More Funerals for Certainty

If you have an hour or so to spare, you might want to watch what the current crop of Harvard undergraduates are debating. In this WGBH/Harvard University production, professor Michel Sandel encourages the students to imagine themselves on a trolley car without brakes, heading for five rail workers, destined to die if the trolley car doesn't stop. Professor Sandel adds this twist: as trolley car drivers, they can choose to divert their car down a spur line and only kill one rail worker by changing course.

What do they do? Kill the five workers or kill the one worker?



The discussion all takes place in Sanders Theater, where the deep burgundy-brown weight of the walls and the ancient, vaulted light combine to make the participants look unequal to the question. (With a few exceptions, Harvard students don't seem to use the King's English, or marshal the great ideas with any precision these days.)

Professor Sandel is leading them all down the road to consideration of the famous case known as The Queen vs. Dudley and Stephens, the generic version of which has been standard fodder for values clarification courses in public high school. It involves the decision of a ship's captain--adrift in a life-boat after the loss of his ship--to kill an ailing orphan cabin boy, so as to feed the remainder of the crew.

Of course, these scenarios tend to involve endless nuance--did the cabin boy give his consent, would it have been more fair to "draw straws," would the trolley car scenario have been more fair if a fat guy had been pushed over a bridge to stop its progress? (This was literally Professor Sandel's invention, tempting us to wonder, was he inviting the students to conclude "fat people" are expendable?)



In only one instance did I see a student stand and say "murder is murder." Professor Sandel seemed to wax a little indignant at this point, if only for the sake of the drama, and he reminded the student that England was very sympathetic to the plight of the captain. The other lifeboat members, after all, had family waiting for them; the orphan had none. Wouldn't the sum total of happiness be increased by favoring the lives of those who had families?

The student didn't flinch. "That's the argument for street crime," he said. "You kill someone on the sidewalk to feed your family."



Unfortunately, this is about as close as any student got to the ten commandments, or any real sense of the axiomatic. One student did say, flat out, "you don't eat human beings," but most students gave what I would have to call technocratic formulations of maximized value, or sneaky narratives about how to avoid the question altogether.



In an 18th century version of the same exchange, a Harvard classroom full of future ministers and lawyers would make--without question--some reference to the Almighty. Someone would surely step forward with the bold pronouncement, "we have no authority to make such a decision" or "better all die than to remain alive without honor."



Perhaps that sense of the unquestioned--that moral stonewall between God's territory and our own--was behind the "murder is murder" comment, but few contemporary college students would dare even intimate they were leaning on eternal truth, much less mention God and man at Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, or even Cal State San Bernardino. (We did have a young friend who mentioned Jesus at a local community college class, only to be threatened with an eye gouging by devout Muslims in the parking lot afterwards, but that's a different story.)

Some folks think that's all well and good. It's better to argue morality in purely secular terms, but there are some assumptions no one seems to be considering. At the beginning of the course, most of the students just assumed that preserving five lives was a good thing, even at the price of another. But the preservation of human life itself, is, arguably, a gift of our Judeo-Christian ancestors. Some cultures value life so little they throw virgins in Volcanoes and widows on funeral pyres.

What happens when the biblical assumptions are washed away by another generation of academics who think God's axioms are too quaint to acknowledge? What happens when technically educated but morally illiterate biologists run the world?



I guess that's already happening. We're letting Sacramento farmers starve in order to preserve a two inch minnow.



Welcome to the Brave New World. Good work, Harvard.