An Ethical Dilemma

"Ethics," complains Caspar at the beginning of the Coen Brothers' movie Miller's Crossing.  "It's a wrong situation.  It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight.  Now if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust?"  The irony is comical.  Later, Caspar's contradiction catches up with him.  "Bluepoint sayin' we should double-cross you.  You double-cross once, where's it all end?  An interesting ethical question."  Caspar is a man caught in his own web of hypocrisy: a violation of Kant's first formulation.

 In the same film, the main character Tom represents the voice of ethical enlightenment (according to Kant).  In the world of gritty Chicago gangsters, Tom takes responsibility for his actions.  He insists on settling his own debt when it would be easier to accept a handout.  He admits to his boss that he has been sleeping with his girlfriend, Verna, putting himself at considerable risk.  And he treats Bernie as a human end to himself, though it comes back to bite him later (fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me).

And yet, surely none of us want to live a world of corruption, murder, and back-stabbing.  There is something deeply profound about Tom's hat floating away from him in a dream.  He yearns, perhaps, for a world in which people are ethically consistent; and yet, that world eludes him, and he is forced to treat a human being not as an end.  "Look into your heart," he is begged by Bernie.  "What heart?" Tom is forced to answer.

My sister, upon reading the start of this blog, has pointed out something missing that I have not yet gotten to: the role of judgment.  There is no moral right or wrong without judgment.  When Tom murders Bernie in Miller's Crossing, is the act justified?  We all may have different individual answers, and we all have to concur that the answer is complex, and not just a simple matter of a single act of violence.

It would not be right, or even feasible, to assume that one moral viewpoint can be used to address all complex moral situations.  The search for Universal Law seems fleeting--much like Tom's hat in Miller's Crossing.  And yet, still we have plenty of counterexamples of unquestionably immoral behavior.

Judgment is a process, not a simple set of rules.  It cannot be boiled down to a simple set of rules (ten commandments, one golden rule, etc.).  It has to built up based on practical, relevant social factors.  It has to be fair (not blind), and it has to consider individuals' human rights.