S C I E N C E OF G O O D A N D E V I L

6 A Science of Good and Evil
Is THE difference between good and evil just a matter of what any
particular group of human beings says it is ? Consider that one of the
greatest sources of amusement in sixteenth-century Paris was cat
burning. At the midsummer's fair an impresario would gather
dozens of cats in a net, hoist them high into the air from a special
stage, and then, to everyone's delight, lower the whole writhing
bundle onto a bonfire. The assembled spectators "shrieked with
laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and
finally carbonized."1 Most of us would recoil from such a spectacle
today. But would we be right to do so? Can we say that there are ethical
truths of which all avid torturers of cats are ignorant?
Many people appear to believe that ethical truths are culturally
contingent in a way that scientific truths are not. Indeed, this loss of
purchase upon ethical truth seems to be one of the principal shortcomings
of secularism. The problem is that once we abandon our
belief in a rule-making God, the question of why a given action is
good or bad becomes a matter of debate. And a statement like "Murder
is wrong," while being uncontroversial in most circles, has never
seemed anchored to the facts of this world in the way that statements
about planets or molecules appear to be. The problem, in
philosophical terms, has been one of characterizing just what sort of
"facts" our moral intuitions can be said to track—if, indeed, they
track anything of the kind.
A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize
that questions of right and wrong are really questions about the
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happiness and suffering of sentient creatures. If we are in a position
to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities
toward them2—and many of these responsibilities are so
grave as to become matters of civil and criminal law. Taking happiness
and suffering as our starting point, we can see that much of
what people worry about under the guise of morality has nothing to
do with the subject. It is time we realized that crimes without victims
are like debts without creditors. They do not even exist.3 Any
person who lies awake at night worrying about the private pleasures
of other consenting adults has more than just too much time on his
hands; he has some unjustifiable beliefs about the nature of right
and wrong.
The fact that people of different times and cultures disagree about
ethical questions should not trouble us. It suggests nothing at all
about the status of moral truth. Imagine what it would be like to
consult the finest thinkers of antiquity on questions of basic science:
"What," we might ask, "is fire? And how do living systems reproduce
themselves? And what are the various lights we see in the
night sky?" We would surely encounter a bewildering lack of consensus
on these matters. Even though there was no shortage of brilliant
minds in the ancient world, they simply lacked the physical and
conceptual tools to answer questions of this sort. Their lack of consensus
signified their ignorance of certain physical truths, not that
no such truths exist.
If there are right and wrong answers to ethical questions, these
answers will be best sought in the living present. Whether our
search takes us to a secluded cave or to a modern laboratory makes
no difference to the existence of the facts in question. If ethics represents
a genuine sphere of knowledge, it represents a sphere of
potential progress (and regress). The relevance of tradition to this
area of discourse, as to all others, will be as a support for present
inquiry. Where our traditions are not supportive, they become mere
vehicles of ignorance. The pervasive idea that religion is somehow
the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more
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get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than
we get our sense that two plus two equals four from the pages of a
textbook on mathematics. Anyone who does not harbor some rudimentary
sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is by
reading—and, indeed, most scripture offers rather equivocal testimony
to this fact in any case. Our ethical intuitions must have their
precursors in the natural world, for while nature is indeed red in
tooth and claw, it is not merely so. Even monkeys will undergo
extraordinary privations to avoid causing harm to another member
of their species.4 Concern for others was not the invention of any
prophet.
The fact that our ethical intuitions have their roots in biology
reveals that our efforts to ground ethics in religious conceptions of
"moral duty" are misguided. Saving a drowning child is no more a
moral duty than understanding a syllogism is a logical one. We simply
do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives.
Once we begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we
find that our religious traditions are no more reliable on questions
of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.
The anthropocentrism that is intrinsic to every faith cannot help
appearing impossibly quaint—and therefore impossible—given
what we now know about the natural world. Biological truths are
simply not commensurate with a designer God, or even a good one.
The perverse wonder of evolution is this: the very mechanisms that
create the incredible beauty and diversity of the living world guarantee
monstrosity and death. The child born without limbs, the
sightless fly, the vanished species—these are nothing less than
Mother Nature caught in the act of throwing her clay. No perfect
God could maintain such incongruities. It is worth remembering
that if God created the world and all things in it, he created smallpox,
plague, and filariasis. Any person who intentionally loosed such
horrors upon the earth would be ground to dust for his crimes.
The deity who stalked the deserts of the Middle East millennia
ago—and who seems to have abandoned them to bloodshed in his
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL 173
name ever since—is no one to consult on questions of ethics. Indeed,
to judge him on the basis of his works is a highly invidious undertaking.
Bertrand Russell got here first: "Apart from logical cogency,
there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of
those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent
Deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless
nebulae, would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the
final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H bomb."5 This is a devastating
observation, and there is no retort to it. In the face of God's
obvious inadequacies, the pious have generally held that one cannot
apply earthly norms to the Creator of the universe. This argument
loses its force the moment we notice that the Creator who purports
to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions—
jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. A close
study of our holy books reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridiculous
fellow—capricious, petulant, and cruel—and one with whom a
covenant is little guarantee of health or happiness.6 If these are the
characteristics of God, then the worst among us have been created
far more in his image than we ever could have hoped.
The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in
the face of evil (this is traditionally called the problem of theodicy)
is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by
recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely
heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.7 Surely there must come a
time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little
more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance
with wings.
Ethics and the Sciences of Mind
The connection between ethics and the scientific understanding of
consciousness, while rarely made, is ineluctable, for other creatures
become the objects of our ethical concern only insofar as we
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attribute consciousness (or perhaps potential consciousness) to
them. That most of us feel no ethical obligations toward rocks—to
treat them with kindness, to make sure they do not suffer unduly—
can be derived from the fact that most of us do not believe that there
is anything that it is like to be a rock.8 While a science of consciousness
is still struggling to be born, it is sufficient for our purposes to
note that the problem of ascertaining our ethical obligations to nonhuman
animals (as well as to humans who have suffered neurological
injury, to human fetuses, to blastocysts, etc.) requires that we
better understand the relationship between mind and matter. Do
crickets suffer? I take it as a given that this question is both coherently
posed and has an answer, whether or not we will ever be in a
position to answer it ourselves.
This is the point at which our notions about mind and matter
directly influence our notions of right and wrong. We should recall
that the practice of vivisection was given new life by certain missteps
in the philosophy of mind—when Descartes, in thrall to both
Christian dogma and mechanistic physics, declared that all nonhuman
animals were mere automata, devoid of souls and therefore
insensible to pain.9 One of his contemporaries observed the immediate
consequences of this view:
The scientists administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference
and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they
felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they
emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that
had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling.
They nailed the poor animals up on boards by their four paws to
vivisect them to see the circulation of blood, which was a great
subject of controversy.10
Cognitive chauvinism of this sort has not merely been a problem for
animals. The doubt, on the part of Spanish explorers, about whether
or not South American Indians had "souls" surely contributed to the
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL 175
callousness with which they treated them during their conquest of
the New World. Admittedly, it is difficult to say just how far down
the phylogenic tree our ethical responsibilities run. Our intuitions
about the consciousness of other animals are driven by a variety of
factors, many of which probably have no bearing upon whether or
not they are conscious. For instance, creatures that lack facial expressiveness—
or faces at all—are more difficult to include within the
circle of our moral concern. It seems that until we more fully understand
the relationship between brains and minds, our judgments
about the possible scope of animal suffering will remain relatively
blind and relatively dogmatic.11
THERE will probably come a time when we achieve a detailed understanding
of human happiness, and of ethical judgments themselves,
at the level of the brain.12 Just as defects in color vision can result
from genetic and developmental disorders, problems can undoubtedly
arise in our ethical and emotional circuitry as well. To say that
a person is "color-blind" or "achromatopsic" is now a straightforward
statement about the state of the visual pathways in his brain,
while to say that he is "an evil sociopath" or "lacking in moral fiber"
seems hopelessly unscientific. This will almost certainly change. If
there are truths to be known about how human beings conspire to
make one another happy or miserable, there are truths to be known
about ethics.13 A scientific understanding of the link between intentions,
human relationships, and states of happiness would have
much to say about the nature of good and evil and about the proper
response to the moral transgressions of others. There is every reason
to believe that sustained inquiry in the moral sphere will force
convergence of our various belief systems in the way that it has in
every other science—that is, among those who are adequate to the
task.14 That so little convergence has been achieved in ethics can be
ascribed to the fact that so few of the facts are in (indeed, we have
yet to agree about the most basic criteria for deeming an ethical fact,
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a fact). So many conversations have not yet been had; so many intuitions
have not yet been exercised; so many arguments have not yet
been won. Our reliance upon religious dogma explains this. Most
of our religions have been no more supportive of genuine moral
inquiry than of scientific inquiry generally. This is a problem that
only new rules of discourse can overcome. When was the last time
that someone was criticized for not "respecting" another person's
unfounded beliefs about physics or history? The same rules should
apply to ethical, spiritual, and religious beliefs as well. Credit goes to
Christopher Hitchens for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of
discourse that could well arrest our slide toward the abyss: "what
can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
15 Let us pray that billions of us soon agree with him.
Moral Communities
The notion of a moral community resolves many paradoxes of
human behavior. How is it, after all, that a Nazi guard could return
each day from his labors at the crematoria and be a loving father to
his children? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: the Jews
he spent the day torturing and killing were not objects of his moral
concern. Not only were they outside his moral community; they
were antithetical to it. His beliefs about Jews inured him to the natural
human sympathies that might have otherwise prevented such
behavior.
Unfortunately, religion casts more shadows than light on this terrain.
Rather than find real reasons for human solidarity, faith offers
us a solidarity born of tribal and tribalizing fictions. As we have seen,
religion is one of the great limiters of moral identity, since most
believers differentiate themselves, in moral terms, from those who do
not share their faith. No other ideology is so eloquent on the subject
of what divides one moral community from another. Once a person
accepts the premises upon which most religious identities are built,
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the withdrawal of his moral concern from those who do not share
these premises follows quite naturally. Needless to say, the suffering
of those who are destined for hell can never be as problematic as the
suffering of the righteous. If certain people can't see the unique wisdom
and sanctity of my religion, if their hearts are so beclouded by
sin, what concern is it of mine if others mistreat them? They have
been cursed by the very God who made the world and all things in it.
Their search for happiness was simply doomed from the start.
New problems arise once we commit ourselves to finding a rational
foundation for our ethics. Indeed, we find that it is difficult to
draw the boundaries of our moral concern in a principled way. It is
clear, for instance, that susceptibility to pain cannot be our only criteria.
As Richard Rorty observes, "If pain were all that mattered, it
would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to
protect the Jews from the Nazis."16 In virtue of what have we convinced
ourselves that we need not intercede on behalf of all rabbits?
Most of us suspect rabbits are not capable of experiencing happiness
or suffering on a human scale. Admittedly we could be wrong about
this. And if it ever seems that we have underestimated the subjectivity
of rabbits, our ethical stance toward them would no doubt
change. Incidentally, here is where a rational answer to the abortion
debate is lurking. Many of us consider human fetuses in the first
trimester to be more or less like rabbits: having imputed to them a
range of happiness and suffering that does not grant them full status
in our moral community. At present, this seems rather reasonable.
Only future scientific insights could refute this intuition.
The problem of specifying the criteria for inclusion in our moral
community is one for which I do not have a detailed answer—other
than to say that whatever answer we give should reflect our sense of
the possible subjectivity of the creatures in question. Some answers
are clearly wrong. We cannot merely say, for instance, that all
human beings are in, and all animals are out. What will be our criterion
for humanness? DNA? Shall a single human cell take precedence
over a herd of elephants? The problem is that whatever
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attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals—
intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on—will
equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If people
are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate
their interests, why aren't more articulate people more important
still? And what about those poor men and woman with aphasia?
It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral community.
Find an orangutan that can complain about his family in
Borneo, and he may well displace a person or two from our lifeboat.
The Demon of Relativism
We saw in chapter 2 that for our beliefs to function logically—
indeed, for them to be beliefs at all—we must also believe that they
faithfully represent states of the world. This suggests that some systems
of belief will appear more faithful than others, in that they will
account for more of the data of experience and make better predictions
about future events. And yet, many intellectuals tend to speak
as though something in the last century of ratiocination in the West
has placed all worldviews more or less on an equal footing. No one
is ever really right about what he believes; he can only point to a
community of peers who believe likewise. Suicide bombing isn't
really wrong, in any absolute sense; it just seems so from the
parochial perspective of Western culture. Throw a dash of Thomas
Kuhn into this pot, and everyone can agree that we never really
know how the world is, because each new generation of scientists
reinvents the laws of nature to suit its taste. Convictions of this sort
generally go by the name of "relativism," and they seem to offer a
rationale for not saying anything too critical about the beliefs of
others. But most forms of relativism—including moral relativism,
which seems especially well subscribed—are nonsensical. And dangerously
so. Some may think that it is immaterial whether we think
the Nazis were really wrong in ethical terms, or whether we just
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL 179
don't like their style of life. It seems to me, however, that the belief
that some worldviews really are better than others taps a different
set of intellectual and moral resources. These are resources we will
desperately need if we are to oppose, and ultimately unseat, the regnant
ignorance and tribalism of our world.
The general retort to relativism is simple, because most relativists
contradict their thesis in the very act of stating it. Take the case of
relativism with respect to morality: moral relativists generally
believe that all cultural practices should be respected on their own
terms, that the practitioners of the various barbarisms that persist
around the globe cannot be judged by the standards of the West, nor
can the people of the past be judged by the standards of the present.
And yet, implicit in this approach to morality lurks a claim that is
not relative but absolute. Most moral relativists believe that tolerance
of cultural diversity is better, in some important sense, than
outright bigotry. This may be perfectly reasonable, of course, but it
amounts to an overarching claim about how all human beings
should live. Moral relativism, when used as a rationale for tolerance
of diversity, is self-contradictory.
There is, however, a more sophisticated version of this line of
thinking that is not so easily dispatched. It generally goes by the
name of "pragmatism," and its most articulate spokesmen is
undoubtedly Richard Rorty.17 While Rorty is not a household name,
his work has had a great influence on our discourse, and it offers
considerable shelter to the shades of relativism. If we ever hope to
reach a global consensus on matters of ethics—if we would say, for
instance, that stoning women for adultery is really wrong, in some
absolute sense—we must find deep reasons to reject pragmatism.
Doing so, we will discover that we are in a position to make strong
cross-cultural claims about the reasonableness of various systems of
belief and about good and evil.
The pragmatist's basic premise is that, try as we might, the
currency of our ideas cannot be placed on the gold standard of correspondence
with reality as it is. To call a statement "true" is merely
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to praise it for how it functions in some area of discourse; it is not to
say anything about how it relates to the universe at large. From the
point of view of pragmatism, the notion that our beliefs might "correspond
with reality" is absurd. Beliefs are simply tools for making
one's way in the world. Does a hammer correspond with reality? No.
It has merely proven its usefulness for certain tasks. So it is, we are
told, with the "truths" of biology, history, or any other field. For the
pragmatist, the utility of a belief trumps all other concerns, even the
concern for coherence.18 If a literalist reading of the Bible works for
you on Sundays, while agnosticism about God is better suited to
Mondays at the office, there is no reason to worry about the resulting
contradictions in your worldview. These are not so much incompatible
claims about the way the world is as different styles of
talking, each suited to a particular occasion.
If all of this seems rather academic, it might be interesting to note
that Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher, felt that
pragmatism would spell the death of American civilization. He
thought that it would, in Berman's phrase, "undermine America's
ability to fend off its enemies."19 There may be some truth to this
assertion. Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, does not
appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you
can actually be right—about anything—seems a recipe for the End
of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity." I believe that
relativism and pragmatism have already done much to muddle our
thinking on a variety of subjects, many of which have more than a
passing relevance to the survival of civilization.
In philosophical terms, pragmatism can be directly opposed to
realism. For the realist, our statements about the world will be
"true" or "false" not merely in virtue of how they function amid the
welter of our other beliefs, or with reference to any culture-bound
criteria, but because reality simply is a certain way, independent of
our thoughts.20 Realists believe that there are truths about the world
that may exceed our capacity to know them; there are facts of the
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL l8l
matter whether or not we can bring such facts into view. To be an
ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are
truths waiting to be discovered—and thus we can be right or wrong
in our beliefs about them.21
According to pragmatists like Rorty, realism is doomed because
there is no way to compare our description of reality with a piece
of undescribed reality. As Jürgen Habermas says, "since the truth
of beliefs or sentences can in turn be justified only with the help
of other beliefs and sentences, we cannot break free from the magic
circle of our language."22 This is a clever thesis. But is it true? The
fact that language is the medium in which our knowledge is represented
and communicated says nothing at all about the possibilities
of unmediated knowledge per se. The fact that no experience when
talked about escapes being mediated by language (this is a tautology)
does not mean that all cognition, and hence all knowing, is
interpretative. If it were possible for any facet of reality to be known
perfectly—if certain mystics, for instance, were right to think that
they had enjoyed unmediated knowledge of transcendental truths—
then pragmatism would be just plain wrong, realistically. The problem
for the pragmatist is not that such a mystic stands a good chance
of being right. The problem is that, whether the mystic is right or
wrong, he must be right or wrong realistically. In opposing the idea
that we can know reality directly, the pragmatist has made a covert,
realistic claim about the limits of human knowledge. Pragmatism
amounts to a realistic denial of the possibility of realism. And so, like
the relativist, the pragmatist appears to reach a contradiction before
he has even laced his shoes. A more thorough argument along these
lines has been relegated to a long endnote, so as not to kill the general
reader with boredom.23
Relativists and pragmatists believe that truth is just a matter of
consensus. I think it is clear, however, that while consensus among
like minds may be the final arbiter of truth, it cannot constitute it.
It is quite conceivable that everyone might agree and yet be wrong
about the way the world is. It is also conceivable that a single person
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might be right in the face of unanimous opposition. From a realist
point of view, it is possible (though unlikely) for a single person, or
culture, to have a monopoly on the truth.
It would seem, therefore, that nothing stands in the way of our
presuming that our beliefs about the world can correspond, to a
greater or lesser degree, to the way the world is—whether or not we
will ever be in a position to finally authenticate such correspondence.
Given that there are likely to be truths to be known about
how members of our species can be made as happy as possible, there
are almost certainly truths to be known about ethics. To say that we
will never agree on every question of ethics is the same as saying
that we will never agree on every question of physics. In neither case
does the open-endedness of our inquiry suggest that there are no
real facts to be known, or that some of the answers we have in hand
are not really better than some others. Respect for diversity in our
ethical views is, at best, an intellectual holding pattern until more of
the facts are in.
Intuition
One cannot walk far in the company of moral theorists without
hearing our faculty of "moral intuition" either exalted or scorned.
The reason for the latter attitude is that the term "intuition" has
always carried the scent of impropriety in philosophical and scientific
discourse. Having been regularly disgraced by its appearance in
colloquialisms like "woman's intuition" (meaning "psychic"), or
otherwise directly contrasted with "reason," the word now seems to
conjure up all that is cloying and irrational outside the university
gates. The only striking exception to this rule is to be found among
mathematicians, who apparently speak of their intuitions without
the least embarrassment—rather like travelers to exotic places in the
developing world who can often be heard discussing the misadventures
of their colon over breakfast. But, as we know, mathematicians
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL 183
travel to very exotic places indeed. We might also note that many of
them admit to being philosophical Platonists, without feeling any
apparent need to consult a trained philosopher for an exorcism.
Whatever its stigma, "intuition" is a term that we simply cannot
do without, because it denotes the most basic constituent of our faculty
of understanding. While this is true in matters of ethics, it is no
less true in science. When we can break our knowledge of a thing
down no further, the irreducible leap that remains is intuitively
taken. Thus, the traditional opposition between reason and intuition
is a false one: reason is itself intuitive to the core, as any judgment
that a proposition is "reasonable" or "logical" relies on intuition to
find its feet. One often hears scientists and philosophers concede
that something or other is a "brute fact"—that is, one that admits of
no reduction. The question of why physical events have causes, say,
is not one that scientists feel the slightest temptation to ponder. It is
just so. To demand an accounting of so basic a fact is like asking how
we know that two plus two equals four. Scientists presuppose the
validity of such brutishness—as, indeed, they must.
The point, I trust, is obvious: we cannot step out of the darkness
without taking a first step. And reason, without knowing how,
understands this axiom if it would understand anything at all. The
reliance on intuition, therefore, should be no more discomfiting for
the ethicist than it has been for the physicist. We are all tugging at
the same bootstraps.
It is also true that our intuitions have been known to fail. Indeed,
many of the deliverances of reason do not seem reasonable at first
glance. When asked how thick a piece of newspaper would be if one
could fold it upon itself one hundred times in succession, most of us
imagine something about the size of a brick. A little arithmetic
reveals, however, that such an object would be as thick as the known
universe. If we've learned anything in the last two thousand years,
it is that a person's sense of what is reasonable sometimes needs a
little help finding its feet.
Or consider the unreliable species of intuition that might be
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summed up in the statement "Like breeds like"—yielding sympathetic
magic and other obvious affronts to reason. Is it reasonable to
believe, as many Chinese apparently do, that tiger-bone wine leads
to virility? No, it is not. Could it become reasonable? Indeed it could.
We need only be confronted with a well-run, controlled study yielding
a significant correlation between tiger bones and human
prowess. Would a reasonable person expect to find such a correlation?
It does not seem very likely. But if it came, reason would be
forced to yield its present position, which is that the Chinese are
destroying a wondrous species of animal for no reason at all.
But notice that the only manner in which we can criticize the
intuitive content of magical thinking is by resort to the intuitive
content of rational thinking. "Controlled study"? "Correlation"?
Why do these criteria persuade us at all? Isn't it just "obvious" that
if one doesn't exclude other possible causes of increased potency—
the placebo effect, delusion, environmental factors, differences in
health among the subjects, etc.—one will have failed to isolate the
variable of tiger bone's effects on the human body? Yes, it's just as
obvious as a poke in the eye. Why is it obvious? Once again, we hit
bedrock. As Wittgenstein said, "Our spade is turned."
The fact that we must rely on certain intuitions to answer ethical
questions does not in the least suggest that there is anything insubstantial,
ambiguous, or culturally contingent about ethical truth. As
in any other field, there will be room for intelligent dissent on questions
of right and wrong, but intelligent dissent has its limits. People
who believe that the earth is flat are not dissenting geographers;
people who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred are not dissenting
historians; people who think that God created the universe in
4004 BC are not dissenting cosmologists; and we will see that people
who practice barbarisms like "honor killing" are not dissenting ethicists.
The fact that good ideas are intuitively cashed does not make
bad ideas any more respectable.
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL 185
Ethics, Moral Identity, and Self-interest
While our ethical concerns are necessarily bound up with the understanding
that others experience happiness and suffering, there is
more to ethics than the mere knowledge that we are not alone in the
world. For ethics to matter to us, the happiness and suffering of others
must matter to us. It does matter to us, but why?
Strict reductionism does not seem to offer us much hope of
insight into ethics. The same, of course, can be said of most higherlevel
phenomena. Economic behavior necessarily supervenes upon
the behavior of atoms, but we will not approach an understanding of
economics through particle physics. Fields like game theory and evolutionary
biology, for instance, have some plausible stories to tell
about the roots of what is generally called "altruistic behavior" in
the scientific literature, but we should not make too much of these
stories. The finding that nature seems to have selected for our ethical
intuitions is relevant only insofar as it gives the lie to the ubiquitous
fallacy that these intuitions are somehow the product of
religion. But nature has selected for many things that we would
have done well to leave behind us in the jungles of Africa. The practice
of rape may have once conferred an adaptive advantage on our
species—and rapists of all shapes and sizes can indeed be found in
the natural world (dolphins, orangutans, chimpanzees, etc.). Does
this mean that rape is any less objectionable in human society? Even
if we concede that some number of rapes are inevitable, given how
human beings are wired, how is this different from saying that some
number of cancers are inevitable? We will strive to cure cancer in
any case.
To say that something is "natural," or that it has conferred an
adaptive advantage upon our species, is not to say that it is "good"
in the required sense of contributing to human happiness in the present.
24 Admittedly, the problem of adjudicating what counts as happiness,
and which forms of happiness should supersede others, is
difficult—but so is every other problem worth thinking about. We
l86 THE END OF FAITH
need only admit that the happiness and suffering of sentient beings
(including ourselves) concerns us, and the domain of such concerns
is the domain of ethics, to see the possibility that much that is "natural"
in human nature will be at odds with what is "good." Appeals
to genetics and natural selection can take us only so far, because
nature has not adapted us to do anything more than breed. From the
point of view of evolution, the best thing a person can do with his
life is have as many children as possible. As Stephen Pinker
observes, if we really took a gene's eye view of the world "men
would line up outside sperm banks and women would pray to have
their eggs harvested and given away to infertile couples."25 After all,
from my genome's point of view, nothing could be more gratifying
than the knowledge that I have fathered thousands of children for
whom I now bear no financial responsibility. This, needless to say, is
not how most of us seek happiness in this world.
Nor are most of us resolutely selfish, in the narrowest sense of
the term. Our selfishness extends to those with whom we are
morally identified: to friends and family, to coworkers and teammates,
and—if we are in an expansive mood—to humans and animals
in general. As Jonathan Glover writes: "Our entanglements
with people close to us erode simple self-interest. Husbands,
wives, lovers, parents, children and friends all blur the boundaries
of selfish concern. Francis Bacon rightly said that people with
children have given hostages to fortune. Inescapably, other forms of
friendship and love hold us hostage too. . . . Narrow self-interest
is destabilized."26
To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness
and suffering. It is, as Kant observed, to treat them as ends in
themselves rather than as a means to some further end. Many ethical
injunctions converge here—Kant's categorical imperative, Jesus'
golden rule—but the basic facts are these: we experience happiness
and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize
that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we
soon discover that "love" is largely a matter of wishing that others
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND E V I L 187
experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to
feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that
of others, than hate. There is a circle here that links us to one
another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one
of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be
concerned for the happiness of others. We discover that we can be
selfish together.
This is just a sketch, but it suggests a clear link between ethics and
positive human emotions. The fact that we want the people we love
to be happy, and are made happy by love in turn, is an empirical
observation. But such observations are the stuff of nascent science.
What about people who do not love others, who see no value in it,
and yet claim to be perfectly happy? Do such people even exist? Perhaps
they do. Does this play havoc with a realistic account of ethics?
No more so than an inability to understand the special theory of relativity
would cast doubt upon modern physics. Some people can't
make heads or tails of the assertion that the passage of time might
be relative to one's frame of reference. This prevents them from taking
part in any serious discussion of physics. People who can see no
link between love and happiness may find themselves in the same
position with respect to ethics. Differences of opinion do not pose a
problem for ethical realism.
CONSIDER the practice of "honor killing" that persists throughout
much of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. We live in a
world in which women and girls are regularly murdered by their
male relatives for perceived sexual indiscretions—ranging from
merely speaking to a man without permission to falling victim of
rape. Coverage of these atrocities in the Western media generally
refers to them as a "tribal" practice, although they almost invariably
occur in a Muslim context. Whether we call the beliefs that inspire
this behavior "tribal" or "religious" is immaterial; the problem is
clearly a product of what men in these societies believe about shame
l88 THE END OF FAITH
and honor, about the role of women, and about female sexuality.
One consequence of these beliefs has been to promote rape as a
weapon of war. No doubt there are more creaturely, and less calculating,
motives for soldiers to commit rape on a massive scale, but it
cannot be denied that male beliefs about "honor" have made it a
brilliant instrument of psychological and cultural oppression. Rape
has become a means through which the taboos of a community can
be used to rend it from within. Consider the Bosnian women systematically
raped by Serbs: one might have thought that since many
of their male relatives could not escape getting killed, it would be
only reasonable to concede that the women themselves could not
escape getting raped. But such flights of ethical intelligence cannot
be made with a sufficient payload of unjustified belief—in this case,
belief in the intrinsic sinfulness of women, in the importance of virginity
prior to marriage, and in the shamefulness of being raped.
Needless to say, similar failures of compassion have a venerable
pedigree in the Christian West. Augustine, for instance, when considering
the moral stature of virgins who had been raped by the
Goths, wondered whether they had not been "unduly puffed up by
[their] integrity, continence and chastity." Perhaps they suffered
"some lurking infirmity which might have betrayed them into
proud and contemptuous bearing, had they not been subjected to the
humiliation that befell them."27 Perhaps, in other words, they
deserved it.28
Given the requisite beliefs about "honor," a man will be desperate
to kill his daughter upon learning that she was raped. The same
angel of compassion can be expected to visit her brothers as well.
Such killings are not at all uncommon in places like Jordan, Egypt,
Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.29 In
these parts of the world, a girl of any age who gets raped has brought
shame upon her family. Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can
be readily expunged with her blood. The subsequent ritual is
inevitably a low-tech affair, as none of these societies have devised a
system for administering lethal injections for the crime of bringing
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL l89
shame upon one's family. The girl either has her throat cut, or she is
dowsed with gasoline and set on fire, or she is shot. The jail
sentences for these men, if they are prosecuted at all, are invariably
short. Many are considered heroes in their communities.
What can we say about this behavior? Can we say that Middle
Eastern men who are murderously obsessed with female sexual
purity actually love their wives, daughters, and sisters less than
American or European men do? Of course, we can. And what is truly
incredible about the state of our discourse is that such a claim is not
only controversial but actually unutterable in most contexts.
Where's the proof that these men are less capable of love than the
rest of us? Well, where would the proof be if a person behaved this
way in our own society? Where's the proof that the person who shot
JFK didn't really love him? All the proof we need came from the
book depository. We know how the word "love" functions in our discourse.
We have all felt love, have failed to feel it, and have occasionally
felt its antithesis. Even if we don't harbor the slightest
sympathy for their notion of "honor," we know what these honor
killers are up to—and it is not a matter of expressing their love for
the women in their lives. Of course, honor killing is merely one facet
in that terrible kaleidoscope that is the untutored, male imagination:
dowry deaths and bride burnings, female infanticide, acid attacks,
female genital mutilation, sexual slavery—these and other joys
await unlucky women throughout much of the world. There is no
doubt that certain beliefs are incompatible with love, and this notion
of "honor" is among them.
What is love? Few of us will be tempted to consult a dictionary on
the subject. We know that we want those we love to be happy. We
feel compassion for their suffering. When love is really effective—
that is, really felt, rather than merely imagined—we cannot help
sharing in the joy of those we love, and in their anguish as well. The
disposition of love entails the loss, at least to some degree, of our
utter self-absorption—and this is surely one of the clues as to why
this state of mind is so pleasurable. Most of us will find that cutting
1 9 0 THE END OF FAITH
a little girl's head off after she has been raped just doesn't capture
these sentiments very well.
At this point, many anthropologists will want to argue for the
importance of cultural context. These murderers are not murderers
in the usual sense. They are ordinary, even loving gentlemen who
have become the pawns of tribal custom. Taken to its logical conclusion,
this view suggests that any behavior is compatible with any
mental state. Perhaps there is a culture in which you are expected to
flay your firstborn child alive as an expression of "love." But unless
everyone in such a culture wants to be flayed alive, this behavior is
simply incompatible with love as we know it. The Golden Rule
really does capture many of our intuitions here. We treat those we
love more or less the way we would like to be treated ourselves.
Honor killers do not seem to be in the habit of asking others to
drench them in gasoline and immolate them in turn.
Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls, rather
than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the
growth of love. Such societies, of course, regularly fail to teach their
inhabitants many other things—like how to read. Not learning how
to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others
as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. It is a failure
of ethics.
How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral
sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to be mere
human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or
religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of
reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less
than the guardian of love.
Morality and Happiness
The link between morality and happiness appears straightforward,
though there is clearly more to being happy than merely being
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL 191
moral. There is no reason to think that a person who never lies,
cheats, or steals is guaranteed to be happier than a person who commits
each of these sins with abandon. As we all know, a kind and
compassionate person can still be horribly unlucky, and many a
brute appears to have seized Fortune herself by the skirts. Children
born without a functioning copy of the gene that produces the
enzyme hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase will have
a constellation of ailments and incapacities known as Lesch-Nyhan
syndrome. They will also compulsively mutilate themselves, possibly
as a result of the build-up of uric acid in their tissues. If left
unrestrained, such children helplessly gnaw their lips and fingers
and even thrust pointed objects into their eyes. It is difficult to see
how instruction in morality will contribute meaningfully to their
happiness. What these children need is not better moral instruction,
or even more parental love. They need hypoxanthine-guanine
phosphoribosyltransferase.
Without denying that happiness has many requisites—good
genes, a nervous system that does not entirely misbehave, etc.—we
can hypothesize that whatever a person's current level of happiness
is, his condition will be generally improved by his becoming yet
more loving and compassionate, and hence more ethical. This is a
strictly empirical claim—one that has been tested for millennia by
contemplatives in a variety of spiritual traditions, especially within
Buddhism. We might wonder whether, in the limit, the unchecked
growth of love and compassion might lead to the diminution of a
person's sense of well-being, as the suffering of others becomes
increasingly his own. Only people who have cultivated these states
of mind to an extraordinary degree will be in a position to decide this
question, but in the general case there seems to be no doubt that love
and compassion are good, in that they connect us more deeply to
others.30
Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become
more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons. This is a
paradox, of sorts, because these attitudes undermine selfishness, by
192 THE END OF FAITH
definition. They also inspire behavior that tends to contribute to the
happiness of other human beings. These states of mind not only feel
good; they ramify social relationships that lead one to feel good with
others, leading others to feel good with oneself. Hate, envy, spite,
disgust, shame—these are not sources of happiness, personally or
socially. Love and compassion are. Like so much that we know about
ourselves, claims of this sort need not be validated by a controlled
study. We can easily imagine evolutionary reasons for why positive
social emotions make us feel good, while negative ones do not, but
they would be beside the point. The point is that the disposition to
take the happiness of others into account—to be ethical—seems to
be a rational way to augment one's own happiness. As we will see in
the next chapter, the linkage here becomes increasingly relevant the
more rarefied one's happiness becomes. The connection between
spirituality—the cultivation of happiness directly, through precise
refinements of attention—and ethics is well attested. Certain attitudes
and behaviors seem to be conducive to contemplative insight,
while others are not. This is not a proposition to be merely believed.
It is, rather, a hypothesis to be tested in the laboratory of one's life.31
A Loophole for Torquemada?
Casting questions about ethics in terms of happiness and suffering
can quickly lead us into unfamiliar territory. Consider the case of
judicial torture. It would seem, at first glance, to be unambiguously
evil. And yet, for the first time in living memory, reasonable men
and women in our country have begun to reconsider it publicly.
Interest in the subject appears to have been provoked by an interview
given by Alan Dershowitz, an erstwhile champion of the
rights of the innocent-until-proven-guilty, on CBS's 60 Minutes.32
There, before millions who would have thought the concept of torture
impossible to rehabilitate, Dershowitz laid out the paradigmatic
ticking-bomb case.
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL 193
Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a large bomb in the
heart of a nearby city. This man now sits in your custody. As to the
bomb's location, he will say nothing except that the site was chosen
to produce the maximum loss of life. Given this state of affairs—in
particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent
atrocity—it seems there would be no harm in dusting off the strappado
and exposing this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone
times.
Dershowitz has argued that this situation can be cast in terms
that will awaken the Grand Inquisitor in all of us. If a ticking bomb
doesn't move you, picture your seven-year-old daughter being
slowly asphyxiated in a warehouse just five minutes away, while the
man in your custody holds the keys to her release. If your daughter
won't tip the scales, then add the daughters of every couple for a
thousand miles—millions of little girls have, by some perverse negligence
on the part of our government, come under the control of an
evil genius who now sits before you in shackles. Clearly, the consequences
of one man's uncooperativeness can be made so grave, and
his malevolence and culpability so transparent, as to stir even the
most self-hating moral relativist from his dogmatic slumbers.
It is generally thought that the gravest ethical problem we face in
resorting to torture is that we would be bound to torture some number
of innocent men and women. Most of us who were eager to don
the Inquisitor's cap in the case above begin to falter in more realistic
scenarios, as a person's guilt becomes a matter of some uncertainty.
And this is long before other concerns even attract our notice.
What, for instance, is the reliability of testimony elicited under torture
? We need not even pose questions of this sort yet, since we have
already balked at the knowledge that, in the real world, we will not
be able to tell the guilty from the innocent just by looking.
So it seems that we have two situations that will strike most sane
and decent people as ethically distinct: in the first case, as envisioned
by Dershowitz, it seems perverse to worry about the rights of an
admitted terrorist when so many innocent lives are at stake; while
194 THE END OF FAITH
under more realistic conditions, uncertainty about a person's guilt
will generally preclude the use of torture. Is this how the matter
really sits with us? Probably not.
It appears that such restraint in the use of torture cannot be
reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place. What,
after all, is "collateral damage" but the inadvertent torture of innocent
men, women, and children? Whenever we consent to drop
bombs, we do so with the knowledge that some number of children
will be blinded, disemboweled, paralyzed, orphaned, and killed by
them. It is curious that while the torture of Osama bin Laden himself
could be expected to provoke convulsions of conscience among
our leaders, the unintended (though perfectly foreseeable, and
therefore accepted) slaughter of children does not.
So we can now ask, if we are willing to act in a way that guarantees
the misery and death of some considerable number of innocent
children, why spare the rod with suspected terrorists? What is the
difference between pursuing a course of action where we run the
risk of inadvertently subjecting some innocent men to torture, and
pursuing one in which we will inadvertently kill far greater numbers
of innocent men, women, and children? Rather, it seems obvious
that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to
us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at
Guantanamo Bay, just rather scrofulous young men, many of whom
were caught in the very act of trying to kill our soldiers.33 Torture
need not even impose a significant risk of death or permanent injury
on its victims; while the collaterally damaged are, almost by definition,
crippled or killed. The ethical divide that seems to be opening
up here suggests that those who are willing to drop bombs might
want to abduct the nearest and dearest of suspected terrorists—their
wives, mothers, and daughters—and torture them as well, assuming
anything profitable to our side might come of it. Admittedly, this
would be a ghastly result to have reached by logical argument, and
we will want to find some way of escaping it.34
In this context, we should note that many variables influence our
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL 195
feelings about an act of physical violence, as well as our intuitions
about its ethical status. As Glover points out, "in modern war, what
is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful." To learn
that one's grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the
Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls
and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he
would have killed more women and girls by dropping bombs from
pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible
deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. Indeed, we
seem to know, intuitively, that it would take a different kind of person
to perpetrate violence of the latter sort. And, as we might expect,
the psychological effects of participating in these types of violence
are generally distinct. Consider the following account of a Soviet
soldier in Afghanistan: "It's frightening and unpleasant to have to
kill, you think, but you soon realize that what you really find objectionable
is shooting someone point-blank. Killing en masse, in a
group, is exciting, even—and I've seen this myself—fun."35 This is
not to say that no one has ever enjoyed killing people up close; it is
just that we all recognize that such enjoyment requires an unusual
degree of callousness to the suffering of others.
It is possible that we are simply unequipped to rectify this disparity—
to be, in Glover's terms, most shocked by what is most
harmful. A biological rationale is not hard to find, as millions of
years on the African veldt could not possibly have selected for an
ability to make emotional sense of twenty-first-century horror. That
our Paleolithic genes now have chemical, biological, and nuclear
weapons at their disposal is, from the point of view of our evolution,
little different from our having delivered this technology into the
hands of chimps. The difference between killing one man and killing
a thousand just doesn't seem as salient to us as it should. And, as
Glover observes, in many cases we will find the former far more disturbing.
Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the
Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess
dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth's population
196 THE END OF FAITH
falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we
must feel in order to change our world.
What does it feel like to see three thousand men, women, and
children incinerated and crushed to ash in the span of a few seconds?
Anyone who owned a television on September 11, 2001, now knows.
But most of us know nothing of the sort. To have watched the World
Trade Center absorbing two jet planes, along with the lives of thousands,
and to have felt, above all things, disbelief, suggests some
form of neurological impairment. Clearly, there are limits to what
the human mind can make of the deliverances of its senses—of the
mere sight of an office building, known to be full of people, dissolving
into rubble. Perhaps this will change.
In any case, if you think the equivalence between torture and collateral
damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal
while stray bombs aren't, you stand convicted of a failure of
imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment's reflection on
the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and
Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of
any dungeon. That such an exercise of the imagination is required to
bring torture and collateral damage to parity accounts for the dissociation
between what is most shocking and what is most harmful
that Glover notes. It also demonstrates the degree to which we have
been bewitched by our own euphemisms. Killing people at a distance
is easier, but perhaps it should not be that much easier.
Second, if our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of
an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we
should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented
pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for
screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise
methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the
plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet.
Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of
the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against
the use of torture. To demonstrate just how abstract the torments
A S C I E N C E OF G O O D A N D E V I L 197
of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal
"torture pill"—a drug that would deliver both the instruments
of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. The action
of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory
misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a
second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving
this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to
be an hour's nap only to arise and immediately confess everything
he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be
tempted to call it a "truth pill" in the end?
No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering
of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.
WHICH way should the balance swing? Assuming that we want to
maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to
be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs,
or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing
to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners;
if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern
war.
Opponents of torture will be quick to argue that confessions
elicited by torture are notoriously unreliable. Given the foregoing,
however, this objection seems to lack its usual force. Make these confessions
as unreliable as you like—the chance that our interests will
be advanced in any instance of torture need only equal the chance of
such occasioned by the dropping of a single bomb. What was the
chance that the dropping of bomb number 117 on Kandahar would
effect the demise of Al Qaeda? It had to be pretty slim. Enter Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed: our most valuable capture in our war on terror.
Here is a character who actually seems cut from Dershowitzian
cloth. U.S. officials now believe that his was the hand that decapitated
the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Whether or not
this is true, his membership in Al Qaeda more or less rules out his
1 9 8 THE E N D OF F A I TH
"innocence" in any important sense, and his rank in the organization
suggests that his knowledge of planned atrocities must be
extensive. The bomb is ticking. Given the damage we were willing to
cause to the bodies and minds of innocent children in Afghanistan
and Iraq, our disavowal of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed seems perverse. If there is even one chance in a million
that he will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further
dismantling of Al Qaeda, it seems that we should use every
means at our disposal to get him talking.
IN ALL likelihood you began reading this chapter, much as I began
writing it, convinced that torture is a very bad thing and that we are
wise not to practice it—indeed that we are civilized, in large measure,
because we do not practice it. Most of us feel, intuitively at
least, that if we can't quite muster a retort to Dershowitz and his
ticking bomb, we can take refuge in the fact that the paradigmatic
case will almost never arise. From this perspective, adorning the
machinery of our justice system with a torture provision seems both
unnecessary and dangerous, as the law of unintended consequences
may one day find it throwing the whole works into disarray. Because
I believe the account offered above is basically sound, I believe that
I have successfully argued for the use of torture in any circumstance
in which we would be willing to cause collateral damage.36 Paradoxically,
this equivalence has not made the practice of torture seem any
more acceptable to me; nor has it, I trust, for most readers. I believe
that here we come upon an ethical illusion of sorts—analogous to
the perceptual illusions that are of such abiding interest to scientists
who study the visual pathways in the brain. The full moon appearing
on the horizon is no bigger than the full moon when it appears
overhead, but it looks bigger, for reasons that are still obscure to
neuroscientists. A ruler held up to the sky reveals something that we
are otherwise incapable of seeing, even when we understand that
our eyes are deceiving us. Given a choice between acting on the basis
A SCIENCE OF GOOD AND EVIL l99
of the way things seem in this instance, or on the deliverances of our
ruler, most of us will be willing to dispense with appearances—particularly
if our lives or the lives of others depended on it. I believe
that most readers who have followed me this far will find themselves
in substantially the same position with respect to the ethics of
torture. Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our
war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances,
would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does
not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before.
The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those
that give rise to the moon illusion. In fact, there is already some scientific
evidence that our ethical intuitions are driven by considerations
of proximity and emotional salience of the sort I addressed
above.37 Clearly, these intuitions are fallible. In the present case,
many innocent lives could well be lost as a result of our inability to
feel a moral equivalence where a moral equivalence seems to exist.
It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky.38
The False Choice of Pacifism
Pacifism39 is generally considered to be a morally unassailable position
to take with respect to human violence. The worst that is said of
it, generally, is that it is a difficult position to maintain in practice. It
is almost never branded as flagrantly immoral, which I believe it is.
While it can seem noble enough when the stakes are low, pacifism is
ultimately nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others
die, at the pleasure of the world's thugs. It should be enough to note
that a single sociopath, armed with nothing more than a knife, could
exterminate a city full of pacifists. There is no doubt that such
sociopaths exist, and they are generally better armed. Fearing that
the above reflections on torture may offer a potent argument for
pacifism, I would like to briefly state why I believe we must accept
the fact that violence (or its threat) is often an ethical necessity.
200 THE E N D OF F A I TH
I WAS once walking the streets of Prague late at night and came
upon a man and a young woman in the midst of a struggle. As I drew
nearer, it became obvious that the man, who appeared to be both
drunk and enraged, was attempting to pull the woman into a car
against her will. She was making a forceful show of resistance, but
he had seized her arm with one hand and was threatening to strike
her in the face with the other—which he had done at least once, it
seemed, before I arrived on the scene. The rear door of the car was
open, and an accomplice had taken a seat behind the wheel. Several
other men were milling about, and from the looks of them, they
appeared to approve of the abduction in progress.
Without knowing how I would proceed, I at once found myself
interceding on the woman's behalf. As my adrenaline rose, and her
assailant's attention turned my way, it occurred to me that his
English might be terrible or nonexistent. The mere effort to understand
me could be made so costly that it might prove a near-total
diversion. The inability to make my intentions clear would also
serve to forestall actual conflict. Had we shared a common language
our encounter would have almost certainly come to blows within
moments, as I would have thought of nothing more clever than to
demand that he let the woman go, and he, to save face, would have
demanded that I make him. Since he had at least two friends that I
could see (and several fans), my evening would probably have ended
very badly. Thus, my goal, as I saw it, was to remain unintelligible,
without antagonizing any of the assembled hooligans, long enough
for the young woman to get away.
"Excuse me," I said. "I seem to have lost my hotel, my lodging,
my place of residence, where I lie supine, not prone. Can you help
me? Where is it? Where is it?"
"Sex?" The man asked with obvious outrage, as though I had
declared myself a rival for his prisoner's affections. It now occurred
to me that the woman might be a prostitute, and he an unruly
customer.
"No! Not sex. I am looking for a specific building. It has no aluA
S C I E N C E OF G O O D A N D E V I L 201
minum siding or stained glass. It could be filled with marzipan. Do
you know where it is? This is an emergency."
In an instant, the man's face underwent a remarkable transformation,
changing from a mask of rage, to a vision of perplexity itself.
While he attempted to decipher my request, I threw a conspiratorial
glance at the woman—who, it must be said, seemed rather slow to
appreciate that the moment of her emancipation was at hand.
The man began to discuss my case in fluent Czech with one of his
friends. I continued to rave. The woman, for her part, glared at me as
though I were an idiot. Then, realizing her opportunity for the first
time, like a bird that had long sat within an open cage, she suddenly
broke free and fled down the street. Her erstwhile attacker was too
engrossed by his reflections even to notice that she had left.
Mission accomplished, I at once thanked the group and moved on.
While my conduct in the above incident seems to meet with the
approval of almost everyone, I relate it here because I consider it an
example of a moral failure. First, I was lying, and lying out of fear. I
was not lost, and I needed no assistance of any kind. I resorted to this
tactic because, quite frankly, I was afraid to openly challenge an
indeterminate number of drunks to a brawl. Some may call this wisdom,
but it seemed to me to be nothing more than cowardice at the
time. I made no effort to communicate with these men, to appeal to
their ethical scruples, however inchoate, or to make any impression
upon them whatsoever. I perceived them not as ends in themselves,
as sentient creatures capable of dialogue, appeasement, or instruction,
but as a threat in its purest form. My ethical failure, as I see it,
is that I never actually opposed their actions—hence they never
received any correction from the world. They were merely diverted
for a time, and to only a single woman's advantage. The next woman
who became the object of their predations will have little cause to
thank me. Even if a frank intercession on the woman's behalf would
have guaranteed my own injury, a clear message would have been
sent: not all strangers will stand idly by as you beat and abduct a
woman in the street. The action I took sent no such message. Indeed,
I suspect that even the woman herself never knew that I had come
to her aid.40
GANDHI was undoubtedly the twentieth century's most influential
pacifist. The success he enjoyed in forcing the British Empire to withdraw
from the Indian subcontinent brought pacifism down from the
ethers of religious precept and gave it new political relevance. Pacifism
in this form no doubt required considerable bravery from its
practitioners and constituted a direct confrontation with injustice. As
such, it had far more moral integrity than did my stratagem above. It
is clear, however, that Gandhi's nonviolence can be applied to only a
limited range of human conflict. We would do well to reflect on
Gandhi's remedy for the Holocaust: he believed that the Jews should
have committed mass suicide, because this "would have aroused the
world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence."41 We might
wonder what a world full of pacifists would have done once it had
grown "aroused"—commit suicide as well?
Gandhi was a religious dogmatist, of course, but his remedy for
the Holocaust seems ethically suspect even if one accepts the metaphysical
premises upon which it was based. If we grant the law of
karma and rebirth to which Gandhi subscribed, his pacifism still
seems highly immoral. Why should it be thought ethical to safeguard
one's own happiness (or even the happiness of others) in the
next life at the expense of the manifest agony of children in this
one? Gandhi's was a world in which millions more would have died
in the hopes that the Nazis would have one day doubted the goodness
of their Thousand Year Reich. Ours is a world in which bombs
must occasionally fall where such doubts are in short supply. Here
we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when
your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another
weapon in his hand.
It is, as yet, unclear what it will mean to win our war on "terrorism"—
or whether the religious barbarism that animates our eneA
mies can ever be finally purged from our world—but it is all too
obvious what it would mean to lose it. Life under the Taliban is, to a
first approximation, what millions of Muslims around the world
want to impose on the rest of us. They long to establish a society in
which—when times are good—women will remain vanquished and
invisible, and anyone given to spiritual, intellectual, or sexual freedom
will be slaughtered before crowds of sullen, uneducated men.
This, needless to say, is a vision of life worth resisting. We cannot let
our qualms over collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies
know no such qualms. Theirs is a kill-the-children-first approach to
war, and we ignore the fundamental difference between their violence
and our own at our peril. Given the proliferation of weaponry
in our world, we no longer have the option of waging this war with
swords. It seems certain that collateral damage, of various sorts, will
be a part of our future for many years to come.