Essays, Treatises, and Other Pretensions

[LazyAutumnMoon]

A place for long, rambling thoughts painted with a veneer of scholastic philosophy and romanticism, because everybody gets them sometimes. Put yours here.

Brevity is not always a merit, and changing minds involve more than screaming back and forth about fallacies. I don't mind just hearing you yap if it makes me think.

 

[LazyAutumnMoon]

Kill 10 to save 100. Kill 100 to save 10,000. Kill 1,000 to save 100,000.

This, is the framing of the hard choice, a dilemma where someone dies no matter what. In story discussions, it is the argument that is posed whenever the debate arises on the morality of a character's actions.

And yet, the hard choice is easy.

There is only one right answer. To choose to save anything beside the bigger number, means that a person would be stared at with askance. They will be called an imbecile or a bleeding heart, their arguments in either case thereafter dismissed as the whining of a mewling infant unable to comprehend the reality of the world. 100 is more than 10, what are you, dumb?

During the course of discussion, it may be that the worth of a person is put under scrutiny. Of course, everyone involved could quickly agree that the sanctity of a human life is not to be questioned. It is precious, and good, and right.

Does the dilemma therefore change its answer?

No. 100 precious lives is clearly of a greater worth than 10 precious lives. The idea had been raised and settled, its point entirely missed. The 'precious' human is yet a number, appearing now in the mind of the philosopher as a stick figure rather than, say, a squiggle; a series of lines topped by a circle in which the word SACRED is written, regarded with the care and value that such a thing warrants.

In other words, to consider 10 of them to be important? Madness.

The hard choice is so easy.

~o~​

Today, the city rejoiced, for a tragedy has been averted. A Great Man has made a hard choice. A hundred people were saved from death at a cost of merely ten others. What a day to be alive.

A boy, nearly a man, thought otherwise. He did not care that a hundred people lived, he cared that his brother died.

The news said they used a humane method, a quick whiff of the chemical mist and it was over.

He had seen a leaked video of what the mist did, and although the file was scrubbed within the next hour to leave no trace, he couldn't forget it now that he had learned the truth. Minutes were not fast. People scream because they're in pain. They marched his brother to his death, and he died in agony.

The two of them had been as close as can be, and while the boy was a little too freaked out by fire to become a fireman like him, his brother had wholeheartedly supported the boy in applying to the police academy. They boasted that between them, their hometown would be kept safe for years to come.

Perhaps if it was the other way around, and the boy was the one to die, his brother would accept the decision. Years on the job as a fireman surely taught him of sacrifice. The boy did not have that. He just wanted his brother back.

Since he couldn't… well.

The boy went to his garage. His fingers danced on the number pad, inputting the password to the gun cabinet. He had a few options, but he chose a handgun for ease of carry.

One thing about training to be a cop, you know the worst, and best, ways to conceal a gun.

Elsewhere in the city, a woman mourned the loss of her husband.

They weren't quite childhood sweethearts despite knowing each other since before they could walk. Her husband had been a bit too oblivious to her, thinking of her as one of the boys. The woman had fallen in love, grew up and out of love, then fell for him all over again.

When he dated other girls in high school, she had been the one he confided in. While he was out with his college friends getting drunk and trying to score, she stayed in to livestream her Dark Souls playthroughs. When she had to go across the country for a game tournament and had no money for a plane ticket, he dropped his date and drove her for days to get her there—his swanky car didn't survive the trip.

He told her that he could spend hours just watching her play, because she looked so happy. She told him that the best games were co-op.

They married two years out of college. Their gifts to one another were the dream gaming setups they've each gushed about, set side by side. His desktop screen was of their wedding day, hers was of Mario jumping on a Goomba.

She looked at those now, and the desire to play was just not there. The best games were co-op, but he was gone.

She thought about it a lot, what she would do next. A knife was no good, and the only gun she knew how to use were the digital ones operated with a game controller. It took a while for the solution to come to her. A person picked things up here and there on the internet, and she had always been a deft hand at chemistry.

Her husband was going to get fireworks on his funeral day.

It's either that, or she jumps off a bridge.

Elsewhere from elsewhere, a young man stood in the living room of a house. It wasn't his—well, it wasn't his before. The will changed that.

The old woman who lived here was no relation of his, simply a neighbor who asked him one day in passing for help buying groceries, an incident that ended with him coming over everyday from then on. Her family did not often stop by anymore, always busy with their own lives, leaving him the one person around to maintain the place, run her errands, and all the other things she had not the strength for. He sometimes thought of it as a hassle, but the old woman made up for it with the best cookies he ever tasted along with the fascinating stories of her life.

She had scaled mountains in her youths, and dove deep below the sea. Places all over the world bore traces of her footprints, and treasures in museums had plaques with her name mentioned. A real-life Indiana Jones, was the old woman.

At least the chemical mist would have taken her instantly, he thought. That was a mercy.

She left him the house and everything inside. He'd rather hear one of her stories again. The old woman's tale shouldn't have ended like this.

And, looking around, he arrived at the conclusion that the house held nothing of value to him. It was cold and empty, bereft of the one good thing it had. What the house could do, was enable a number of plans bouncing inside his head. The old woman's tale would not end like this.

A million dollars translated to a lot of hired hands and a pretty big shark tank, to make one hell of a finale. A Great Man would die for what he has done.

~o~​

How odd that, when thinking of the hard choice, everybody puts themselves in the position of the person making the decision, of a bystander, or of one among the 100 to be saved. Hardly ever, the 10 to die, or those that knew them. Hardly ever, are there thoughts of contexts or consequences. The question is reduced to its most basic form. 10 people vs. 100 people. Or, even simpler, 10 vs. 100, no need to think of the whats or whos.

The hard choice is not a hard choice because of what is seen before our eyes as the question is posed, a piece of paper with 10 stick figures drawn on one side and 100 stick figures drawn on the other side. It comprises all the unseen details behind the scenario and behind each number, and what comes after. It is the understanding that there are consequences no matter which you choose, that you will cause grief and pain to utterly ruin people's lives, and your days may well be numbered from the moment you made the decision.

I would never begrudge that Great Man for having to make the hard choice. I would also never begrudge the ten sacrificial lambs were they to rage against their end, to rebel and fight and seek their freedom. And I could only smile, should someone loved me so dearly that they pursued revenge for my murder.

At its core, the hard choice is not about who lives or dies, but whether or not you'd accept standing in front of a firing line at the end. Because, really, you were the first person on the chopping block from the moment you were forced to consider the options.