The Dower Power Hour

I watched a video on YouTube the other day that sparked some interesting online debate.  A man finds himself in a white room in which he is forced to make a decision.  Either he takes a key and leaves the room never to return.  Or he takes he pushes a button and gets 10 million dollars.  The catch: the button randomly kills one person on the planet.  Of course the man pushes the button and surprise he is in purgatory and is forced to go to hell for making the wrong choice. 

Now, my assertion is this: if the man had used the money, or maybe just 9 out of the 10 million, to save more lives than the one he sacrificed, that would be a morally acceptable decision.  This is a controversial assertion: how could you justify this sacrifice to the one person who was killed?  Who are you to take their life away, isn’t that a decision they should make?  Now, these are valid critiques.  However, I must spin the question back on you.  What do you say to the 10, 100, or 500 people you didn’t save?  I chose to sacrifice all of you on behalf of one other person? 

Now, practically speaking I offer a complete and unqualified rejection of “the ends justify the means.”  Opportunities like using torture of terrorist suspects or supporting right-wing insurgents to combat communist regimes: we’ve seen time and time again that these decisions backfire horribly.  The inevitability of uncertainty in outcome destroys the value of the ends justifying the means.  If there’s even a slight chance of backfire, it’s immoral to take that chance.  In fact, we create these stories with morals, not to mention such axioms as “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” to discourage people from engaging in this sort of behavior.  So rarely do the ends truly justify the means without there being some sort of unacceptable backlash, that on the whole the entire concept ought to be rejected.

However, I think there is a difference between appropriate behavior in real life and abstract moral hypotheticals.  Morally speaking, if there was a situation where you had to choose to sacrifice one person’s life to save ten people and there was no way to avoid the decision, you should always save the ten.  No apologies.  I don’t think you have the right to sacrifice anyone, but ultimately it is better to violate the basic human rights of one individual by killing them than the rights and lives of ten individuals.  If you are paid 50 dollars to save ten, it shouldn’t complicate the choice, you’re still morally obligated to protect the greater good. 

That said, as far as I’m concerned there is never a situation in real life that is as clean cut as the situation I am describing.  There are always complications and unexpected events.  In movies where the hero is put in this situation - and it seems to happen surprisingly often - he (or she) usually stalls long enough for the situation to be resolved on its own (if he is unable to resolve it himself.)  Movie directors don’t like it when our protagonists actually have to make and then justify this choice, so they create loopholes to avoid the decision.  Even is this loophole is death, it is still a way to dodge the moral bullet of responsibility.  I’m not sure why we don’t like to see our heroes actually make this choice: maybe it’s because both outcomes can be criticized and we like our heroes to be morally sparkly and pure, the mineral water of the soul. 

Regardless, my ultimate point is this: in a perfect moral world, it’s worth killing the one to save the ten if there is absolutely no way to avoid the choice and your own death isn’t an option.  In that flawlessly scripted scenario, the ends do justify the means.  However, a situation cut and dry enough to truly validate that decision never occurs in reality and thus even though in a perfect moral scenario the ends do justify the means, we ought to live our lives as if it doesn’t.  And that’s why we create videos like this one, to reinforce this societal verdict. 

Ultimately it still bothers me when the devil pops out of the hat to condemn the “immoral choice” of taking the 10 million without giving the audience the opportunity to see how the protagonist would have used the money.  Maybe he would have used it selfishly and he deserved to be condoned.  On the other hand, with 10 million he could have easily saved 100 people from the Darfur genocide, paid for their transit to the United States and subsequent housing, food, and education.  This situation might not be cut and dry enough to qualify as the straightforward moral hypothetical that I previously described.  The money makes the entire thing a bit sketchy because you’ll never know what the other side effects were of your decision.  Maybe this situation isn’t simple enough to condone sacrificing a stranger without their permission, but I would still argue that there’s an ethical difference between the first choice and the second and to ignore the distinction is to grossly oversimplify.  Shame on you DarkHeartProductions!  Treat the issue with the complexity it deserves next time.