have indeed failed us.  Science and truth are not altered by misstatement, misuse or misfeasance although such is not the case for the perception of science and/or truth.  Today, science is perceived by many, perhaps most as having failed the human race because of many things scientists have either done or not done, depending upon your viewpoint.  Since it is my opinion that science has been done a grave disservice by all the things that have been said in its name over the past forty or so years, I will spend some time trying to show that science is not responsible for the problems; people – unscrupulous people (remember that scruples are for those who believe in metanarratives; postmodernists don’t see the point in being scrupulous, especially if the situation warrants some overstatement according to them to make their point.  Postmodernists are big on ensuring that they make their point.  Please remember that what I am trying to get across here is not that postmodernists are after your soul, but that they all have their own agendas, and said agendas may conflict with what the rest of us would regard as truth, or if not truth, at least with bare statements that were made by scientists in decades past that laid out the situation without interjecting personal or political agendas.  There is one other thing that should be borne in mind here, in addition to the postmodern stuff; there are those (not necessarily postmodernists) who shot their conscience years ago for talking too much.  You may have a bit of difficulty telling these folks and postmodernists apart.

One of the problems with research is that the results have a tendency to turn out the way the researcher thinks they will turn out.  That’s called experimenter bias.  It describes a situation in which everything looks okay and research is progressing well, but every study or data reduction brings the result expected by the person in charge of the experiment.  This is the reason that there are now what are called double-blind studies, in which neither experimenter nor the subjects know which of the subjects have received the medication and which have received the placebo (forgive me for using medical research as the example here, but the medical profession was the first to discover experimenter bias.  According to a study done in 1979, there are fifty-six discrete types of experimenter bias that can contaminate a study.  Experimenter bias contaminates a study unintentionally.  It still ruins the research, but it is not an act of volition and it is not strictly the fault of the experimenter.

However, there are other situations where either research or compilation of historical data are not contaminated unintentionally, but on purpose.  In fact, some of the “research” that has been done was worse than junk science – it was a bald-faced lie from beginning to end.  I can’t think of any nobler term than deceit to describe it.  Everyone should be acutely aware that science is ill-served by those who do not use it for the public benefit, but crowd all their eggs into the same basket and say to themselves that it’s okay to do that because this is important, and they have to make people believe that their conclusion is correct because it’s their conclusion and it’s the right one because everyone can see that things are tending that way and it might even be worse, so why not make it look like an emergency?   People like this would be easier to dismiss if so many of them were not highly placed in either government or science, or both.

Unfortunately, I can’t help you past that rather complicated warning.  There are just too many self-aggrandizing, narcissistic money-and-notoriety-hungry scientists involved in this climate change thing.  In addition, they’re starting to emerge elsewhere.  If it didn’t sound so postmodern, I would tell you not to trust anyone.  Fortunately, you can trust some people.   There are teachers, counselors, relatives, acquaintances and even famous people all over the place who still make a genuine effort never to tell a lie to anyone.  See you next week.

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