First I want to talk about an episode of Torchwood I just watched on Netflix.
The basic storyline is that someone is going around murdering people who were volunteers to test this miracle drug called Reset that can, as the show puts it, “reset you to your factory settings”.
In other words, it fixes absolutely everything. Infections, diseases, malformations. It cured one guy’s diabetes, that’s how thorough it is.
Of course, it turns out that it does this by infecting you with an alien parasite that gestates inside you (and fixes you in the process because it needs a healthy body to support it) and then kills you as the adult form of a fucked up kind of space wasp emerges from you.
Too good to be true, right?
The villain of the piece is Doctor Copler, the scientist in charge of a scary secret lab that is infecting volunteers (without informed consent, natch) with this drug/bug, trying to figure out how to get the good effects (making you super healthy) without the bad effects (filling you full of killer space wasps).
Of course, the Torchwood team has to swoop in and stop this evil doctor who is giving people a deadly drug in order to experiment on them, and they are all self-righteous about how horrible it all is and how Copley is abusing poor innocent space wasps and so forth and so on.
But here’s the thing. I would have let Copley continue.
In fact, I might have helped him out.
See, I’m a Utilitarian, not an absolutist. That means that to me, there is no act, no matter how heinous or horrifying, that cannot be justified under the right circumstances.
That means I would kill a thousand people to save a million. I wouldn’t feel wonderful about it and I would make sure there was not a less massacre-y way to do it, but if that was the only way to do it, I would do it, and consider it the right thing to do.
I know that sounds cold, and emotionally speaking, it is. But morality is bigger than simply what feels right. Sometimes, the right thing will feel wrong, and you have to do it anyhow, regardless of how you feel or what kind of damage it does to yourself to do it.
And so if Copley truly could make the drug that cures absolutely everything, and there is no indication that he would not do so eventually, then he is actually justified in killing a couple of dozen people in order to get there because that drug would save billions of lives over time, AND increase the human lifespan by an incalculable amount.
That is a seriously potent good. Like Copley says, surely that justifies a few sacrifices.
I totally agree with him,
They try to make him seem more villainous by having him talk about getting a Nobel Prize and being somewhat callous about the lives he’s taken, but I still think he’s fundamentally right and I would have let him keep doing it.
I would try to direct him to people who maybe the world could do without, but still. If it takes the deaths of dozens to save the lives of billions, I say go for it, and I consider those who would rather pretend that morality means only ever having to do what feels right to be the ones who are wrong.
Wrap it in as much stirring rhetoric and feel-good speeches as you want, by shutting Copler down, Captain Jack and the rest probably doomed billions of people to a painful and unnecessary death.
Tell me how that could possibly be right. The people of the future where all forms of disease are a distant memory certainly will not care if some people had to die in order for them to live.
It wouldn’t make the drug any less effective. In fact, ideally, they would never know.
We do the world no favours when we retreat from difficult questions and bury our heads in the sand by pretending there’s always an easy, pleasant alternative that feels good.
Sometimes, the right thing will be something that seems quite evil out of context.
Well, enough of that serious and depressing stuff, time for today’s vid.
Ha ha, no, it’s about the Trayvon Martin verdict.
Oh, and it’s almost 20 minutes long.
Time really flies when I am talking. I am getting used to it now, but part of learning the art of the video blog has been learning that what feels to me like five minutes when I am recording and focusing on performance will turn out to be fifteen minutes.
This must be related to that weird phenomenon I have noticed that being onstage performing and therefore “on”, it’s like everything but me and the audience ceases to exist.
And the really freaky part is that afterwards, I barely remember my time on stage. It’s like it happened to someone else. I will remember bits and pieces, flashes and sensations, but for the most part, it might as well have been a dream.
So I suppose it’s good that lately, this has been happening while I am recording myself. That way, if I forget what I said when I was speaking to the camera, I can just watch the vid!
Plus, editing video means watching parts of it over and over again, so that should help fix the thing in my memory. Isn’t externalizing information great?
As for what I talk about in the vid, I mean every word of it. I know I wandered far afield of my starting subject, but to me, it’s all connected. Only a profound moral degeneracy on the part of the American Right could possibly lead to people sticking up for a murderer who hunted down and killed a fifteen year old boy in the middle of a prosperous suburb just because he was acting some kind of action movie fantasy where he would be the hero who shot the bad guy.
What can I say. To a mind like mine, all the threads are connected.