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”

Theory 10: Practical Applications of Utilitarianism When an Alien Threatens to Kill You. Part A: Viva L’Evolution

I have been giving the term “Internet surfing” new meaning as I wander from computer to computer over the last two weeks because my own Internet connection is down. My quality of life has suffered, and the quality in the Book of Mark has suffered.
To top it off, I haven’t been able to play any poker. I miss the Internet. I may actually be forced to do some revisions on Theory 9 and 10 when I am up and running again. Nonetheless, the show must go on, and so I ask you:

When it comes to judging people and humanity, are you a pessimist or an optimist?

I am both: First one, then the other. I am highly suspicious of just about anyone I don’t know. I just assume that most people are idiots, and I think the stats back me up. On the other hand, I believe in one force that VERY SLOWLY fixes everything and provides me with great optimism: Evolution.

I already talked about this in Theory #3. You may recall me ranting on about how we only grow through the freedom to make mistakes, as individuals, and as a society. Sure, evolution is painfully slow. It may even be so slow that we are moving backwards as a people through most of our lives without ever living long enough to see the resulting two steps forward. Still, I am somehow cheered up by the fact that we are part of the process of humanity becoming more than what we are.

At this point you are probably hoping I won’t try to bore you by spouting off some of the few things I remember from university. You should know better.

Somewhere around the turn of the 19th century some guy named Bentham came up with “The Greatest Happiness Principle”. He, along with John Stuart Mill’s dad thought that the right thing to do in every situation is one that causes the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest amount of people. Simple and practical, n’est pas? Much like a Book of Mark theory.

Practical as it may sound, I have always disliked this theory because it is a bit TOO simple. Utilitarianism (with a slight nod of the head to John Stuart for trying to salvage it) is the basic idea of maximizing utility for all. It has often been criticized for lacking any kind of moral or principled approach. I agree. It might be better for ten people if you sacrifice one, but is it actually fair? And if it isn’t fair, is it really better? I vaguely recall that Star Trek used to love playing with this one.

Speaking of Star Trek, I should point out that, due to my complete lack of Internet, I have been watching more TV lately. There is a two hour time slot where there is pretty much nothing on except Law and Order. When you watch Law and Order, it is fairly common to hear defense attorneys say that the North American legal system (which I have studied but can safely say I know nothing about) is founded upon the principle that it is better to let a hundred guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man. I can’t even begin to imagine how much that must suck for prosecutors, but it has always made for decent TV.

You might ask yourself why this is really better for society. In a practical sense, the math simply doesn’t add up. If 100 guilty people go free you have to assume, guilty bastards that they are, that they will utilize their freedom to run about and cumulatively do all kinds of incalculable damage to other innocent people. If we had just convicted them all (and sacrificed the one innocent guy, who statistically, you may remember, is probably an idiot anyway) we would be a lot better off. Crime begets more crime as its impact continues to live with its victims. We are just creating more criminals; all for the sake of one innocent. Any good utilitarian, by Bentham’s standards, should be all over this like a criminal lawyer on the Constitution.

Sadly, I actually believe all this stuff about society not convicting innocent people. I am one of the many people who think that when you cross that line you are headed in the wrong direction and morality is not a street with a lot of U-Turns. I CAN”T STAND when the government, or just about anyone, tries to create the greater good by inflicting controls on others FOR THEIR OWN GOOD. I also can’t stand when they sacrifice people or principles FOR THE GOOD OF SOCIETY. I grew up with the naïve but simply charming idea that we all have to take a principled approach in life in every single thing we do. We can’t turn our back on our principles and jump up and down saying the end justifies the means, no matter how compelling a read The Prince might be.

What’s more, I always liked to take the concept behind so-called utilitarianism and argue it to fit my own philosophy. I have always thought that the evolution (yup, we’re back to evolution) of both people and society is exactly what is best for the greatest number in the long run. Sure, you can argue that you can produce better results in the short run by convicting the odd innocent person, or by banning poker, or sacrificing certain principles for a better short term result. I just don’t think that is really what’s best for the greatest number in the long run. We are all a small part of the evolution of humanity in each and every seemingly meaningless decision that we make, and what is best for society is for us to do whatever foolish thing that we think is the correct moral choice. The most important thing we can do is to live by our own individual principles. That is the way we grow as a species. It doesn’t even matter if we are wrong in our choices. It isn’t our job to be right all the time and if it was we would fail. It is our job to feed the incalculably large and painfully slow evolution machine that keeps us moving forward.

As a young adult, I clung to these principles. The world was black and white and decisions you made were either right or wrong.

Unfortunately, with the wisdom of age comes the cowardice of compromise. One day in law school, while ignoring the things I would later learn watching Law and Order, a radical professor introduced me to a hypothetical question that he liked to use just for the purpose of screwing up idealistic people like me. He introduced me to the aliens, and they have forced me to start inserting surgical little contradictions into what is supposed to be a uniform philosophy. The aliens pretty much took my entire belief system and forced me to question it. They changed the Book of Mark, introducing some unwelcome chaos to a world once comprised only of philosophical law and order .

Stay tuned for Part 2 . .

Theory 9: Casting The Gazillionth Stone

If this is the first Book of Mark entry that you have ever read, let me just start by apologizing. This one is more crass than usual. I didn’t mean for it to be, it just turned out that way.

Furthermore, if you were to ask me which of my theories that I do the worst job of actually following in real life, it would probably be this one. I’m working on it.

Theory 8 talked about how we are best fit to judge ourselves. This logically begs the question of how fit we are to judge others.

I recently learned something interesting about cats. They like to lick their own asses. Not only that, but if two very special cats get along very well, they don’t mind licking each other’s asses.

Having witnessed this several times in the presence of various different non-feline humans, I have learned that we all react the same way when we watch cats lick each others’ asses. We laugh, and we say “That’s disgusting”. The owner is often embarrassed and puts a stop to it.

While I don’t begrudge anyone else their own personal tastes, I am not one of those people who enjoy the idea of licking asses. Most Crohns’ disease sufferers don’t. At least I assume we don’t, I have never gone to a meeting or anything, and even if I did there is no guarantee it would come up.

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that I was reincarnated as a cat, and I didn’t like to lick my own ass, nor would I lick the asses of other cats. Further imagine for a moment that I was aware of how humans would perceive this and I myself still saw the world as a human would. I would think the idea is disgusting.

After about a week, Mark the cat would smell like ass. (Some of you might think this resembles Mark the human). We all know that cats have some special SUPER-SALIVA comprised of some combination of CLR and Liquid Lustre that allows them to lick themselves clean without actually getting sick. They lick their own asses not for the naughty, forbidden pleasure of self-ass licking but simply to keep clean. Mark the cat would not be clean, and everyone would say ``That `s disgusting.`` Mark the cat, by trying to be less disgusting in the eyes of humans, would fail and become more disgusting.

People are different from cats, and when we form basic opinions about cats licking their own asses, using all of our most well-meaning judgmentalism ©, we can only reference our only experiences and perceptions to form our opinions. We don’t understand the natural instincts of cats and it is silly for us to judge a cat through a human’s values.

As much as it may seem I just love the term ‘ass-licking’, I am assuming that by now you see my razor-thin point. Humans are all different from each other too - so much so that we are often intimidated by the differences between us. We have our own insecurities and we don’t like seeing things that are out of our comfort zone, so we put down things that are different for us. All of our judgments are, naturally, created using our own personal opinions. Our opinions are derived through our experiences and, more importantly, our perceptions. We have only our perceptions to rely on, and I am gradually learning the world is so big that I can’t really get a good look at it all. The depth of my perceptions is limited, so my judgments are limited.

Some people have logical minds, and they use their logic to weigh options and make considered decisions. Others are intuitive and work with gut feel. Some won’t eat pork, some wear capes, some wear formal headwear, some wear gold chains. We all have different upbringings and experiences, and these are all we have to draw from when we make our decisions. We judge others through our own eyes without having the benefit of the perceptions of others. When we see something we can’t relate to, we dismiss it as inferior.

On the flip side, let’s be practical for a moment. I am not pretending that all judgment is wrong. We can’t all wander the planet and accept everything that people do because we’re afraid to draw a line. If we are all going to accept the radical idea that we should cram together in civilized existences, we need to agree that there are some acts that no society should forgive: acts like pedophilia (how did ancient Greece miss this one?); murder (unless you are challenged to a duel); or theft (which rules out any practical application of communism.) I am not saying that we should never judge. We HAVE to judge. I am just saying that we are NOT FIT to judge.

How do we reconcile that?

I give you Theory 9 in the Book of Mark: Don’t judge people unless you absolutely have to. The world is more complicated than we like to think, and there is more than one way to skin an ass-licking cat.

Theory #8: Sleeping Through Judgment Day

Introducing the Book’s of Mark’s first “derivative theory”:

Do you know those TV episodes of sitcoms where they use clips from previous shows and mix them in with lame bits of new footage to create a minute-rice version of a new show? Well, this isn’t quite that bad, but it basically involves taking some existing theories, adding them together and extrapolating them into different scenarios to create new theories.

Leonard Cohen once coined the phrase “The place is dead as heaven on a Saturday night.”

I always liked this line because it introduces the bleak concept that, even if there is a heaven, it still might be disappointing. Being a white male aged 18 to 45, I have not only had questions throughout my life as to what will happen after I die, I have actually had expectations.

Growing up I always had the basic hope that I will get to find out all the things that went on that I couldn’t know when I was alive. Things like:

“Which one of us kept underpaying at the restaurant when we were short?”
“Who was right and who was wrong in every argument I have ever had?”
“What is the worst thing I ever caused that I never knew about?”
“Did I tell more lies or was I told more lies?”
“Was anyone faking?”
“On average, did I masturbate more or less than the average person in my demographic?”
“What is the worst thing that was ever done to me?”

And, the million dollar question:

“Overall, was I a good person?”

It just made sense to me that we should find all that stuff out – it went directly against my sense of justice that you don’t eventually learn everything about every decision we ever made. If someone really screwed me over I wanted to sit on an afterlife couch, eat some popcorn (that would hopefully be “to die for”) and find out all about it.

The idea of having a simple judgment day where you either went to heaven, hell or purgatory was entirely unsatisfactory and not nearly precise enough.. I pictured that the next life would have a ready-made formula that assigned weighted scores to each and every decision we ever made, averaged this down to a normalized formula, and give us each a score out of 100 as to how well we lived our life. We could then receive our “Percentile Life Ranking”© that told us what percentage of humans we were better than, and what percentage we were worse than.

Did I mention I am fairly competitive?

Having now grown significantly older and marginally wiser, I am pleased to report that I have gradually become lower maintenance when it comes to afterlives. I have come to accept that my incessant need to have every loose end tied up was part of a deep-seeded belief that life had to be fair. If it wasn’t fair in this life, I expected the next life to make things right.

As you might have guessed, I no longer look to afterlives to rectify the injustices of the present one. I stopped worrying about future lives about the time I realized that this is the only one I can be certain of enjoying. I have accepted that life isn’t always fair. Luckily, it doesn’t seem as important as it used to.

If you have been reading any previous Book of Mark propaganda you have probably noticed a recurring theme of striving for self-actualization as being the key goal to life. I am starting to think that life is a long journey of self improvement, and how well you do in becoming the person you want to be is the real goal, while the stuff that happens and the things other people do to you is less important.

And so Theory # 8 becomes a matter of simple arithmetic: If you start with Theory #2 and strive to be truly honest with yourself, and then add a healthy dose of Theory #6 where you only really focus on the things in life that are truly important, it all adds up to Theory 8:

When it’s all said and done, what life does to you isn’t as important as what you do with life, and you are the only person who has the potential to accurately and fairly judge yourself. If you have truly strived to be who you want to be, and you have gotten yourself to a place where you like who you are, then you don’t need other people, or even your god(s), to tell you who you were and whether you should consider yourself a good person. You have been honest with yourself and kept what is important in perspective. You should already know yourself. All those other questions I asked are just the little details in life that lead you to becoming yourself.

There you have it: 6+2=8. As usual, I offer a simple answer for a complex issue. Sadly, we all know that all kinds of people will beat up innocents, strap themselves to bombs or lie and cheat loved ones, all 100% insistent that they are being exactly the person they want to be. Not everyone is fit to judge themselves. I can only assume they would be if they read the first 7 theories more closely. How do you reconcile the self-congratulations of the immoral into a world of do-it-yourself judgment?

I will soon get to another theory that deals with all that, but it will do nothing to change the fact that we are right back where we started, you have get used to the fact life isn’t fair, and that you just need to focus on yourself.

Addendum – If you are getting as tired of reading about self exploration theories as I am about writing them, you can accept this as a promise that I plan on going a little broader soon. In Theory 10 the aliens will finally arrive and they are going to try and shake things up a bit.