Weighing life
An old student from my department returned to the area yesterday to give a talk about the ethics of invasive animal experimentation. I would have gone to it if the alternative hadn't been to have a nice pub lunch with my bereaved brother on the first day since his wife passed away on which I saw a brief smile pass across his face. I gave up invasive research a couple of years ago, and I don't plan to return to it, but it isn't so much because of a moral absolute and more because I recognized that such work was only morally justified if it was helping someone's life. I could find a way to justify my work on grant and ethics applications (and it's a justification that has some merit) but I had fallen in with a lovely group of Buddhists who really made me think hard about my ethical choices. Without exerting any pressure on me to do anything other than sit quietly and breathe, they helped me to see the shaky moral ground of parts of my professional life and to to re-think how I spent my days.
All of this is, in a way, an aside.....but the argument of the yesterday's talk was that we now know enough about the mental lives of animals to know that there is some degree of continuity between what they think about, feel, and know and what happens in our own minds. Given this, he said, we were holding to a moral double standard if we placed a different value on their lives and on ours.
I've had much cause to think about the value of life over the past few days. I lost a loved one who, although I may have only had a chance to talk to her once or twice a year, was deeply stitched into my life. I cried when she went. I miss her. I ache for the man she left to find some way to reconstruct a life after 40 years with her. I placed great value on her life. In fact, I can think of very few people whose lives mean more to me than Jan's did. And that's the flaw in the argument of the old student. We do place value on human life, but we place a separate value on every single life. I'd rather my neighbour die than my wife. I'd rather all the laboratory rats in the world die than my son. The 30 year old heart patient is placed closer to the top of the transplant list than the 90 year old heart patient. When ships sink, women and children (theoretically) get first go at the lifeboats. These are moral decisions that make sense in most cases -- not only are we biologically disposed to value our kin more than anyone else, but we feel their absence more, so we are willing to sacrifice more (including other lives) to preserve them. The business of life (and much of it is business) consists of careful measurement of risks, costs, and benefits to decide who must live and who must die. Every hospital in the world makes such decisions every day. If I had been at this talk, that's the argument I would have made. I'm sure my colleague would have had some kind of a reply -- he's a smart fellow. I just don't know what it would have been. But, as I said, I wasn't there. I was at lunch with my brother.
Above our heads as we sipped our fine local brew was a television showing bodies being carried out of Virginia Tech. Today, the news media blare headlines detailing the horrific logistics of this systematic slaughter of students and professors by an apparently deranged young man. As a university professor, I can't help but be moved to tears by this coverage. Having spent half my life in classrooms just like the one that ran rivers of blood yesterday, I can perhaps imagine more vividly than many how it might feel to be so trapped, fixed in gunsights, and blown to pieces. And like every other professor I've ever spoken to about any of this and similar killings in the past, I have stories to tell about students who have worried me. I've had sullen students in trenchcoats slump into backrow seats in my classroom and glare down at me with hatred in their faces. I've met students one on one to discuss grades and policies and their disagreements with my views have been acute enough to erupt in shouting matches and slammed doors. I've had irrational and frightening emails from students, one actually threatening violence to me, his classmates, his employers. So I feel for those who were touched, lost lives, loved ones, friends in what looks like a senseless massacre. But when it comes to simple questions about valuing lives, there is, of course, another view, pointed out first to me by my friend Richard.
What we're witnessing unfold in Virginia is a pale reflection of what we're told is happening in Iraq, but which we hold to a different kind of standard of pain. The Virginia story impales our heart. The Iraq stories bounce off our eyes. In fact, I would bet cold, hard cash that 75% of those who read this (all 3 of you) will be tempted to stop here. "Oh, another Iraq comparison. Time to hit the 'next' button." But here's the thing. In Iraq, there's a systematic slaughter of intellectuals going on. Here's a list of names. It isn't just some madman going off his rocker and waving an automatic weapon around, but uniformed squads of hitmen with a list of targets, finding professors in their offices, their homes, their beds, shooting them, cutting their heads off, destroying not just families but an entire generation of scholars -- what's left of a culture. The UN estimates that over 80% of the institutions of higher learning in Iraq are gone, and the teachers and students are quickly following along. Bombs destroy the infrastructure and a good number of the students, assassins move in to do the detail work, and those still alive who have the wit and the wherewithall get the hell out of the country as quickly as they can. I don't have time to do the proper research to find out why this is happening -- I have 26 papers to grade before students begin to get upset with me. But there are all kinds of reasons I can think of, none of them pleasant, for wanting to bump off everyone in a culture who makes a living out of their intelligence, reasoning, and their ability to teach.
Now, thanks to Richard, I've educated myself a little bit about another aspect of the hell created in Iraq by a set of governments that will do anything -- anything at all, up to and including putting a madman into power and then destroying a country, a region, a culture to get him back out of power again -- to maintain hegemony in a part of the world that has lots of oil. But even despite that, I suspect that when my head hits the pillow tonight, I'll think first of my wife and kids, then Jan, then the kids in Virginia and then, maybe, if I'm not already asleep, some of the other innocent deaths that surround us. We weigh life every day.
So it goes.
All of this is, in a way, an aside.....but the argument of the yesterday's talk was that we now know enough about the mental lives of animals to know that there is some degree of continuity between what they think about, feel, and know and what happens in our own minds. Given this, he said, we were holding to a moral double standard if we placed a different value on their lives and on ours.
I've had much cause to think about the value of life over the past few days. I lost a loved one who, although I may have only had a chance to talk to her once or twice a year, was deeply stitched into my life. I cried when she went. I miss her. I ache for the man she left to find some way to reconstruct a life after 40 years with her. I placed great value on her life. In fact, I can think of very few people whose lives mean more to me than Jan's did. And that's the flaw in the argument of the old student. We do place value on human life, but we place a separate value on every single life. I'd rather my neighbour die than my wife. I'd rather all the laboratory rats in the world die than my son. The 30 year old heart patient is placed closer to the top of the transplant list than the 90 year old heart patient. When ships sink, women and children (theoretically) get first go at the lifeboats. These are moral decisions that make sense in most cases -- not only are we biologically disposed to value our kin more than anyone else, but we feel their absence more, so we are willing to sacrifice more (including other lives) to preserve them. The business of life (and much of it is business) consists of careful measurement of risks, costs, and benefits to decide who must live and who must die. Every hospital in the world makes such decisions every day. If I had been at this talk, that's the argument I would have made. I'm sure my colleague would have had some kind of a reply -- he's a smart fellow. I just don't know what it would have been. But, as I said, I wasn't there. I was at lunch with my brother.
Above our heads as we sipped our fine local brew was a television showing bodies being carried out of Virginia Tech. Today, the news media blare headlines detailing the horrific logistics of this systematic slaughter of students and professors by an apparently deranged young man. As a university professor, I can't help but be moved to tears by this coverage. Having spent half my life in classrooms just like the one that ran rivers of blood yesterday, I can perhaps imagine more vividly than many how it might feel to be so trapped, fixed in gunsights, and blown to pieces. And like every other professor I've ever spoken to about any of this and similar killings in the past, I have stories to tell about students who have worried me. I've had sullen students in trenchcoats slump into backrow seats in my classroom and glare down at me with hatred in their faces. I've met students one on one to discuss grades and policies and their disagreements with my views have been acute enough to erupt in shouting matches and slammed doors. I've had irrational and frightening emails from students, one actually threatening violence to me, his classmates, his employers. So I feel for those who were touched, lost lives, loved ones, friends in what looks like a senseless massacre. But when it comes to simple questions about valuing lives, there is, of course, another view, pointed out first to me by my friend Richard.
What we're witnessing unfold in Virginia is a pale reflection of what we're told is happening in Iraq, but which we hold to a different kind of standard of pain. The Virginia story impales our heart. The Iraq stories bounce off our eyes. In fact, I would bet cold, hard cash that 75% of those who read this (all 3 of you) will be tempted to stop here. "Oh, another Iraq comparison. Time to hit the 'next' button." But here's the thing. In Iraq, there's a systematic slaughter of intellectuals going on. Here's a list of names. It isn't just some madman going off his rocker and waving an automatic weapon around, but uniformed squads of hitmen with a list of targets, finding professors in their offices, their homes, their beds, shooting them, cutting their heads off, destroying not just families but an entire generation of scholars -- what's left of a culture. The UN estimates that over 80% of the institutions of higher learning in Iraq are gone, and the teachers and students are quickly following along. Bombs destroy the infrastructure and a good number of the students, assassins move in to do the detail work, and those still alive who have the wit and the wherewithall get the hell out of the country as quickly as they can. I don't have time to do the proper research to find out why this is happening -- I have 26 papers to grade before students begin to get upset with me. But there are all kinds of reasons I can think of, none of them pleasant, for wanting to bump off everyone in a culture who makes a living out of their intelligence, reasoning, and their ability to teach.
Now, thanks to Richard, I've educated myself a little bit about another aspect of the hell created in Iraq by a set of governments that will do anything -- anything at all, up to and including putting a madman into power and then destroying a country, a region, a culture to get him back out of power again -- to maintain hegemony in a part of the world that has lots of oil. But even despite that, I suspect that when my head hits the pillow tonight, I'll think first of my wife and kids, then Jan, then the kids in Virginia and then, maybe, if I'm not already asleep, some of the other innocent deaths that surround us. We weigh life every day.
So it goes.
posted by Colin at 11:17 AM
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