‘Better One Than Ten’

‘Better One Than Ten’

RAIMOND GAITA, King’s College, London

What might Socrates have taught Polus if he had succeeded in con- vincing him? Certainly more than Polus bargained for, in fact more than he could have thought possible. He would have taught Polus what evil was when it was done, and what kind of suffering it was when it was suffered in the doing of it. The distinction is not just between evil suffered and evil done but also between two kinds of evil suffered. Without the latter distinction, the former would not be what it was.’ Polus thought that he knew what it was to do evil. He thought that he and Socrates were in agreement as to what it was and disagreed only as to whether a man caught up in it was harmed by it. Polus claimed to see the evil in the life of the Archelaus; he then looked around for the harm.

I t has been said that Socrates was making a conceptual point - that the relation between doing evil and harming oneself is a conceptual relation. I am not clear as to exactly what is meant when that is said but ifwhat is meant is that Socrates was not trying to teach Polus something about human life, then I think what is said is false. Socrates believed that human beings were such that they could be harmed by doing evil, which is not to say that he thought that there could be creatures who were not so harmed by doing it, or that we might have been such creatures.

Renford Bambrough has said that Socrates and Polus agree as to the ‘facts’, but they have different ‘moral and emotional attitudes’ to these facts.’ There is some truth in that but also much that is misleading. Socrates does not dispute the description Polus gives of Archelaus’ life. Nor would he do so if Polus urged that Archelaus was cheerful all of every day and night, although there would no doubt be some irony in store for Polus if he did say that. Not that it is important for Polus to claim that. However cheerful Archelaus was, Polus would not think him ‘happy’, if Socrates was to tell him that the army was about to rise against Archelaus, or that his pro- miscuous life had given him syphilis which would destroy his

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health and sanity in later life although as yet there were no signs of it, and that indeed, Archelaus did not know that he had the disease. That goes some way towards showing that Socrates was not equivo- cating on the words ‘happy’ and ‘miserable’. But Socrates had nothing like that to tell Polus. That is why Bambrough says that So- crates and Archelaus do not disagree about the ‘facts’. However, Socrates pities Archelaus because of something he understands about Archelaus; he pities him because of what he understands his condilion to be. It is this ‘because’ that the statement ‘They agree about the facts but their attitude to them is different’, fails to give an adequate account of. Socrates and Archelaus do not have the same thing before them, to which they then react differently.

Socrates believed that if you know what evil is then you will pity the man who does it. Knowledge and compassion cannot be separ- ated in this case. There is no room for the question ‘what of the hard-hearted?’. This prompts philosophers to say that the relation is a conceptual one, or that Socrates’ point is a ‘formal’ one.

I don’t want to disregard the distinctions that are drawn when this is said. O n the contrary, I think them very important. I want only to deny the suggestion that Socrates is not telling us what human life is like. There are deep difficulties here, of course. But many philosophers now think that the distinction between ex- pressions that could be true and those that could not, was too hastily and crudely drawn in the past. I suspect the same to be true of the conceptual/factual distinction, and although the internal/external distinction is not the same as the conceptual/factual distinction, it is related to it, and so affected by its unclarity, as too is the contrast between what is ‘formal’ and what is ‘substantive’.

‘Over-eating gives one heart burn’ does not give the logic of ‘doing evil harms the evil-doer’. Polus thought that it did which is why he was incredulous when Socrates said that Archelaus was miserable and pitiable. Many commentators (e.g. Guthrie, Dodds) say that Socrates argued for an ethics of self-interest. They mean that Socrates would say ‘don’t do evil because it will do you harm’ rather as one would say ‘don’t overeat - i t will give you heartburn’, or, to give an example in which the relation is internal, ‘don’t be envious because you will be anxious’. I’m not sure if they would flinch at this interpretation if i t was made less abstract: I mean, if it was made to say ‘don’t bash and rob this old lady because it will harm you ’, or, as said by the evil doer to his victim - ‘You think you have i t bad!’. I think that Socrates would say that just as he who doesn’t know that evil harms the evil doer doesn’t know what evil is, so he who doesn’t do it because it will harm him doesn’t

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know what it is either. Socrates was not giving reasons to one of Philippa Foot’s ‘thousand tough characters’. If he was then Polus convinced would not be very different from Polus unconvinced. Yet what a difference between Polus thus convinced and so crate^.^

This is a passage from Chaim Kaplan’s Warsaw Diary: ‘A rabbi in Lodz was forced to spit on a Torah scroll that was in the Holy Ark. In fear of his life he complied and desecrated that which is holy to him and his people. After a short while he had no more saliva, his mouth was dry. T o the Nazi’s question, why did he stop spitting the rabbi replied that his mouth was dry. The son of the ‘superior race’ began to spit on the rabbi’s mouth and the rabbi continued to spit on the Torah.’

This is not quoted to shock, nor to bully. There might be many things said about this passage - many things relevant to this paper but I want to make only one point. I t is pre-eminently a passage which could lead one to speak of the ‘reality of evil’, and connectedly of ways in which those (differently) caught up in it can be ‘harmed’. But as I understand it the ‘reality’ of evil is not a reality into which anyone’s nose can be rubbed, nor a reality ‘in virtue of which’ some moral assertion or sentence is true, nor in ‘virtue of which’ some expression is given its sense. Which is not to deny that it is just of this kind of example that someone might properly speak of ‘the unmis- takable presence of evil’, or of evil’s irreducibility to kinds of badness’, or of the banality of thinking one can get very far in ethics by talking of choosing one’s principles, or prescribing, attitudinizing, disap- proving, praising or blaming. The reality of evil is not a reality that can persist while being unencountered, and its being encountered is conditional upon what we bring to that encounter in ways that are at crucial points, radically disanalogous with say, the physical conditions of perception. The expression ‘the reality of evil’ connects with and is itself an example of what some philosophers might call an ‘epistemic’ or ‘cognitive’ vocabulary (‘understanding’, ‘real and apparent’, ‘seeing things as they are’, etc) but the regulative focus of that vocabulary is not the metaphor of clear perception, but the notion of wisdom. To be sure, the wise ‘see things as they are’, but ‘things as they are’ such that it is the wise who see them as they are, ‘are’ not independently of it being paradigmatically (though not ex- clusively) the wise who disclose them. If one reflects on the notion of wisdom and the manner in which a person must creatively locate himself in his experience in order to count as wise, or indeed, for his words to convey any moral reality at all, to himself or to others, and if, connectedly, one reflects on the manner in which the notions of authentic or authoritative speech and the ‘reality of good and evil’

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hang together, then I think one will neither be tempted to construe the expression ‘the reality of evil’ along the lines of what is called ‘moral realism’, nor think that therefore it must be mereb . . . (fill in the dots as you wish, e.g. the expression of an attitude, emotion, choice).

I have been dogmatic, but my intention has not been to convince anybody of anything, but only to forestall some misunderstandings.

11

The situation that I want to discuss is discussed most often in aca- demic philosophy when utilitarianism, or more generally conse- qyentialism is the issue. This is unfortunate because consequentialism as an ‘ism’, as an ethical ‘theory’ is morally and imagin- atively inadequate to that which is abidingly serious within it.

Smart has said ‘The chief persuasive argument in favour of utilitarianism has been that the dictates of any deontological ethics will always, on some occasion, lead to the existence of misery that could on utilitarian principles have been avoided’.* Consequentialism will often substitute for ‘utilitarian’ in this statement, and if we disregard the idea that deontological ethics leads to the existence of misery, then I think what Smart says is true. I t is a very serious fact about human life that it should be true.

It is important to note that nobody becomes a consequentialist jus t because he is convinced by consequentialist theory. The world has to appear in a certain way to one before consequentialism can even begin to look like a likely candidate for the reflective organis- ation and clarification of that world. To the extent that consequentialism is a ‘theory’, it is a theory about what a consequentialist can take morally seriously. Socrates and Smart were not confronted with the same moral ‘data’ about which they then theorised differently. (Indeed Socrates did not theorise at all, but that is another matter.) For this reason, I think that though a morally neutral philosophy of mind and action might upset consequentialist theory, it is unlikely to upset in any important way that sense of the world and what is morally possible within it, that tempts people to such a theory.

So I do not want to discuss consequentialism as a theory, which I suppose is to say that I don’t want to discuss it at all. However what I do want to discuss has much in common with that theory - a concern with moral arithmetic, a loss of the sense of what I have called ‘the reality of evil’ and a tendency to think of action first and foremost as the human capacity to intelligently alter the world in

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the light of certain ends, ends set by a certain kind of compassion. I say a certain kind of compassion rather than simply compassion because it is a thoughtless arrogance on the part of some consequentialists to think that only they are truly, or at least un- confusedly compassionate. One gets the impression listening to consequentialists, when they are not talking of Socrates dissatisfied vs the pig satisfied or some other odd problem created by their theory, but when they are talking of the misery in the world, that they would subtitle their theory ‘the ethics of compassion’. Indeed if one attends closely to Smart’s statement one sees it as saying ‘if your ends are set by compassion then consequentialist principles are the ones that you will choose’. But one doesn’t have to attend closely; he says it outright ‘There is a prima facie necessity for the deontologist to defend himself against the charge of heartlessness.’ So when Smart talks of ‘the chief persuasive argument in favour of utilitarianism’ he is talking of that which will persuade the heart.6 (This is all couched in the meta/normative/cognitive/non-cognitive distinction but that is not important). I think that Socrates would answer that it is not for men to choose in matters to do with the ethical. As to the charge of heartlessness he might say that though he wishes from the depths of his heart that the situation could be as the consequentialist would make it, we cannot commandeer the ethical into our service.

Bertolt Brecht was more sensitive to the difficulties; he finally chose what Smart would think to be the path of the heart, and to do that he joined the communist party. Soon after he wrote: ‘What vileness would you not commit to root out the vile . . . Sink down into the slime/ Embrace the butcher/ but change the world.’ This was the voice of one kind of compassion speaking from what it thought to be its historically conditioned possibilities. On another occasion he wrote of ‘the fierce temptation to be good’, thinking of ‘the temptation to be good’ as a temptation against compassion. It is a measure of the subtle depth of Brecht’s perception that the good which tempted was not surrounded by sneer quotes. Glover’s’ gro- tesque expression ‘a possessive attitude to one’s own virtue’ is not one that could have occurred to Brecht; and that is not just a matter of ‘style’. Brecht did not think that good and evil were derivative notions when applied to persons and actions, that they derived a shadowy sense from good and evil states of affairs. If he had thought that he would not have been troubled by ‘the fierce temptation to be good’; he would have thought it a confusion, which though ‘psychologically’ forceful, was a danger to clear judgement. But he did, I think, believe that what was irreducible in the good and evil in action - that which was left unaccounted for by


both motive and result - was logically limited to the individual who did the deed; it spread no further than him and came to an end with his death. So he came to think of the evil in action as something that one could undertake to suffer: he would ‘sink into the slime’ if that is how it had to be, but he would change the world, not wilfully, or aesthetically in the pursuit of an ‘ideal’, but in obedience to the ‘passion of compassion’.’

There are two simple facts of human life which together create the dilemma expressed by Brecht. The first is that the good and evil in action is not reducible to the voluntary causing of good and evil states of affairs. The second is that the human world is a world of institutions intended to survive the death of any individual, which is to say that humans unlike animals are historically in the world, necessarily caught between the past and future of that world. The banal fact that every child is a newcomer to a world that was there before him and will survive his death, is the starting point of politics. Nonetheless, banal as i t is, it is worth drawing attention to, because many who tend to think of politics as social and economic management, think of politics as only contingently connected to past and future. They would imagine a world without a past and future, and without hesitation call the social and economic management of that world, politics. In that case they should think of another name for that uniquely human activity, the very nature of which is conditioned, not only by the fact, but by the self-conscious response to the historicity of human life, which is called politics. Put more simply: politics and history are essentially, not acci- dentally, related. The sacrifice of individuals for what are called ‘reasons of state’ is not an aberration of political life, but an integral, though one hopes rare, feature of it, because considerations of state are necessarily determined by a time logic different from that by which the individual thinks of his life, even if he is a parent hoping for grandchildren. Of course that does not mean that considerations overlap only fortuitously. Tha? which politicizes, is not a contact with power and violence, but a sense, a deep sense of the shortness of human life when measured not against eternal nature, but against the lasting political institutions of mankind. Ivan Karamazov’s thought ‘Even if this immense factory were to produce the most extraordinary marvels and were to cost only a single tear from a single child, I refuse’ is, even disregarding its rhetorical pomposity, not a thought to ‘moralise’ politics but to destroy it.

I t is important to guard against a misunderstanding.. The harm one does oneself in doing evil, is not of the sort that can be ‘her- oically’ or ‘selflessly’ endured. If it was, then the sort of questioning

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which Polus persisted in - ‘What! I t is greater even that that?’ - would have been logically appropriate. People sometimes talk of the ‘pains of conscience’ in a way that makes them vulnerable to that sort of questioning, and the accusation which is its corollary ‘You say that it is better to suffer evil than to do it; it turns out that you would rather that others should suffer evil than that you should do it’. If one thinks like that, that the misfortune that evil doing brings to one who does it is of the sort that could, and in some circum- stances, should, be endured, then the appropriate attitude to Brecht will be one of admiration - that he could endure so much, and also of gratitude that he undertook to endure this suffering for our sakes. But we cannot thank one who does evil for our sakes, if that is what we judge him to have done. I am not denying the obvious fact that one can be glad that one is still alive, if that is the result of the evil done. Still less am I suggesting that we can turn away from the evil doer as though the deed had nothing to do with us, as though it wasn’t done for our sakes; no one is tragically - because inescapably - caught u p in the evil of The impossibility arises when we turn to the evil doer to thank him, for we thank him not for the upshot, or for the generosity of his heart, but for the deed in its fullness. We cannot be glad that evil has entered the world.

I am far from suggesting that Brecht’s position is entirely coher- ent. Socrates would not think it so; he would not think it possible to undertake the suffering that evil doing brings, not because this is ‘suffering beyond human strength’ (Aristotle), but because he would not think it possible for a heart entirely lucid in its knowledge of good and evil to choose evil, even though that evil would bring about a state of affairs that any compassionate man would desire. To Faust’s question (and Brecht in his own way, asked the same question) ‘Am I not free to do with my own soul as I please?’, he would unhesitatingly answer no; the lucid soul is necessarily bound, all else is thrashing about in the dark and there is no free- dom or dignity in that. On the other hand it is precisely the sort of dilemma felt by a man like Brecht that one would introduce to probe more deeply into the Socratic conviction that no one does evil knowingly. However that would take me beyond the reach of this paper. My intention in talking of Brecht was only to introduce a perspective close to consequentialism in its judgements concerning the grounds of moral action, but which was not vulnerable to either the content or the tone of this remark by Williams: ‘Making the best of a bad job is one of its maxims, and it will have something to say on the difference between massacring seven million and massacring seven million and one’. This grisly moral optimism that Wil-


hams thinks characteristic of consequentialism, has sometimes been called a lack of a sense of ‘the tragic’. The position that I want to comment on, for the most part critically, need not be like that. It was not like that with Brecht, nor with Merleau-Ponty - ‘Political action is of its nature impure . . . there is no politician who can flat- ter himself upon his innocence . . . to govern, it has been said, is to foresee and the politician cannot excuse himself for what he has not foreseen. Yet there is always the unforeseeable. There is the tra- gedy . . . The curse of politics is precisely that it must translate values into the order of facts . . . At the level of action every desire is as good as foresight . . . The trial and death of Socrates would not have remained a subject of reflection and commentary if it had only been an incident in the struggle of good men against evil men, and had one not seen in it an innocent man who accepts his sentence, a just man who obeys his conscience but refuses to reject the world and obeys his polis, meaning, that it belongs to man to judge the law at the risk of being judged by it. I t is the nightmare of an involuntary responsibility and guilt by circumstance which already underlies the Oedipus myth.’”

Some of the matters introduced in the quotations from Brecht and Merleau-Ponty are sometimes discussed under the heading ‘Does the end justify the means?’ which is an odd way of putting i t because what else could justify a means, if not an end? To cast the problem in the language of means and ends is already to look at the ethical in a certain way, and in a way favourable to the answer to that question being yes, because it is already to see the nature of moral action and its ‘justification’ in a light borrowed from something, the perfection of one branch of which is engineering. I t is no accident that the problem presented to Popper by the Nazi and Stalinist atrocities was : what sort of engineering.

Von Wright has something curious to say on this. He distinguishes between ‘absolutely’ and ‘relatively’ unavoidable harm, the former being harm that results whatever one does, and the latter being ‘harm which cannot be avoided if some particular end of action is to be reached.’ He then introduces what he calls ‘a rule of minimising unavoidable harm . . . I t determines under which conditions the causing of bad to some being can be morally excused. The harm which it exculpates is unavoidable in the absolute sense. Harm which is in the relative sense unavoidable can, in my view, never be morally excused. To argue that it could be excused is a form of arguing that the end justifies the means. This seems to me the very prototype of immoral argument.”’ Well he might argue that, for on that account of the matter who has ever argued that the endjustifies

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the means? or perhaps more accurately, who has ever caused moral perplexity by arguing that? The situations which have given rise to the question does the end justify the means have all, perhaps falsely, but at any rate reasonably, been thought of as situations of ‘absolutely unavoidable harm’, at least this will be so if one is as generous with the criteria which determine under what conditions refraining is in fact acting as consequentialists usually are.

Moreover, it is by no means clear that questions about ‘justification’ will direct one to anything important in ethics. Someone might shoot his father to prevent another man being murdered. The action is ‘justified’ but what is that to the parricide? When I ask, what is that to him, I don’t mean, how will that help him in his under- standable, but merely ‘psychological’ distress. He could conceivably and appropriately feel something very like guilt, and if one refuses to describe it in that way because, by hypothesis, he says that as far as he is able to see, he would do the same again, and because he says that (morally) there was nothing else for it, then I think that we are left with a moral condition very similar to guilt but for which we have no name. Though of course the situation is different, much the same might be said of Oedipus, namely that if guilty is what we refuse to call his condition because what he did he did unintentionally then we have a moral condition without a name.

So if the nature of the question has a bearing on the nature of the answer then ‘does the end justify the means?’ is not a very good question. But it is a question that occurs often both in discussions of consequentialism and politics, which is not merely coincidental. That which is most serious in consequentialism and in that sense of the world, close to consequentialism but not yet theoretically struc- tured by it, is its justification of politics’2. Hare had declared himself unable to see any conflict between ethics and politics, but this turns out to be because he cannot see any conflict between something very like consequentialism and politics. ’’

A political community governed by persons whose political prac- tice was subordinate to the trust that it was better to suffer evil than to do it (something that Popper naively misunderstands as a ‘principle’ that ‘any humanist would accept’I4) would be a community whose survival had been given as a hostage to a most improbable good fortune. What Polus and Callicles keep pointing out as true of Socrates would be equally true of such a community; it would be vulnerable to and eventually overwhelmed by anybody who arranged things in such a way that the means necessary to its defence were evil (for example, modern guerilla warfare, in which guerillas mingle with the civilian population as ‘fish in the ocean’ forcing


their enemy to choose between the slaughter of civilians and a likely defeat. As Professor Holland has pointed out, the Socratic ethics is an ethics of foregoing, which is why from its standpoint, the connec- tion between politics and evil is not a contingent one; it is not contingent to politics that foregoing is not its manner.

That is why the most ancient charge against the ‘good man’ is that he is irresponsible. I t is a charge at least as old as Plato. The portrait of the perfectly unjust man in Bk 2 of the Republic con- cludes with him being loved both by men and the gods, as the bene- factor of mankind. ‘His sacrifices to the gods are on a magnificent scale, and his services to the gods and to any man he wished to serve are far better than those of the just man, so that is reasonable to suppose that the gods care more for him’. The charge is not much different today; ‘Weber criticises equally political realism which chooses too soon in order to spare itself effort, and the ethics of faith with its ‘Hier stehe ich, ich kann nichts anders’, to which it resorts in the face of an inescapable dilemma, but which is only a heroic for- mula, guaranteeing man neither the efficacy of his actions nor even the approval of others or himself .I5

Hare says of people to whom he attributes the belief that ‘we must pay attention only to the nature and quality of the act and disregard its consequences’16 that ‘Fiat justita, ruat caelum’ is their ‘motto’. Hannah Arendt has shrewdly observed that this is usually heard ‘invoked rhetorically against the defenders of absolute justice, often for the purpose of excusing wrongs and crimes’.” At any rate, one could not imagine Socrates saying it; its pompous tone is the tone of one who, as Kierkegaard would put it, ‘thinks that the good needs him’. But i t is equally certain that the most basic of human goods, such as safety and security, are not ones that the Socratic ethic can safeguard in the face of a cunning and evil enemy. It forgoes the defence, not merely of this or that political community, but of the conditions of political community itself.

What is the nature of the evil in an act of killing, when that act is evil. Here is one sort of answer: that on which the ethical gets its grip when someone is murdered is the fact, the overridingly important fact, that he is dead. After all, what is so bad about being murdered if i t is not the fact that one is dead? Is not the difference of moral seriousness between theft and murder, the difference between the results of these actions? The evil suffered is simply the evil of an unwanted death, and if that is so then the evil suffered when some-

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one is murdered is the same as the evil suffered in a fatal car accident; the dead are all equally dead however they came to be that way. Nature brings evil through necessity and chance, but intentional human actions fall under neither of those headings, which is why we take a special attitude towards evil done, that is, evil when it is the effect of the voluntary causality of a human agent. So a special, but derivative and reducible language of good and evil is attached to these special causes. Actions are evil by proxy when they result in evil states of affairs; there are many bona fide forms of evil, but moral evil is not one of them.

The central idea is of action as power - to alter, control and arrange. We have power for good and evil because we engage caus- ally with that which makes us suffer and that which makes us glad. The ethical is a species of the practical and being so is purposive, and its purpose is to make life better for ourselves and others. G . Warnock has said as much. The ‘object’ of ethics is to ‘ameliorate the human condition”*, which if it wasn’t for ethics would be worse than it already is. The ethical not only roots itself in, but is reducible to these facts of the human condition: we are creatures who can suffer and who can be happy, and we are creatures capable of intelligently directing and controlling the power inherent in action.

This sort of view is almost hypnotic with common sense which is why some treat the refusal to shoot the one to save the ten with derision or incomprehension. Is it not clear, that once in such an awful situation the aim of moral thinking is to ‘ameliorate’ it; and is not that done by having one corpse rather than ten? What can this man who refuses be thinking of! The fault must lie in something ‘inner’, for the structure of action is this : person-act-effect. Ethically acts collapse into the voluntary causation of certain effects, so what is left but the self? He must be distracted by the enchanting but morally irrelevant complexity of his subjectivity, for what is not moral preoccupation with effects must be mistaken moral preoccupation with the self and its ‘integrity’. Other things being equal, it is clearly a better state of affairs that there be one dead rather than ten, so how can it be evil to bring about a state of affairs that all compassionate men would regard as good?

It is a characteristic feature of discussions of the one ten situation that the dilemma is presented from the point of view of the one who might do the killing. This seems perfectly natural, for after all, is it not his problem? However he is not the only one in the situation who has a dilemma. Everyone is caught up in the evil in it; the one who might be shot and the ten who might be saved must ask themselves what they hope for. That they are thus implicated has, as I

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shall try to show later, consequences for the notion of compassion. Even so, one might object that although the others are thus implicated, they have a problem only because, and only to the extent that, the one who has been asked to do the shooting has one. In which case, do not all the problems collapse into ‘what should he do?’ which is perhaps best asked impersonally as ‘What should someone in such a situation do?.

I don’t want to ask ‘what should be done?’. For one thing, the situation as I characterise it is too empty of detail to enable such a question to be sensibly asked. I focus on what might be said by one person involved - one of the ten. I do not claim that anything like that must be said. Indeed I would deny that anything significant must be said. (Bernard Williams says of a similar example that ‘the men against the wall are obviously begging him to accept . . .’ the ‘invitation’ to kill the one.’” Why obuzously?) One could imagine a more extended dialogue. One could give a voice to the one who might be shot, or rather one could give him many voices. I see no reason to think that these voices must converge on the question ‘what should he (who has been asked to do the killing) do?’. Even the man in my example who says - ‘Not for my sake’ is not thereby committed to thejudgement ‘He should not shoot him’.

To be sure only the one who might do the killing has something to deliberate about, for only he is called upon to act; the thought of the others are thoughts about their relation to what he might do. It does not follow that their thoughts must be thoughts about what he should do. And from its not following there does not follow any simple view of the nature of moral reasoning, nor of the nature of the personal and the impersonal in moral thought, nor of the relation between moral thought and description and action; certainly nothing to be prefaced by ‘ s o its mere4 . . .’

The one who might be shot might plead to be shot. It does not follow that he thinks the person to whom he addresses his plea ought to shoot, and that is not because his plea is not a ‘moral’ plea. Even if he knows that the man to whom he addresses his plea thinks he (morally) cannot kill him, still, in pleading as he does he does not thereby think he ought to reconsider. He pleads because he must and he need have no thoughts about what he to whom he addresses his plea must or ought to do. If he is shot he got what he pleaded for, but not simply because he pleaded for it. A person cannot be killed in response to his plea in the way a hungry man can be given food.

The one who shoots one in the hope that ten others will survive might do so because he thinks he must. I t does not follow that for

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this to be a sense of moral necessitation he must think ‘one must’. Further, if he thinks he must he can still think it evil, and he need not think it ‘the lesser evil’. His remorse, if it is serious, will not be remorse for ‘a lesser evil’. Many philosophers think we cannot learn much from remorse for they think it secondary to questions about ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ in action. So some philosophers argue that if he thought he morally must then he thought what he did was morally right, and so, though of course it is only natural that he feel terrible, he should not feel remorse. I would argue the other way; an important and indispensible part of our sense of good and evil in action is given by remorse; it is part of an understanding of ‘morally’ right or wrong, ‘morally’ terrible and so on. There are philosophers who say that there is no moral difference between not giving money to Oxfam and sending poison food parcels to India. There is this clear difference - in one case we have murder, in the other not, and that difference is in significant part given by the manner of the remorse appropriate in the one case but not in the other. A man who says that he knows what evil he has done in murdering people by sending poison food parcels yet shows no grievous remorse is a man who understands neither what he has said nor what he has done. A person who says that he is as one who had murdered by sending food parcels because he had failed to give money to Oxfam and who shows no grievous remorse does not understand what he is saying either. And if he should feel such remorse he would need to do more than philosophise about acts and omissions to convince us he wasn’t mad.

In what follows one of the ten who might be saved by the shooting of an innocent man calls that shooting evil. I do not think it follows that he must say or (pace Hare think) that therefore it must not, ought not be done. Do I intend his speech as an argument that the killing would be evil? Only in this manner and to this degree: it is meant to foreclose one way of talking ab0u.t the killing and its relation to the ten, to the effect that though of course it was terrible it was ‘the right thing to do’, and so not evil. If he kills one to save ten, even because ‘he must’, that ‘he must’ does not mean that he should not plead for the forgiveness not only of the man he kills and those related to him, but of those he ‘saves’ as well.

IV

One is to be shot to ‘save’ ten. One of the ten says this: “If this man dies, then I will live, because he died and because there are nine others with me. Each of the nine others will be able to say the same.

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Yet when this man is dead will I be able to console myself by saying that he died for only one tenth for me? Though you think you must kill him, not for me or any of the others taken individually, but for all of us taken together, when he is dead each of us must accept the fact that he died for each of us singly, absolutely and undividedly. Each of us must face this man and ask whether he can bear the responsibility for his death, and each must do so in his singularity. There are ten of us but we do not make ‘a ten’. No one of us can say ‘a little for me but mostly for the others’. A man cannot die, a little for one and a little for another, and a man cannot share his guilt, like a loaf of bread, a little for one and a little for another. Though each of us is one of the ten, we cannot, any of us, become one tenth of something; we cannot be taken together as ‘something of ten’, and be placed in the scale against this man’s singularity. If there were not nine others, if there was only he and I, and I was to say ‘Let him die, I am as ten’, then anybody could see that I was being ridiculous. Yet that is in fact how it is, even now. If ten men, each alone, came to a raging stream, each would know that if he was to cross it alone he would be swept away. But together they link arms, and each man’s strength and stability would be increased tenfold. The strength and weight of the ten would be added to each. Strength can be added to strength, weight to weight and volume to volume, but we cannot link arms now and say that each must give of his weight to the other so that they might all survive. I t is a mistake to think that a man has moral weight that can be added to by another, so that in that way, each as part of many becomes weightier than one alone. A man can make a gift of his life to another. Suppose a man who received such a gift, suppose him to be grateful as he should be, but suppose now that he discovers that this man has died, not only for him, but for another as well. Would he now become churlish and complain that his gift had diminished in value, that he now only had half of what he had before, and could he say that his gratitude had been excessive? As it was with this man’s relation to the good of the other’s gift, so it is with each of us in relation to the evil of this man’s murder; it is unaffected by the presence of others. If you must count, then let it be like this: one, one, one . . . , and when there is no more ‘one’ to be said, content yourself with that and resist the temptation to say ‘And they total ten whereas there is only one over there’.”

An important part of what this man says is that he sees the man who might be killed as being killed for his sake, although not only for his sake. It is this relation of ‘being for the sake of that cuts throush the weighing and balancing metaphors, which are so im-

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portant for the wretched man to whom this speech is addressed. This can be brought out in the following way. Suppose each of those in a group of ten to say, in unison, ‘Alone, my physical weight is no more than yours, but as one of ten I will tip the scales against you’. There is nothing odd about this. But if each of a group of ten was to say, in unison ‘Let him not die for my sake, but for the sake of the others’, then there is something odd, not of course in the mere saying of it, but in the fact that the saying of it in unison would inhibit the action suggested. Who would ‘the others’ be? It might seem as though this could be avoided if they said ‘Not for my sake alone . . . etc’, in which case the reply could be ‘That is how it will be, not for any of you but for all of you taken together’. But it was against the possibility ofjust such a move that the speech was direc- ted. For each of the ten, the understanding of what it is for the killing to be for his sake, is such as to render morally irrelevant the fact that from the point of view of the man who might do the killing, i t is for the sake of them taken together.

V

The dilemma of the one who might do the killing, cannot present itself to him as ‘one dead or ten dead’, because as i t stands, that fails to mention anything that he might do. Yet, I think that the answer presents itself to him like that; it is better that there be one dead than ten. And that shows something about the way in which he conceives of his actions. This answer is an answer to a question about a kind of doing - doing under the perspective of ‘arranging’. The question is ‘what is the best arrangement here?’, and the answer is ‘the best arrangement is that there be as few dead as possible’. His sense of responsibility hinges on whether, at the end of it all, he has arranged things well or badly, and the only criterion for whether his deed or arranging is good or bad is whether the arrangement is good or bad. Here the criterion for the identity of an action is very simple, and is completely dominated by the identity of a state of affairs. That is why the consequentialist can move with such ease from the judgement that it is better that there be one dead than ten dead, to the judgement that it is better to kill one man, though he be innocent, to save ten others. So his reply to the ten would be: ‘You speak, each for yourselves, and each of you says that he is prepared to die. Yet it is I who must count the corpses, and how can I avoid the conclusion that it is better that there be only one?’.

His dilemma was about what to do, and as soon as he saw this in the light of the consideration that it would be better that there be


one dead than ten dead, as soon as he began to suspect that his dilemma about what to do, would, or at least should be resolved, completely and without remainder, by his judgement about what state of affairs would be the best, than to the extent that the question as to what he might be doing became simplified, to that extent his dilemma lost much of its dreadfulness. That is why talk of ‘squeamishness’ cemes so naturally to a consequentialist in a discussion of this kind of situation. The kind of dreadfulness that the act of killing a man has, when its moral dimensions are exhausted by the judgement that it is better that one be dead than ten be, is of such a kind that the incapacity to do the deed is indeed squeamishness; it is the same kind of incapacity that people suffer when they cannot drown kittens or kill their own meat. But as Williams has pointed out, to describe the refusal to kill an innocent man in such a situation as squeamishness, is not to point to a morally relevant but hitherto neglected aspect of the situation; it is already to see the situation in the morally flat light of consequentialist theory.20

I t might be objected that it is a cheap kind of argument to suggest that consequentialists consider the kind of incapacity to kill a man as being of the same kind as the incapacity to kill an animal. I don’t think that it is, for once one begins to disregard the ways in which the people for the sake of whom one is acting are morally implicated in what one does, then one begins to look at them from the standpoint of the R.S.P.C.A.; one begins to look at them on& as creatures who should be spared further suffering, which is not to see them as human beings who can suffer the harm of being implicated in the evil being done for their sakes. That, I think, was Brecht’s mistake. The same thing is chillingly illustrated in the life of Che Guevara, who, starting as Brecht did, finally said that in order to succeed in his task, he had to transform himself into ‘a cold, calcu- lating, brutal killing machine’. From the beginning to the end he was obedient to a certain kind of compassion and from the beginning to the end, that compassion demanded that he ‘change the world!’. But that same compassion disguised from both men, a pro- found disrespect for those to whom they were doing evil. That they were doing evil, is a judgement that both men passed on themselves, which is not to say that either of them would have done otherwise if they had to choose a second time.

Socrates would say that the compassion was counterfeit, not because it was ‘insincere’, but because it was sustained by ignorance about the nature of the object - a human being. We tend to pride ourselves both on our historically unparallelled respect for persons and our compassion. We have no right to be so naive as to the ways

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in which our sense of these have come into conflict with one another.

If one thinks that men’s capacity for action, is above all, the capacity to intelligently control the changes he can effect in the world, then one’s model for the ethical will be an administrative one. It has certainly been pointed out many times that consequentialism has a certain theory of action and that given this, all else follows. But it is important to notice that the relation between the ethical and the anthropological is reciprocal. The person in our example, thinks of himself as having been placed in a situation where it is said to him, ‘the outcome is in your hands’. Of course his first thought will be for the man he has to kill, but he cannot think about this without thinking about the others, and so the problem seems to be inescapably presented to him as one ofnumbers, as one in which he is to exercise the administrative power that he has; it is little wonder that he begins to count corpses.

It is different with the others. In so far as each does his thinking from his own situation, his perception will be unaffected by any idea of the administrative. His problem is not whether at the end of the day there will be one man dead or ten men dead - that is not within his power - i t is, as I have tried to show, whether he can consent to the killing of another for himself. So his gaze does not go to and fro, from one to ten and back again, it stays fixed on the action to be performed. And while he knows that the perspective of the doer of the deed is necessarily different from his own because of his necessarily different relation to the ten, though he knows that the doer of the deed can make nothing of his ‘radical singularity’, and that for him his singularity is only the countable singularity of a corpse, the perspective of the doer of the deed cannot be his. When it is finished each faces something different.

Department of Philosophy, King’s College, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS

FOOTNOTES

‘The distinction between two kinds of evil suffered: those murdered suffer not only the evil of death but also that of being murdered. So, for example, an unjust act, e.g. a lynching ‘for the sake’ of the murdered dead makes matters worse for them, for they are then not only the murdered but also the unjustly avenged dead and so are forced even deeper into a quagmire ofevil. ‘R. Bambrough. Socratic Paradox Phil. Quarterly Vol. X 1960.


'No doubt this is a controversial reading. It has the advantage of treating Socrates as though he meant what he said - that it is better to suffer evil than to do it, that the worst thing that could befall one is to become an evil doer - rather than treating it as pointing to hitherto unexpected consequences of evil doing, for then what he says becomes gratuitously misleading.

4Thus contrast G. H. von Wright: The Varieties of Goodness Routledge & Kegan Paul 1963.

'J. Smart: in Smart and Williams Utilitarianism: f o r and against Cambridge 1973. 6Needless to say 'heart' is not contrasted with 'head' here. Smart would contrast it

with 'abstract moral principles'. If that wur the contrast then one had indeed better follow the 'heart'.

'J. Glover Aristotelian Socieb Supplementary Vol. 1975. 'The expression is Hannah Arendt's from On Revolution. Pelican, 1963. 'Though of course I do not mean that we are in any way 'responsible' for it. ' O M . Merleau-Ponty Humanism and Terror Beacon Press, 1969. "G. H. von Wright, op. cit. "By which I do not mean that politics is consequentialist. O n the contrary I think

it is not. The dramatic manner in which concern for consequences does not enter politics has lead some philosophers to think that consequentialism is the ethics of politics. But contrast for example M. Oakeshot - Human Conduct, Clarendon Press, 1975.

I3R. M. Hare, Applications of Moral Philosophy, Macmillan. Hare attacks the act- /consequence distinction in the following way: he argues that any consequence/effect (he doesn't distinguish) of an act can enter into a further description of that act, and that the act thus described can fall under a moral principle. His discussion is sloppy, not only because there is no argument for this claim (which as it stands is highly dubious) hut also because he says things like 'for my acts (what I do in the appropriate sense of do) are what I cause to happen . . . my causing something to happen is always an act', and that is clearly false. But that could he put down to carelessness. We can restate his argument in a way that would I think be true to his intention, by saying, in the manner of Davidson, that someone is an agent of an act if what he does can he described under an aspect that makes it intentional, and that agency enables us to redescribe actions in ways we cannot describe other events. But all this makes little difference. A man kills another by shooting him; the shooting is redescribable as a killing because of its effect; the death is external to the shooting but internal to the killing (something that has led to the results/consequence distinction - some writers e.g. Zeno Vendler, have suggested a tripartite distinction between results, effects and consequences). Now it is true that until relatively recently such distinctions were not drawn, and some, though I think not very important confusions resulted. The ethical question has always been: what has the death to do with the evil of the killing when i t is evil, and to that question there have been three answers according to which ethical theories divide : everything, nothing and something hut not everything. The first position is consequentialism the second corresponds to a certain reading of Kant, and the third is I think the truth, but only the second can plausibly be described as a position which held that consequences were 'completely morally irrelevant'.

14K. Popper The Open Soczely and ifs Enemies Vol. I Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962. "M. Merleau-Ponty op. cit. 16R. M. Hare op. c i t . "H. Arendt 'Civil Disobedience' in Critis in the Republic, Pelican 1969. '*G. Warnock The Object OfMoralip, London: Methuen, 1971. "B. Williams in Smart and Williams, op. cit. 'OB. Williams, ibid.

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It is anyhow absurd to suggest that the ‘ I can’t kill him’ which contrasts with the mnifestb moral ‘can’t’ betokens squeamishness (in any save the most extraordinary example), and it can only hinder understanding of the relation between them.

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‘Better One Than Ten’