A recent episode of Fox’s sci-fi show Fringe, 6955 kHz (S3, Ep06), ended with a scene that reminded me of how philosophers and statists like to pose difficult hypothetical scenarios designed to test your principles and your commitment to them. Usually these scenarios are underspecified for practical ethical decision-making and what specifics they do have are extremely improbable at best, downright unrealistic at worst. The “best” of these are carefully crafted to pump your emotions and moral intuitions. Thought experiments should be used by good philosophers to seek truth, but often these scenarios are posed by ideologues with the intention of leading you to accept whatever pet theory, principle, or policy proposal they prefer.
But it is a mistake to draw moral principles from emergencies and lifeboat situations for general application in everyday, normal circumstances. It is rather a function of practical wisdom to properly apply our principles in any given situation. Sometimes we are faced with what appears to be a no-win scenario (such as the Kobayashi Maru of Star Trek fame). But I think that often in real life, as in fiction, we are really just presenting to ourselves or being presented with two false alternatives. We can choose to take the easy, seemingly pragmatic, way out — the least unpalatable of the two options before us — and rationalize it. Or we can choose to look for another way. It is not always wrong to fight the hypo.
In Fringe, the characters are faced with two parallel universes collapsing into each other. We are informed that only one can survive. There is an ancient device that could possibly be used to destroy one of the universes and save the other. In the scene starting at around 37 minutes into 6955 kHz, the alternate Olivia asks the hero, Peter Bishop, on whose shoulders the fate of both universes seems to rest, a weighty question:
Olivia: If you knew that only one of our worlds could survive, and if it was up to you — you alone — to defend your side, you’d have no choice, right? You would have to do what you had to do, no matter the cost, to protect our world.
Peter: There are billions of innocent people over there…just like here…people with jobs, families, lives. I gotta believe there’s another way. And, whatever my part in all this is…I gotta believe there’s another way. There’s always hope, right?
He is not so eager to convince himself that the easy way out is the right thing to do. Like Captain Kirk, Peter Bishop does not believe in no-win scenarios. Do you?
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