Virtue Surplus

[rowyn]

That's a term ceruleanst used when I was talking about the protagonist in Ghost several weeks ago, to describe the concept that "enough good deeds will offset a certain amount of evil ones".

I don't think many people subscribe to this idea at any kind of extreme. No one's going to say "Well, you saved 50 people from certain death during a disaster last month, so it's okay that you murdered that one guy today for cutting you off in traffic".

Yet it's still an interesting idea, in some ways. It reminds me of various other sayings, like "the ends justify the means" or "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one". Or an Ursula LeGuin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".

Usually, people accept a certain amount of negative consequences in return for desirable things. One could assign a portion of the blame for the deaths from every airplane crash to the Wright Brothers, or hold Henry Ford partly responsible for the tens of thousands who die in car accidents each year. But we don't look at airplanes or cars in terms of the damage they do: we look at them for their benefits instead. And those benefits can be measured not just in convenience, but in human lives, too. Famine in the modern world is not a matter of food production, but of transportation: improving technology in this area has helped tremendously.

It's easier to forgive unintended consequences, though. Plane crashes and car accidents aren't an essential part of faster transportation: indeed, people make changes to them all the time to make them safer. Which is one of the benefits of the drive and ambition of modern society: we're never satisfied.

But it would be different if the negative consequences were not unintended, or if they wasn't even an apparent connection. Rapists aren't the price we pay to have an effective military, and to say that they are is an insult to every man in uniform. The two don't go hand in hand .... necessarily.

But what if it happens that they do? What do you do with someone who is mostly good, who has done great things that few could match -- but who's also done something terrible?

At what point does the hero become a villain? Which flaws can you overlook? Is it okay if the firefighter who's rescued hundreds of people from burning buildings cheats on his wife? What if he beats his children? Maybe he's a chronic shoplifter. Maybe he got a co-worker killed once, by accident, and then covered up his part so he wouldn't get blamed or lose his career. Does the good that he's done make the evils more forgiveable, or less?

What if the events really are correlated? What if that cop really did need to torture his captive in order to find the location of the bomb that would otheriwse kill hundreds?

Or is that a hypothetical case that never matches reality? Does evil ultimately beget evil, even if the intentions were good, so that truly no good comes out of a sinister act?

Sometimes when I think about all the horrible things we hear about people in power, the way no presidential candidate can escape attacks upon his character, and I wonder if they're all true. If that's the way everyone would look if they were put under a microscope to be viewed by 300 million prying eyes. All those flaws, amplified and expounded on and presented in the worst possible light. How would I look, under such scrutiny?

Is the problem with stories that they only present a tiny portion of the whole? We ascribe such weight to the things we know, but in every person we judge, there's a lifetime of experience we do not know.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't have any answers, only more questions.

Comments

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Civilization is a peace treaty.

"I'm not going to kill you, and in return, you're not going to kill me. All these other people aren't going to kill each other either, and now we all aren't going to kill each other, and can live happily and safely."

Someone who doesn't sign on to the treaty is uncivilized, but not a bad person per se. That doesn't mean a civilization can stand to have them around -- they'll ruin everything, because the default assumption is that all humans in a civilized area are civilized. That's what makes it a civilized area.

So, there's two ways to deal with it, either of which could work:
(a) They signed implicitly on by entering the civilized area (or just by existing as a human being), so if they break the treaty, imprison them.
(b) They're wild and dangerous animals (because they're not civilized) that must be exterminated or kept in the wilderness. Or maybe they're useful, so we'll let them hang around as long as they're kept under the control of their handlers.

The second makes it easier to accept the existance of morally repugnant but useful or necessary people. But either of them give an answer to the dilemma -- civilization, law, morality, etc. isn't a fixed absolute handed down from god that must be adhered to rigidly. It's a framework that was set up to make the world a comfortable place to live. If an exception, or a class of exceptions, makes things better, then it's in our power to change it.

This doesn't mean that there's no fixed optimal morality, but we have no way of knowing what it is a priori, and presumably or at least hopefully changes to our morality to make things better locally would lead us towards the optimal state.

[rowyn]

Someone who doesn't sign on to the treaty is uncivilized, but not a bad person per se.

What does make someone a "bad person"?

It's a framework that was set up to make the world a comfortable place to live. If an exception, or a class of exceptions, makes things better, then it's in our power to change it.

That makes sense, and it's generally the way I view morality: the set of rules which maximizes the potential for individual and collective happiness/comfort. It's actually why I reject traditional sexual morality (ie, no sex before or outside of marriage, no divorce). I think that model used to maximize individual happiness, but I don't think it does in modern society for a variety of reasons. (Contraception, longer lifespans, decreasing importance of reproduction, ability to prevent or cure STDs, etc.)

But I'm struggling with how to identify exceptions, especially exceptions in the grey area. And there are two distinct classes of possible exceptions -- correlated and uncorrelated. Basically "monsters who can only fight monsters because they are monsters" and "monsters with important redeeming qualities that are not apparently connected to the reasons they do horrible things."

They're both problematic, but for different reasons.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

What does make someone a "bad person"?

Inefficiency? }:P Just kidding.

A bad person is someone who makes the world a worse place. Usually, it doesn't really count if they're not doing it on purpose -- then they're just being foolish, or wrong, or insane.

It's easier to be bad if people think you're civilized, because they hold you to a much higher standard and put themselves more at risk of being hurt by you, but that doesn't mean uncivilized people couldn't be bad too. Per capita, it's probably more likely.

"monsters with important redeeming qualities that are not apparently connected to the reasons they do horrible things."

This class could be more easily replaced by someone with the important redeeming qualities who wasn't also a monster, so there's less need to keep them around from a practical standpoint. But it might still be worthwhile -- you just have to make sure that they're kept under control. Exiled instead of executed, maybe.

If they're going to do the same horrible things again later, you can't just charge it to their account and forgive them. You have to take steps to prevent it to avoid being culpable. If you think you might need them later, you can avoid steps that would prevent getting their help later.

If the things aren't *that* horrible, well, maybe you *can* charge it to their account. Like, if they're a thief, you can pay off the people they stole from and literally, you know, charge them. c.c So the dilemma is only when they break things that you can't fix.

[rowyn]

Yes, that makes sense.

There's a personal aspect to it that I find difficult, too. Which is, even if society doesn't *need* someone, that's not the same as saying they're worthless. If I've got a choice between an honest cop and one on the take from a drug dealer, I'm obviously going to prefer the honest cop. Yet the corrupt one might be doing some real good in the world, too. That he's corrupt in one area doesn't (necessarily) mean he's not a good father, or husband, or that he won't stop other crimes or hasn't risked his life to save people.

Society doesn't need people like him, in the 'can't get the good without the bad' sense. Throwing him into exile or death may be a net benefit to civilization. And yet to do so ignores the good in his life.

But this is, perhaps, one reason we have punishment. Not just as a preventative and a deterrent, but as a form of acknowledgement. "We know you did this bad thing. We are going to punish you for it. There, now you've been punished, don't do it again and we'll consider it even." Maybe half the point of punishment is just to be able to say that the wrongs have been addressed, so that we don't need to keep trying to answer the unanswerable.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

There's this tendancy to want to quantify moral and ethical issues mathematically. Maybe humans find some comfort in finding distinct boundaries, because the unknown is scary, and because we want easy answers. However, while there are things we're certain of, I don't think the edges of these boundaries are concrete. Everything has to be judged on a case by case basis, and they're not always going to be consistant, even without accounting for context. Some people are going to view things differently from person to person. For some people, murder is the most abhorrant crime imaginable. For others, rape is worse than death, subjecting someone to a life of scarring.

As for people in positions of power... well, I wouldn't subject you to the scrutiny of 300 million prying eyes, but you don't have the ability to declare war or directly impact the lives of those 300 million people. People in power are human, and should be viewed as humans, with foibles, but they are also there for a reason... ostensibly they have the qualities needed in leaders, self discipline, intelligence, ability, etc. Lots of things can have an impact or indicate a breaking point in those, so while the public does not have a right to pry into everything, people in power are still subject to a different standard.

None of this is black and white. It is mud and the most uncomfortable thing for us to consider, but we live in it, so we should be aware of it.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

I should also add that in the first paragraph, I would say everything has weight. Nothing invalidates anything... not completely, anyway.

And in the second paragraph, I also should clarify that I don't mean to imply everyone in power got where they did on their merits. But they are still to be held to the standard.

[rowyn]

I would say everything has weight. Nothing invalidates anything... not completely, anyway.

Yeah, that's one of the things that I've been pondering. If a murderer turns into a philanthropist, or a philanthropist into a murderer, both acts are still true. Neither the philanthropy or the murder stops being real for having been done by the same person.

Part of me does want to reduce it to a mathematical formula. I want to subtract X from Y and get Z. But I can't represent it in any simplified form. It's X and Y. There is no way to take them and arrive at Z. But I feel like I don't know how to treat the person as a whole without reaching Z.

It is mud and the most uncomfortable thing for us to consider, but we live in it, so we should be aware of it.

Yeah.

[sebkha.livejournal.com]

There's this tendancy to want to quantify moral and ethical issues mathematically.

This isn't just an irrational quirk of psychology. Mathematics is the science of abstraction; the law is the abstraction used to resolve moral and ethical issues. We go to great efforts to remove the relative abhorrence of murder and rape from the realm of subjective opinion.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, there's a practical reason for it. As you point out, ultimately something has to get done about what's going on, and this abstraction helps get it done.

I suppose the danger then is an over-reliance... because while the psychological quirk isn't all of the reason for this drive's existance, it's very significant, and the system is inherantly flawed as it is. We must avoid basing too much on subjective opinion but at the same time avoid trying to reduce everything to a tally sheet or point system. We want to avoid the muddy middle where we can, but we must've be afraid to get into it to haul the best resolution out of it rather than settle for an easy, ill-fitting answer.

Perhaps then, the distinction is between necessarily establishing quantifiable qualities to use with precedents and the less desirable but more attractive practice of arbitrating based on inflexible parameters. God, that was a mouthful. Anyway, I guess our system of law tries to do this already, but kind of teeters back and forth between the extremes.

I wish I had more solutions. Mostly I just wanted to warn against the allure of neat-n-tidy systems that achieve their cleanliness by sweeping things under rugs. If we tortured information out of somebody, and that info saved 500 lives, we can't just forget about the torture. We have to address it, even if that means accepting it on some level.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

In the case of "saving 500 lives, but doing it via torture," there's not only the inherent wickedness in torturing someone, but (on a more pragmatic level) consequences this has for future moral decisions.

E.g.: "We tortured that guy last time. Why can't we do it now?" "If you're willing to torture to save 500 lives, why not 100? 10? 1?" "Country X *TORTURES!* They are evil! Death to Country X!" "Well, YOUR guys torture to get information, so we're fully justified in doing the same."

And so on. Some of those consequences are more direct than others. (For instance, in instance #3, it could well be that the speaker would eventually get around to screaming, "Death to Country X!" whether this had happened or not.) But in any case, there are various "moral absolutes" that some people follow, and then along comes someone who observes, "But if we broke that moral absolute, we could save someone, and saving someone is imperative, so this moral absolute is a hindrance." But once you break those barriers, it becomes a lot easier to break them in the future. All you need to do is do a bit of rationalization and justification, and there you go. Eventually the prohibition becomes meaningless.

In the short term, strict adherence to a particular rule could result in unfortunate consequences ... but sometimes the *breaking* of that rule could have far greater (if not immediately obvious) ones.

[rowyn]

Yes, this is one of the things I was thinking about. Is the hypothetical "do one bad thing to get a much better result" based on an inherently flawed assumption? Are there truly real-life situations where the best result comes from doing something morally questionable, or do the morally questionable acts always have long-term consequences that make them more detrimental than beneficial?

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

"Virtue surplus" seems like a concept that only exists if we're measuring "virtue" as some sort of ... uhm ... measurable quality. It also seems to imply that "virtue" = "favors accomplished."

I can see it as the product of a cold, pragmatic way of looking at things: "Yes, Vlad the Impaler is bloodthirsty and prone to killing people without much reason ... but without him, we would be overrun by even more bloodthirsty murderers."

I can see such logic being applied to, say, someone in the Star Wars universe who has chosen to defend the Empire because he actually believes that it is necessary in order to suppress all of the petty, genocidal wars that would pop up between various planets if the Empire weren't there to keep them both in line ... and to keep various threats from outside the galaxy from encroaching.

From a strategic standpoint, I can understand the person who would make such decisions, and opposing the hotheaded hero who wants to punish evil here at hand (heedless of the lurking evil at the gates that THIS evil is keeping at bay).

However, when a so-called hero saves the world (and himself with it) and then proceeds to feel justified in, oh, let's say, raping a girl who really OUGHT to have been honored to spend the night with him ... I can see various folks simmering and feeling obliged not to do anything harsh to him, because they OWE HIM. But you know it's wrong. What, did he get 1,000,000 Good Points, and this one Rape brought him down, let us say, buy 100 Evil Points?

I don't see it that way. Good, Evil - it's not a linear scale. His actions here tell us that he is capable of taking such actions again. And if he "justifies" his own actions because he saved the world previously, we might do well to see just how much surplus he thinks he still has - because he could very well decide to "cash in" and commit more misdeeds later on. The good citizen might feel obliged to thank him for saving the world ... but then he might be wise to move out of town, far away from Mister Powerful Hero, lest one of his kids catch Mr. Hero's corrupt eye.

Besides, power does not equal virtue. There are plenty of people who, given the power, might choose to save or destroy the world ... but it'd be a rare thing for any one person to really have that much power. Our imaginary hero, let us suppose, was in the right place, at the right time, with the right skill set and/or super powers. He succeeded in keeping the world from being destroyed by some particular catastrophe. That doesn't mean that Grandma Jones over there, had she similar power and abilities, would have done any less. And if saving the world had required self-sacrifice, Grandma Jones might have done so for the sake of not only her children but for complete strangers, while Mister Powerful Hero might have wasted time looking for another way out.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Usually the reason people keep antiheroes around is that they expect a class of problems to continue to crop up which only antiheroes could solve. Grandma Jones couldn't do it because being evil is a requirement and she's not.

Like, Hellblazer, for a relatively sanitized version. Constantine can fight off the forces of evil because he literally sold his soul to the devil.

[rowyn]

And if saving the world had required self-sacrifice, Grandma Jones might have done so for the sake of not only her children but for complete strangers, while Mister Powerful Hero might have wasted time looking for another way out.

But Mr. Powerful Hero might be self-sacrificing, too. The fact that a person has done, or will do, a contemptible act does not preclude the possibility that he has good qualities, too. The sins and the virtues occupy the same body; that's what makes the whole person so difficult to figure out. Sometimes, so difficult to reconcile.

[rowyn]

One of the examples I was thinking of, and this isn't an entirely appropriate example:

In the +terrible butterflies+ campaign, my PC, Seraph, helped another PC cast a spell that largely eliminated world hunger. It was an act that saved tens of thousands of lives every single day.

Later, Seraph cast a world-wide spell that she intended would protect ordinary people during a global magic duel between the PCs and some belligerent NPCs. Seraph's spell turned out to be unnecessary, and caused a panic amongst a large percentage of the population to boot, resulting in 50 or so deaths and countless injuries and other damages.

The consequences of the latter spell were unintentional, of course. But Seraph could've predicted them, and she could've followed a safer and less drastic course instead of doing something flashy and impressive (and terrifying to normal people).

And I never really forgave the character for that second spell. And I never figured out how to forgive her, either. What would be enough penance, what would be sufficient restitution? I don't know. Even though her existence would appear to be a net benefit for the world, I still feel 'meh' about her, like she screwed up in an irredeemable way. I can still play her and enjoy playing her, but I can't really like her any more.

[krud42.livejournal.com]

To grossly oversimplify my stance: Doing a crapload of good doesn't give you a Get Out Of Jail Free card.

If [insert some major philanthropist whose name I won't use so as not to even hypothetically besmirch their name] were to end their life by blowing up a facility full of innocents, to me that would be their legacy.

And conversely, if a horrible person changes their ways and dedicates the remainder of their life to helping everyone as much as they can, that too would be their legacy, even though one couldn't necessarily "overlook" their previous atrocities.

As for scrutiny, one's opinion should take one's own life into consideration by comparison, which I think is the basis for that whole "judge not, lest you be judged" scripture that even non-religious folk enjoy quoting. The problem there, however, is that most people are incapable of giving themselves the sort of honest scrutiny that countless outside sources could. But conversely, no amount of people can actually "see" what's going on in someone else's psyche, no matter how many brain scan's, lie detector tests, and hypnosis sessions the person undergoes. All they can do is extrapolate.

Not sure what my point was, either...

RYN: In that case, you might not like "Wicked." I think I benefitted from not being able to hear it clearly. I worry that if I did, I would be annoyed by it. (It would probably help to think of it as a totally unrelated entity. And yes, that sort of storyline tends to annoy me, too.)

[rowyn]

There is this sense that one's last acts are the most important ones. It doesn't quite seem fair to disregard the previous record, though, whether it's good or bad. All of it is a part of who the person is.

[krud42.livejournal.com]

I suppose I either didn't think it through all the way, or worded it properly, as I didn't mean to imply that final acts are the most important ones. But to me life should be (in part) about learning, progressing, and improving one's self. And though there's never an "age" where a horrible deed is acceptable, maturity is often considered. I've known people who did awful things as a teenager but who later matured into kind, responsible adults who had other people's best interests at heart. (I've been friends with such people.) And I've known good, upstanding people who've later turned into utter jerkwads. In those two situations, I think the former is better than the latter. It's a matter of "old enough to know better", or "knowing then what you know now." Or however you want to word it. Case in point: I made some very politically incorrect jokes when I was little. I don't make them now. If you transplanted them from then and put them into now, it would be far worse, because I'm more educated and mature than I was then, presumably. Can you fault my childhood self just as much as you would my older self? I would hope not.

I guess it depends on the scale of what you're talking about. Because I agree that if you were to punch someone in the gut and then offer them some ice cream, it's no better than if you were to offer them some ice cream and then punch them in the gut. (Though even in that bizarre scenario, the first example would probably leave a better impression, if only marginally.)

[zaimoni.livejournal.com]

That is milder than the problem posed by meditiating deeply on Ecclesiastes 7:15-18 (which I did have to do, to make headway on some controllable aspects of my time non-management.)

How about being dealt "to be extremely good, you must be as extremely evil"? (In one sense this is wrong-headed, since all temptations are guaranteed resistable. On the other hand, even a malinstructed conscience's demands are binding — and the perspective of Ecclesiastes is under the sun.)

[zaimoni.livejournal.com]

The full impact requires some awareness of the Hebrew text, to get the full parallelism. Most translations flinch.