In Which the Ethics of the Lifeboat Exercise Is Trash

[lydy]

mrissa has a really lovely essay about lifeboats over at Uncanny, and you should read it.  Beware the Lifeboat - Uncanny Magazinehttps://uncannymagazine.com/article/beware-the-lifeboat/


Seventh grade was when I was first exposed to the lifeboat thought experiment.  Thirteen of us were assigned roles, and told to decide who to toss out, because the lifeboat could only hold twelve.  I do not remember what role I was assigned, but I do remember being completely unable to find a reason not to toss out the disabled twelve year old girl, which is what we eventually did.  I didn't find it all that traumatic, but it nagged at me afterwards.  

I think it must have actually bothered me a great deal more than I recognized at the time, because when I found out that the parameters of the lifeboat problem were a cheat, I felt furious and betrayed.  In real lifeboats, the parameters are not clean and hard.  A boat that is rated for ten can usually carry more, maybe many more, depending on the people.  The water is only a limiting factor if it doesn't rain, and there's no knowing if it will.  Food, too, is not a limiting factor in the way it was represented to me.  Over and above rationing, the waste from a lifeboat draws fish and birds, and lots of cast aways have used this to supplement the food on the boat.  Finally, rescue is neither certain nor predictable.  You do not know if there will ever be a rescue, nor do you know when it will be.  It could be in an hour, or a day, or never.  Everything about the problem was a cheat.  In looking at that, and the trolley problem, and the other thought experiments in this genre, my conclusion is that, whatever the intent, the effect of having people engage with the problem is not an exercise in getting them to examine their underlying ethical structures, but rather a way to force people to act unethically.  I think it desensitizes and damages our understanding of ourselves and our world, rather than exposing or exploring anything.

I do not know if this would be more informative or ethical, but I'd like to see some psychology department try this.  Set up the scenario the same way it was presented to me in seventh grade.  Give people roles, tell them to decide who to sacrifice.  Have them play it out.  When the finally decide who goes over the side, have the proctor describe the death in some reasonable amount of detail.  The goal here is not to traumatize, but to give everyone a chance to have second thoughts.  See if anyone jumps in to save the drowning person, and how the rest react.  Then have the proctor say, "As you stare at the surface of the ocean, at the space where the drowning person last rose, you hear a voice from a megaphone telling you to remain still, the ship will be there to rescue you.  After you are taken on board, cleaned and cared for, and asked how you are, and what you did while you waited for rescue."  Then, have the proctor ask each participant to re-visit their choice of sacrificing one of their own.  Ask them why they did it, if they would change their mind.  Guide them to seeing all the questions and possibilities they didn't consider when they decided on the sacrifice.  

Would this be a better framework for getting people to examine their underlying ethical structures, or is this just me still being angry 40 years later?  I am not sure.  But it would certainly be more interesting than what they put me through when I was 13, I tell you what.

Comments

[petrea_mitchell]

In a weird bit of synchronicity, I'm watching an anime where this same hypothetical issue was just raised (not specifically involving lifeboats, but essentially the same problem, trying to force an unethical answer) so that the hero could say no, he'll try to find a way to save everyone. It's based on a fairly popular manga, so there's one bunch of people being introduced to the idea that the false choice should be rejected...

[calimac]

Vehement agreement on this. The problem with all such thought experiments, particularly those set in exigent circumstances with strict time limits, is that the experiments present as definitive facts things which in real life would be unknowable (or, as you point out, much more fuzzy than definitive). Since the intended point of all these experiments is to use the definitive facts to force moral conclusions, to point out that the facts aren't definitive completely undercuts the intended moral argument.

However, I have to disagree with one point in mrissa's reading of "The Cold Equations." The story does not "put the moral failing on the girl alone," or at all. The story is at pains to express the opinion that nobody is blaming her for her mistake, she did not commit a failing, still less a moral one. The story's intent is to put the blame solely on the abstract cold equations themselves, and it's this perspective which makes the story, when read as intended, so striking.

That the story ignores that the real fault lies with those who implemented the cold equations into practical effect is the story's moral failing. But its failure to put the blame there doesn't mean it's putting it on the girl instead.

[lydy]

I think that your plain-text reading of the story is correct. However, I also think that you are overlooking the context of how women and emotion were portrayed in science fiction. It is getting a little better, but at the time the story was written and published, women tended to be victims and poker chips, and assumed to be unable to process important things like physics and violence. And this is played out on steroids in "Cold Equations." While the story is explicit in saying that that fault is in our stars, the structure and the context clearly exonerate and lionize the pilot's actions. Insofar as any human behavior is examined and found wanting, it is the girl's actions, not the pilot's. Putting the decisions of the engineers and corporate bean counters out of frame, and centering the ignorance of the girl, while highlighting how fucking emotional she is all the time, is definitely shaming and blaming.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden also points out how grotesquely erotic this "hard choice" theme is in so much of science fiction. There is definitely an aspect of prurient pleasure taken in sacrificing girls in the genre.

If you don't see this, well, I certainly didn't when I first read it, either. I was too energized and elated by the idea that people's actions mattered, had real consequences, and that the universe itself didn't care about the state of my soul, it cared about the my actual actions. But the story also exists to push a fairly toxic narrative about who matters, who doesn't, and how we should think about the world. Using that frame, it has very similar properties to the Trolley Problem or the Lifeboat Problem. It exists to glorify evil.

[calimac]

I'm curious as to what generates such readings. The girl as extremely emotional - she's an adolescent who's just learned she's going to be killed, I should bloody well hope she'd be fucking emotional. In fact, given the circumstances she seems to me to be remarkably calm about it; any more so and the story wouldn't be believable.

You're right that I don't see the story as taking prurient pleasure in sacrificing the girl; in fact the opposite. It's a tragedy. It's sadder if an innocent girl dies than, say, a stoic adult male. If you read it the other way, I'm curious if you read all tragedies involving the deaths of young women that way, and if not, what's the difference? Does Shakespeare take prurient pleasure in sacrificing Juliet, Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, for instance?

[lydy]

I guess I don't know how to approach my answer, here, as I don't have a sense for how you view literary criticism. For instance, what do you think about the discussions of the racism and classism in Lord of the Rings? What do you think of the critique of H.P. Lovecraft as a howling racist? Are you familiar with the trope "bury your gays" and does that inform your understanding of "Thelma and Louise" or the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Shakespeare is wonderful and vastly more layered and complex than "Cold Equations." He is also pretty damn misogynist on a bad day. Not to mention dreadfully anti-Semitic. But his characters, including his female and Jewish characters, tend to be more human, rounded, and endowed with agency than not. All of the women you mention had agency, and generally died while trying to deal with an unjust oppression. Nor were their deaths the sold and only point of the plays. So, um, not quite the same. But again, Shakespeare has a lot more range than Tom Godwin.

I can try to describe in more detail why I read the story the way I do, and why other people also read it that way, but I first need to understand how you see literary criticism.

[calimac]

Just your asking these questions, especially concerning Thelma and Buffy, makes clearer to me what I think you're getting at. I'm guessing you're discussing instances where a work, which is not blatantly or "old school" sexist/racist/etc, still reproduces "old school" discriminatory cliches.

And if you'd said that your reaction to "The Cold Equations" was something like, "Oh no, not yet another story in which the young woman is killed; I can't deal with reading this whether or not the cliche was consciously employed," then I'd have understood immediately, and as a personal reaction this is unanswerable.

But that's not how I read the framing of the issue. You wrote of PNH's observation that "There is definitely an aspect of prurient pleasure taken in sacrificing girls in the genre," and while you didn't specifically state this was true of "Cold Equations," this is a description not of readerly reaction but of authorial intent. It's possible that Godwin (or Campbell, who seems to have been more responsible for the story's final shape) had such prurient pleasure in mind, consciously or unconsciously, but I see nothing in the story to evidence this.

This being so, I think I've gotten past my puzzlement at your statement, and we need proceed no further unless you wish to. I'll respond to your specifics at renewed request, but it need not be prefatory to the long response you contemplated. Thanks.

[lydy]

So, I don't think this is just about my personal reaction. I think that that, instead, the critique of "Cold Equations" is actually a critique of the genre, not just that one story. I think you need to ask why someone can say, "Oh, god, not _another_ story where the girl gets killed." Fridging, which is from comics, describes not just that one dude whose girlfriend ends up the fridge, but the problem that this happens over and over and over again. Why is this? What is happening, and why.

What would "Cold Equations" look like, if the genre weren't so deeply devoted to sacrificing girl children and mocking emotionalism? Here's an alternative: A young person has a father who is an engineer, and knows that engineers always always always build in safety margin for critical systems. They also note that the pilot assigned to the pod is rather smaller than average, does a back of the envelope calculation, decides that in between the safety margin and the mass of the pilot, everything will be fine. When they are discovered, and the pilot explains that these suckers are launched with no goddamn safety margin, the kid is appalled. Then he and the pilot spend the rest of the story doing chewy math together, trying to figure out if there is any combination of things that they can space to save them both. They can discuss orbital mechanics, different entry paths, argue about how much a liter of blood weighs, if they can do an emergency amputation, etc. Really work the problem. At the end, no matter how hard they try, they can't make the numbers come out. The pilot stays, the kid walks out the airlock. Amazingly, utterly tragic.

Why was the story not told that way? Why does the genre I love so much so continually denigrate and then sacrifice people that look like me? Why are emotions so frequently portrayed as dangerous and stupid? There aren't good answers, probably, but noticing the underlying misogyny is useful. Noticing that this kind of thing happens _a lot_. The problem isn't any single instance, but the multiple times. Seeing the pattern, challenging the assumptions, lets us _tell better stories_!

I remember really liking Season 6 of Buffy, and being confused as to why so many of my friends hated it. Not being queer, I hadn't really been paying attention to the lack of queer representation in media, and I hadn't been seeking out queer representation. I was happy when it showed up, but wasn't focused on it. I was utterly unaware of the Dead Lesbian trope. So when Willow went all veiny, what I saw was this cool thing, where Willow and Tara's relationship was being treated exactly the same as any other romantic relationship. What I didn't see, was not aware of, was the context of So Many Dead Lesbians! And that changed how people understood it. Art exists within context. Whedon really should have known better. (I am currently working on a fix-it fic for Season 6, actually.) Patterns exist, and often mean things.

The biggest problem with "Cold Equations" is that it comes from the same artificial and aggrandizing world view the leads people to argue that torture can be used morally, that kicking a 12 year old disabled girl out of a lifeboat is the kind and moral thing to do, that the Trolley Problem actually tells us essential truths about the world. It reifies a bunch of really bad attitudes about the world and about people. It helps normalize a particular form or cruelty.

All that said, I will say that when I first read it, I did not have most of this context, and I liked the story a great deal. It is not the story, by itself, that is the problem. It is how the story fits into the grand conversation of who we are and what we want our future to be.

[quadong]

Star Trek plot lines play this out also, the ones where they tell the audience that there are 27 minutes of air left, and now there are 12.3 minutes of air left, as though that were cut and dry. On the other hand, Star Trek plot lines also usually involve taking the opposite extreme in actions to what your class exercise demanded. The captain nearly always risks 10 people to save one, and I can't recall a protagonist gunning down their compatriots to conserve air either. FWIW.

[hrj]

Back when I was in junior high school (ca. age 13-14) I was in couple of "small enrichment classes" for social studies that engaged in a number of strategy/role-playing exercises. After a few go-rounds, they taught me to be deeply suspicious about buying in to the overt premises of such scenarios, because I discovered that not only were all the games deliberately corrupt (i.e., interactions that were presented as random and fair were actually being manipulated by the facilitator), but they were designed to lead you into acting unethically in order to teach "gotcha" lessons.

My newfound cynicism has carried over into adult life when presented with "team building" exercises that either teach entirely different lessons than the ones they purport to teach, or that simply reinforce my lack of team spirit.

[lydy]

I have only been subjected to a very few "team building" exercises. They were uniformly horrific. They confirmed my opinion that the people I worked with were horrible human beings with whom I wished to have as little to do as possible, and that my management was deeply incompetent.

The one I remember best was where we were told a parable. A baroness, while the baron was away, invited a strapping young man to do her dirty. Her husband, hearing of her infidelity, rode directly home to kill the strapping young man. The young man, in fear for his life, and unarmed because peasant, fled, but was stopped by the river which he could not cross. He begged the ferry man to take him across the river, but the ferryman refused, because the strapping young man could not pay the fare. This enabled the baron to catch up to said strapping young man, and kill him. Our task, as a team, was to decide who was guilty for the poor boy's murder: the baron, the baroness, or the ferryman.

One of my team mates was a very serious fundamentalist Christian, who blamed the murder entirely upon the baroness. I blamed the baron entirely. Other people had other opinions, don't remember what they were. But there was no compromise, nor could there be. And, honestly, how is this an appropriate topic to be talking about at work? Dear gods, what a nightmare that was. Our facilitator was tearing out her hair, trying to get Heidi and myself to see each other's points of view. I told the facilitator that I could see Heidi's point of view, and that it was wrong, evil and immoral and I wanted to have nothing to do with it. Heidi said much the same about me. We weren't on speaking terms for the rest of the time I was with the company, actually.

[quadong]

Jesus.

In retrospect, would "I refuse to answer the question on the grounds that it will unbuild this team" have flown?

[lydy]

I was much younger, more confrontational and more rules-bound, antithetical though those two are. These days, I think I would just keep my head down, and just get through the damn thing saying as little as possible. What I should have done is what most of the "team" did, which was to kind agree with anyone with a strong opinion without volunteering one of their own.

[calimac]

Good lord. Yes, this is a way to bring out fundamental moral divergences, not to develop respect for varying points of view.

Had I been there, I hope I would have had the nerve to point out that the baron placed the blame for his wife's infidelity upon the young man and not upon the baroness. Not that he should have murdered either of them, of course, but there's more than one question of blame in this parable.

[lydy]

I gotta say, one of the things that really drives me spare about the way the story just ignores the class issues, and how no one in my "team" wanted to talk about them. I mean, seriously, what would have happened to Matty Groves if he'd refused Lord Donald's wife? Do you think it would have ended well for him? And exactly why was Lord Donald's wife casting her eye about? What was her home life like and what opportunities diid she have to change it? If a kiss from dead Matty's lips was better than Lord Donald in all his finery, I'm thinking her home life wasn't all that great.

Honestly, the question of blame is just...the guy committed a goddamn murder. I'm happy to stop there. You don't get to kill people. Full stop. As for any of the other mitigating circumstances, we are not given any information, so how can we possibly assess blame?

[hrj]

I tend to suspect that some of my co-workers have come to unfortunate conclusions about *me* during team building exercises. But I'm very upfront about my issues. "This exercise is designed to have a specific 'win condition'. I've played this one before. If you put me in charge, we have our best chance of working together as a team to win. If you're more interested in the discussion process, go ahead, but I'm not likely to be very invested."

I've also annoyed the facilitators on occasion by responding to the question of "what have we learned from this exercise" with answers like, "Don't bother to take ownership of your process because the bosses will just change the rules of the game on the next go-round and all the process improvements you implemented will become obsolete." or "The process is designed to undermine your self-confidence and demonstrate that success is impossible. The lesson is not to get too invested in success."

[lydy]

Heh. I would love you to pieces in those scenarios. Back when such things happened to me on the regular, I was both too cowardly to tackle things head on, and a little too slow on the uptake to catch the gotchas until I'd been got. I would so have appreciated somebody just telling the truth.