Sorting Jim Out

Well what did you make of Jim? Was there a solution for his dilemma? It's a problem, but there may not be a solution. That's to say, there may not be a solution that you or he is happy with. He has to do something but he may not like what he has to do.

Enter your inner jungle!

Imagine that you are in his shoes and wearing his hat. You might tell yourself that that the best thing to do would be to take the pistol and shoot one of the Indians. We will assume in this fictional world that the police captain will keep his word and that Jim knows this and that once he has shot that one Indian the other nineteen captives will be released and allowed to go back to their villages. How would Jim justify his action when he gets back to his own home and he has to talk to the press and his mother about what he has done? Well, he would probably say that saving nineteen lives at the cost of losing or sacrificing one was the right thing to do in the circumstances. Imagine a similar situation where you are a helicopter pilot rescuing men from an upturned fishing vessel. You can only take some of them and have to leave one behind so as not to overload the helicopter. Surely you would upload the nineteen and leave the last one behind, wouldn't you? You wouldn't refuse to take any of them just because you couldn't take all of them, would you? That would be not just inhuman, but also absurd. You would save as many as you could.

Surely then Jim should shoot the one Indian? You might not be entirely happy with this argument. You might have your doubts about the supposed similarity of these two situations. There is a basic similarity between the two, but there is also an important difference. What is that difference? Well, surely the difference is that in our actual situation Jim is being forced to take the captain's pistol and shoot one of the Indians himself. He would then feel - and surely to some extent be - directly responsible for that one man's death. It is this sense of personal responsibility that makes Jim's situation so difficult. It is made much worse by the fact that if he does not kill one man the others will also die. He must choose between being responsible for the death of one man or the deaths of twenty. The helicopter pilot does not face the same dilemma. He will save the greatest number of people that he can.

What is obvious is not always obvious!

So what holds Jim back from just shooting the one and thereby saving the lives of the other nineteen? We must assume that it is the same thing that would make us profoundly unwilling to take the pistol and shoot the innocent man we select at random for death. We're not the sort of people who do that sort of thing. Jim probably thinks of himself as someone who does not go around the world shooting people. It goes against the grain of the person he feels himself to be. He feels a revulsion against this kind of thing which he probably sees as murder. He doesn't want to think of himself as a murderer.

Should we accept Jim's reluctance to act in this case? One way to test this notion is to imagine another man who does not share Jim's qualms about shooting one man to save the other nineteen. This second man just takes the gun and shoots the nearest Indian at point blank range. What would he say to the press and his mother when he gets back to London? We can imagine what he might say and we would probably sympathise with him and even feel that Jim was a bit of a wimp for not going ahead with the shooting. But we might also think that the second man was not the sort of person you wanted to invite home or make friends with; something in us makes us avoid people who we know have committed murder. We would prefer not to have blood on our hands.

We seem to be left with two contrasting attitudes. We might be happy to accept the justification of the man who shoots the one Indian in order to save the others. This would seem to imply that what we do in life is simply a matter of reckoning consequences. If more lives are saved then that is the right thing to do. You might in a similar way defend animal experiments by claiming that this kind of work will save many lives that are currently lost each year through disease and the like. You might add that we have to find ways to deal with evil police captains and life-threatening bacteria. We did not make the world, but we do have to do what we can if we are going to survive in it. 

Socrates drinking the hemlock (Jacques-Louis David)

Back to Jim. His attitude - as we'll assume it to be his - proclaims in effect that he does not want to be the sort of person who does things of that kind. Like Jim, something in us rejects murder. This visceral reaction may stem from an image of the person we imagine we are  and which perhaps owes a lot to our upbringing or it might come from some some more deep-seated fear of contagion involved in bloodshed and murder mentioned in the last paragraph. Whatever the motivation - and we can hardly hope to determine which it is in practice - we must surely respect the fact that people have pictures of themselves as people who do not go around killing others. It would, however, be fair to question this belief. Are these people just separating themselves from the world in order to maintain a good opinion of themselves? The ultimate test of such a belief would be to ask if they are prepared to suffer evil rather than to inflict it on others. That was Socrates' opinion, but few of us are made of the same stuff as him!

Final thoughts 

(1) Jim experiences his situation as a dilemma. The fact that he does probably raises him in our estimation. We would surely be worried if he had no qualms at all about taking the gun and shooting some hapless person at random. We somehow feel that it belongs to our lives as human beings to be at odds with ourselves when we meet new or unusual situations. We have to stop and make a decision about what would be the best thing to do. Moral philosophers are people who believe they know how we should go about making these decisions. We'll look at their recommendations later, though only in brief.

(2) But is this perhaps just some ancient prejudice, like the fear that makes us avoid the dead and even the lifeless bodies of badgers on the road. A fear of pollution, like the ancient Greek fear of miasma or the aversion Orthodox Jews have for women who've just given birth and who are regarded as ritually impure. 

(3) Perhaps a really modern rational man would be more like the coroners we see on TV, people who can examine things in a cool objective manner, while we weaker creatures shudder in the comfort of our armchairs? Such a man would just assess the situation and shoot one to save nineteen. End of story, as they say. Perhaps a modern rational man would not or should not be swayed by such qualms. Medical students start as nervous novices but they soon become quite blasé, happily throwing body parts around the room when nobody is watching. Maybe we should be more like them or more like those celluloid robots R2D2 and Judge Dred, who simply make their cybernetic decisions, solving the problem and moving on to the next. Once they know that the consequences are positive, they act without any hesitation or doubt.

(4) But perhaps you don't see life as just a set of problems that demand solutions? How then should we see it? Who do you want to be? How do you want to live? Can you give a reason for your choice? Should everyone make the same choice?

Ω
  

That is my response written on the hoof at my computer. I cannot write a generic response that everyone should come up with because there isn't such a thing, but there are aspects and attitudes in this example that we have to account for. Your job is to recognise these and to say something about them. I hope that you agree with me that the more you think about these things the less clear they become. Only prejudice is black and white.

There are some general procedural points that are worth keeping in mind and using in your own discussions. The most useful is the construction of other examples that are like the one you are thinking about. Construct the similarity, then try to see how it is different from the original case. This is what I tried to do with the helicopter example. Never stop with the similarity - that would turn your example into mere rhetoric - always follow through and look for the differences as well. They are always more instructive. That way you get to the fine grain of the logic.

You would never be able or expected to say as much as this in an interview, but we're not writing scripts. We are simply trying to think things through, like trying to get people up on their own legs. It says somewhere in Beowulf that God helps the warrior who struggles to stand up and continue the fight. That would have to be you.

Friedrich Nietzsche said in his book 'Human, All too human' that convictions are more dangerous than lies. Imagine that the interviewer asks you if this is true. What might you say? How might you use Jim's situation to analyse this claim? You could start with that and work towards your own example situations.

There will be another interview problem in a couple of days.