Theory 10: Practical Applications of Utilitarianism When an Alien Threatens to Kill You. Part B: The Vulcan Threshold

WARNING: CHRONOLOGICAL FAILURE. If you have not read Part A you may want to skip down and read that first.

It has now been four weeks since I have had the Internet at my home. In case you are wondering, I live in a condominium right in the heart of downtown Toronto, a place many would consider a major metropolitan city. We have all kinds of “big city amenities” like a subway, a healthy nightlife, several professional sports teams, regular smog warnings, etc. We are serviced by numerous large telecommunications providers, all of whom are apparently incompetent.

I have now switched from one abusive telco conglomerate to another, and the difference has been palpable. I now get to spend my evenings listening to an entirely different voice telling me that the next available operator will be along when he/she is good and ready. If I were half the man Al Pacino used to be I would take a flame thrower to this entire world wide web-less situation. Alas, I am not half the man Al Pacino used to be. I am, at best, about 4/5ths the man that I used to be. I will deal with this new devil and take whatever lumps I am served. However, sometimes, when trapped between sleep and drunkenness, my mind wanders to those heady days when I wouldn’t have put up with this bullshit, when I roamed the earth as its master, back in the early 1990s, in my prime, before the aliens.

The early 1990s were tumultuous times: The Toronto Blue Jays were showing us all that the World Series isn’t just for the United States; a young Mike Myers was teaching us that hanging out in your parents’ basement was actually really cool; and, the formerly obscure rock titans known as 95 South were permanently changing the music landscape with the release of their breakthrough masterpiece “Whoot, There it is”.

There I was, in the midst of all that turmoil, a philosophical genius thumbing my nose at the rest of the world. I marched through my final years of higher education in a rum-induced haze, flaunting the law school grading system that ensured all exams were submitted anonymously. I snored through classes, wandered in and out on a whim, and oozed my own refreshing scent that somehow let all those around know that I fancied myself their intellectual superior.

I believed that the rest of the world was trapped in the minutiae of day to day decisions, forced to make endless evaluations of every scenario in order to calculate the more practical choice. Stuck in their own webs of self-delusion and insecurity, they lacked the one thing that could bring a centre of gravity to the abyss of their existences – they were not truly living by principles and principles alone. They were compromised.

I had decided on my principles and I was sticking to them, driven to become my own version of a Randian archetype. Life was simple, and I had the depth of a cartoon character, but I felt certain that I was heroic cartoon character, like He-Man or the “Mark” from G Force: Battle of the Planets.

In short, if you look past the fact that I’m exaggerating, I was a lot like most other 20 year-olds: arrogant and self involved.

At the same time, there was a mad professor who resided at my law school, a man who had graduated the top of his class back in the days of Charles Manson (a person whom this professor shared an odd physical resemblance to at the time.) It was this man who would present the alien hypothesis that would cause so much trouble to my blissful superiority complex. This professor claimed to teach criminal law, but this was in fact a thinly-veiled farce he perpetuated in order to have the freedom to drill his students with the most evil of all philosophical theories, a toxic cocktail I had never encountered before that featured one strong dose of determinism mixed with a shot of relentless practicality.

Indeed, he was a worthy nemesis. Occasionally I would drag myself from daydreams to get sucked into arguing with him. Ironically, we both enjoyed this because we seemed to see the great argument of life the exact same way, but we chose the opposite ends of the spectrum.

On the surface, the mad professor’s theories seemed as simple as mine. He believed that there were no real choices in life, that some combination of nature and nurture made our every move inevitable. The idea of being proud or taking credit for something was ridiculous. We were all just ants playing out our assigned role. Moreover, the idea that criminals, rapists or murderers deserved any blame was preposterous. These people were playing out their inevitable roles the same as you and I. (I will be getting to the determinism equation in Theory 14, and I’ll actually get to create a parallel universe in the process, something which I’ll admit to looking forward to).

More perplexing than removing all choices from his human equation was his subsequent explanation for punishing criminals. He felt it was ridiculous to blame them for their crimes, but he felt we must punish them anyway. Not because they deserved it, just because it was practical. It was the greater good. Utilitarianism in its ugliest form. He took the guilty, made them innocent, and then punished them anyway as a sacrifice for society. He was against everything I stood for. So I argued.

Suffice to say, I challenged him on sacrificing people for “the good” of society. As you can see in Part A, I felt strongly that the greater good was always served through fairness, not through sacrificing the innocent (who in this case were also guilty by definition, but that was no longer relevant for the purpose of the argument).

I told him that sacrificing the innocent was never justified. Life was about principles. If you abandoned principles and started to compromise for the sake of being practical, all was lost. To me, the principles were the only thing that ever mattered.

He assured me he could come up with a hypothetical scenario where, if given the choice, I would forego my own principles and make the practical choice.

I told him he couldn’t.

He assured me he could.

My mind conjured up all kinds of horrible scenarios, but I had done this exercise countless times. I was confident he had nothing.

And then he told me a story.

Imagine, if you will, a scenario where aliens come to the earth. These aliens quickly and credibly establish that they can destroy the planet on a whim. They are horrible beings, the kind of aliens who would presumably listen to Celine Dion, eat their steaks well done and constantly re-raise with only Queen-Ten unsuited.

Further imagine that the aliens allow me to be the person who decides humanity’s fate. They give me a clear ultimatum. I must either horribly torture or kill a completely innocent person, or they will wipe our entire species out.

That’s it. That is all there is to these aliens I keep talking about. It is nothing more than a two paragraph hypothetical, that, even on my worst of bad bays, is unlikely to ever occur. I hated how the aliens had so fortuitously eliminated my argument in Part A about evolution. Evolution was no longer in the equation if everyone was going to die. Suddenly the idea of killing one innocent person, given that we were all going to die, became the greater good.

I smirked at the mad professor and life went on.

I have thought about it ever since.

As dumb as it may sound, this theoretical posed a major problem to my own self-image. If I were to admit in any hypothetical scenario that it might be better to abandon my principles for a practical solution for the “greater good”, I would be walking a slippery slope while opening floodgates while trying to put toothpaste back in the tube all at once. I would be admitting that there is a point of compromise, where principles give way to the practical. I couldn't go around acting superior, I would just be another shmoe. And that is just what I became.

I hate to tell you this but, if you are the innocent person is this hypothetical, than you’ll be the only person on the planet who has a worse day than me, because, in the words of the Mad Professor, “Screw the innocent guy. We have to be reasonable.”

Gradually over time I began to see the wisdom of this theoretical, and the aliens began to appear in real life scenarios. What about bombing and killing civilians to fight a greater threat? What about Nazis? What about telecommunications companies? It turns out that in many cases Fox Mulder was right and the truth is metaphorically out there after all.

Ever since then, I dropped my pretense and joined the rest of the world. I have tried to walk that fine line in the sand, trying to determine for me that exact threshold where logic supersedes idealism, and the needs of many outweigh the equations of right and wrong. Having seen friends and family have children, I now appreciate that almost everyone is forced to make sacrifices when the practical becomes more and more important and you are no longer just looking out for yourself. I have come to appreciate that compromise is a part of growing up. I too am compromised.

So I give you Theory 10 in the Book of Mark: As much as we don't like to admit it, sometimes we may have to comprimise our principles for the sake of being logical, and for the greater good. Where we draw our own compromise threshold goes a long way to determining who we are.

I hate this theory.

So begins the 2nd Chapter in the Book of Mark. We move from actualization through choice to using choice as a means of practical living. I hope you’ll enjoy.

In the words of those great maestros:

“Whoot. There it is”