From the Archive: Definitions in Morality
As I sat down to watch “Life Boat,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 movie based on a John Steinbeck story about the survivors of a Nazi U-Boat incursion forced into a tiny…well…life boat, I expected a few good ethical questions to arise out of the human drama. Whatever the film’s drawbacks, at the end of the evening it had me thinking.
We tend to value human life above all other forms. Viewing human history and our various violent situations currently suffered, it might be dryly commented that this value isn’t high. Maybe it isn’t sometimes, but it’s always higher on the list than say…squirrels and trees.
It has been said that the main job for a government with an agenda to get its own people to fight is to make the enemy an “It.” Through propaganda you must dehumanize the opposition. “Its” are easier to hate, and what is easier to hate is easier to kill. We no longer identify with them, we no longer have the ability to sympathize or empathize with them. In our history, the nation backed a war against Nazis because there seemed such a clear divide between us. Good vs. Evil.
Luckily, Germany easily regained its human status in western eyes after the war. The Nazi regime fell, and they were Germans again. In “Life Boat” the first handful of survivors in the boat are all from Allied countries. They all speak English and can easily relate to each other. Then they pull someone else from the water, someone who does not speak English. A German. A Nazi. What’s the difference?
The people in the boat are instantly divided. Some see the German as a human, some see him as a Nazi. The label serves its purpose in dehumanization. Some want to throw him overboard and let him die, the others want to keep him on board. This conflict goes beyond the immediate crisis of their boat having been attacked by the German’s U-boat. He signifies a source, or at least a distinct representation, of evil. It’s the same reason you don’t stop to think of what oppressive circumstances the Orcs might have been under that forced them into a conflict they may not have wanted in “Lord of the Rings,” and why the most maddening question in “Independence Day” is how Will Smith knocked an alien wearing a bio-suit out in one punch, not wether he should be going around punching aliens. Inhuman villains evoke the strongest negative emotions that we are OK with having.
Whether this identification is something evolutionarily useful, or we were endowed with this response (there is no reason these need be mutually exclusive), is too wide for the scope of this little piece, but it is important to note that we have not outgrown the ability to rob other humans of their human status for our own moral sanity. Remember former President Bush’s remarks about our enemies being our enemies because they “hate our freedoms?” It is this sort of simplistic emotional statement that is so persuasive, because it implies some nonsensical motivation we can not understand, much like a dragon hoarding gold in some old legend.
It is just evil being evil. The actual reasons, as I have faith most people know, are more complicated and deep than that, and while there are certain aspects of our lifestyle I am sure our enemies don’t care for, I am not sure they were walking around cracking their knuckles like villains, mumbling to themselves “The biggest problem in my life is how free the Americans are. Someday…”
My main point I wish to convey is this: our biggest ethical dilemmas stem from a struggle to define ‘human.’ We have trouble harming or exploiting people we actually see as people. Historically, slaves were seen as lower than human, the abortion debate hinges on the definition of when we begin to be human, war depends on the definition of ‘human’ (on a subtler level), and so on. We are looking for the common thread that goes beyond our biological unity. That definition, which is less clear than we often realize, is crucial to our moral structure.
1 Hippies excepted, of course. Not that we don’t value hippies on an equal footing with the rest of humanity. In reference to their own values, trees may rank higher.
2 What’s he going to do with all that stuff, anyway?