I’ve grumbled before about ethics textbooks and the way I was taught ethics in philosophy classes. I’m put off by the way they attempt to take the marvelous, wondrous thing which is a person and the infinite mystery of how we can show proper reverence for that wonder, and turn it into a set of rules. I understand why they do that, but I don’t enjoy it. It’s frightening how quickly ethics can turn into a logic puzzle, arguing the proper response not to people but to a series of idiotic cartoon scenarios. If you were in a runaway trolley which couldn’t brake, but the steering was fine, and you had a choice between steering to hit a case of beer or steering to hit a baby, what would you do? Ah, but what if the choice was between two babies, and one had a terminal disease? What if you knew that one baby would grow up to be a terrorist? What if you were stranded on a life raft with a murderer and a saint, and you needed a kidney? What if you were locked in a dungeon and force to resort to cannibalism? What if I cut a body in half, but kept both halves alive? What if your brain was made of Christmas lights? What if there was a pure psychopath incapable of doing good, and you could stop him by running him down with your trolley?
These thought experiments usually seem ludicrous, to me.
Usually, ethics in real life is not so black and white; the circumstances wherein we’re called to make ethical choices are not that crisp and obvious. Hardly anyone in real life is a stereotype plucked from a logic problem. Hardly any ethical scenario is as clear-cut and dire.
Yet, here we are.
Dylann Roof is about as close to an ethics puzzle stereotype as you can get. He is a hateful, racist killer and a terrorist. He has suppressed his conscience to the point where he’s annoyed at the sounds of grief. He did just about the worst thing a person can do to another, nine times, mostly to elderly people and preachers; he did it for the worst reason imaginable, and he’s not sorry. He has no dependents and no role in society. If he were run over with a trolley today, I wonder if anyone would even mourn.
And yesterday, a jury in the State of Georgia sentenced Dylann Roof to the hypothetical trolley.
He’s going to be executed for murder.
And we are faced with an ethics problem.
If you could kill a truly evil man, ought you to do it? Not indirect killing; not just war or self-defense, where you act with potentially deadly force to stop something worse from happening. I mean real killing. Here’s a jolt of electricity or a cocktail of drugs which will certainly wipe out an evil man’s life. It will cost you no earthly price to flip the switch. No one will miss him. It won’t even hurt him that much, not for long. You’ll gain a more orderly society, a sense of justice fulfilled, a certain amount of closure for his victims, and a reputation for being tough on crime. Ought you to do it?
No, you ought not.
Because, killing a person is evil.
Acting with deadly force to defend people may not be, but directly killing is.
And Dylann Roof is a person.
Our faith demands that we respond in love and reverence, toward persons. Even evil persons. Even a person like Dylann Roof. He’s done his best to bury his own humanity, but it’s still there. I don’t know if it will ever be unearthed– I hope and pray that it can, that he can be brought to repentance and a life of virtue. But even if it never is, we are required to act with mercy toward everyone, including him.
I don’t like that, but there it is.
(image via Pixabay)
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