A Clockwork Pineapple

You have a choice: somehow, you have been made omnipotent and put in charge of all the newborn children in the world. If you want, you can change their personalities so that they will never, ever do anything you consider to be wrong, but they’ll be otherwise normal in every way (i.e. we aren’t talking about lobotomies here: if you prevent them from ever wanting to murder, it won’t stop them from being able to get angry with someone or tie their shoelaces or reading thrillers). They won’t even perceive your intervention as intervention – it will simply never occur to them to want to kill or rape or cut anyone off in traffic through the course of their lifetime.

Right or wrong?

Though I referenced Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange in the title, the situation here is a little different. In Burgess’s novel, the protagonist, Alex, is a vicious, amoral murderer and rapist. He gets sent to an experimental rehabilitation program where the authorities physically condition him so that he cannot commit an act of violence, no matter how much he wants to.

The Clockwork Orange case is my thought experiment pushed to the most brain-manipulating-friendly extreme: Alex isn’t innocent. He’s had his chance to be a good person, and he’s blown it. Furthermore, we as good as know that if he isn’t conditioned in this way, he’s going to kill and rape again – he even tells us so himself. So other people’s lives and well-being are at stake.

Just like it would be really nice if Alex stopped murdering and raping people, it would obviously be great  if no one ever wanted to do anything bad ever again. We could all live in peace and harmony, without fearing getting mugged on the street or even being insulted by a stranger. Heck, while we’re at it, why not get people to share their wealth and give each other money as well? We could get rid of pernicious horrors like war and poverty.

I think most of us would be willing to accept a world where no one wanted to do anything bad if it turned out that way by chance. Again, to go back to the example of A Clockwork Orange, I doubt anyone would  have a problem with Alex’s condition if it had come on naturally – a sudden illness that makes people nauseated whenever they think about acts of violence. If everyone who was born starting tomorrow were physically incapable of bad thoughts or deeds, most of us would find that acceptable (well… we wouldn’t exactly have a choice in the matter, but that’s beside the point).

However, I don’t know about you, but I think I’d find those incontrovertibly good born-tomorrowers really, really annoying. Part of this is, of course, pettiness: I know I think of doing bad things. I’d much rather that my bad thoughts weren’t something specific to me – that they were just a product of my being normal or human rather than my personal problem. Nobody wants to be a worse person than the people around them.

Another reason why I might find them annoying is because having bad thoughts or motivations does seem to be an important part of being human. When I encounter someone who behaves as though he or she isn’t tempted to do bad things, I’m immediately suspicious. Is this person lying? Does this person just not realize his or her own evil inclinations?

This is, of course, historically contingent: I was born into a generation that knows the realities of a post-colonial world, that learns about and lives in the aftermath of two World Wars and the Cold War and Vietnam and Iraq and 9/11. My peers and my parents’ and my grandparents’ are understandably skeptical about heroes. Just look at our incarnations of Superman and Batman. Batman was a skilled detective who beat criminals at their own game; now he’s a doubt-ridden vigilante. Superman was The Man of Steel; now he’s a no-flights-no-tights emo teenager living in Smallville.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s nothing particularly inhuman about not having bad impulses. Maybe I’m just a cynical person who wants to believe the worst of everyone.

Even if this were the case, it seems like there’s something inherently wrong about removing the potential impulse to evil in anyone. First of all, we seem to have an intuition that doing good ought to be a choice: if your mom forces you to share your cookie with your little brother, it doesn’t have the same moral status as giving him half out of spontaneous generosity. So if our ability to do good depends on our ability to choose to do otherwise, and if doing otherwise than good is doing evil, then taking away someone’s ability to do evil also means taking away their ability to do meaningful good*.

But more importantly, we seem to have this impulse that taking away someone else’s freedom to choose is wrong. After all, we don’t lock people in prison just in case they might do something; we don’t even like the idea of locking them up for a day to scare them into never committing a crime. People deserve the right to choose their own paths as best they can (always taking into account that there will be some things, like genes, laws of physics, and historical and environmental factors, that nobody can change), and while the rest of us reserve the right to oppose them once they’ve made their choices (like, if you see someone getting murdered on the street, you’re not taking away the murderer’s freedom by trying to stop him or her), we have no right to prevent them from being able to make a choice in the first place, even if we have good reason to believe they’ll make the wrong one.

But wait a minute, RhetoricalDevice!you might say, it’s true that it would be wrong to take away someone’s freedom over something iffy, like the possibility that they might someday in the future jaywalk or that they might say something devastating to their significant other. But aren’t there actions we can all agree justify taking away someone’s freedom? For instance, what if we had the chance to take away Hitler’s and Pol Pot’s urges to commit genocide? Or serial killers’ need to murder? Surely by choosing to commit those crimes, those individuals have waived their right to freedom. Surely, in fact, if we don’t choose to take away their inclination to do evil when we have the chance, we bear some measure of responsibility for their crimes.

So we’re back to Alex and his droogs. This is the place where things get complicated. In other words, it’s time to go all po-mo on everybody’s butt. (What’s the theme music for post-modernism? Something atonal like Berg? Or something ironic like “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows”?)

See, on one hand, it seems like, yes, we would absolutely be justified in going back in time and free-will-lobotomizing a young Hitler before he puts his genocidal plans into motion. On the other, it seems like once we agree that something like that’s OK, we face a slippery slope, and wherever we draw the “stop! no taking away free will past this point!” line, it’s always going to be in some way arbitrary.

Slippery slope arguments are tough, because, on one hand, they (the good ones, anyway) do make logical sense: if doing a certain action means accepting a certain principle, and if accepting a certain principle means that one must abandon a second principle that was the only thing preventing one from doing another action, then doing the first action means one must abandon one’s resistance against doing the second one. (The “only thing” part is important and the reason why most slippery slope arguments fail in real life.) The trouble is, people don’t make logical sense. Most people can and do believe contradictory things; whether they’re justified in this or not is a different matter. Point is, even if it’s logically contradictory, there’s nothing stopping me from figuring it’s OK to take away Hitler’s free will but not a jaywalker’s.

I know I’m supposed to wrap up in some big flashy “Aha! And here’s the solution to this moral dilemma!” conclusion here, but to be honest, I just plain don’t know. There are too many questions tied up in it, not the least of which is the (afore-unmentioned) is it moral to damn oneself (ie do something extremely immoral) in order to increase the happiness of others? Does that question even make sense?

So this is where the po-mo comes in. Because, basically, post-modernism is a big darn way of saying, “I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone ever will – at least, not for sure”. IMHO, there’s always going to be an essential tension (po-mo vocab alert!) between freedom of choice and morality of choice. And the trick is not to come crashing down on one side or the other but in always negotiating some sort of balance between the two.

Unless, of course, they do invent some kind of baby-brainwashing machine, and I’m put in charge of it.

* Two big ifs. But here’s a tangentially related Judaism Interlude (TM) [imagine the theme music as something like hava nagila]. In Judaism, there’s a similar line of thought that says fulfilling a mitzvah (a commandment from G-d) “counts” only if you deliberately do it. So you don’t get bonus points for following “Thou shalt not kill” unless you actually do think about killing someone and choose not to. Likewise, although vegetarian diets are kosher, being vegetarian doesn’t get you kashrut-brownie-points unless keeping kosher was part of your decision to be or to continue being vegetarian.