Eureka Street wishes all its readers the peace, blessings and unity of the Christmas season. Cover design: Siobhan Jackson Photograph p5 by Michael McGirr. Graphics p11, 20, 21, 35, 37, by Siobban Jackson. Photographs pp16-17, 18 by Bill Thomas. Cartoon p40 by Peter Fraser. Eureka Street magazine Jesuit Publications PO Box 553 Richmond VIC 3 12 1 Tel (03)9427 73 11 Fax (03)9428 4450 e-m ail: eureka@werple.net.au Volume 6 Number lO December 1996 A magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology CONTENTS 4 COMMENT 7 CAPITAL LETTER 8 LETTERS 10 ROOM AT THE TOP Chris McGillion looks at collegiality, or lack of it, in the Catholic Church. 14 COMMISSIONS AND OMISSIONS Moira Rayner on our rash of Royal Commissions. 15 ARCHIMEDES 16 BARBED CONTRACT Jon Greenaway looks at inside business: Australia's new prison regime. 19 ADAMS' VALUES Australia should have granted Gerry that visa, argues Frank O'Shea. 20 ONCE IN SPRINGTIME Peter Pierce, at the track, gives Bart Cummings the last word. 22 THE JESUS IN QUESTION Robert Crotty on the latest debates . 27 INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE Peter Craven sifts the scholarship of Christopher Ricks and revisits T.S. Eliot. 30 BOOKS Andrew Hamilton draws a sense of nationhood from Timor: A People Betrayed; Citizens, and God's Heavenly Son, Th e Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Ziuquan; Max Charlesworth reviews Francis Fukuyama's Trust (p33); David Lewis takes issue with Peter Unger's Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocen ce (p35 ); Raymond Benjamin reviews Thea Astley 's latest (p3 7); Pamela Foulkes reviews three books that examine the state of Church and Christianity, Outrageous Wom en , Outrageous God; Angels: Their Mission and Message, and Redefining the Church: Vision and Practice (p38); David McCooey's Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography is reviewed by Graham Little (p40); Morris West's pilgrim travels are tracked by Andrew Bullen (p42); James Griffin takes a look at labour and Labor history and the life of Lloyd Ross (p43). 45 JUDGING DRAMA Is the play the thing, or is it 'literary m eri t ' that counts at award time, asks Geoffrey Milne. 47 FLASH IN THE PAN Reviews of the films William Shakespeare's Romeo eJ Juliet; The Horseman on the Roof; The Pillow Book; Children of th e Revolution; Dead Heart; Jude; The Spitfire Grill; Holy Week. 50 WATCHING BRIEF 51 SPECIFIC LEVITY VOLUME 6 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 3 BooKs: 3 DAVID L EWlS Illusory Innocence? W Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence 1\:tu Unger, Oxford Un1vus!l\ Press Oxford and NL\\ Yorl [l)l)f> llJ 'ilOK'ilJ ()I'll sn l)'i ILE DR!VlNG ON A deserted road, far 1. Could our commonsensical ethical twice over. If indeed it is seriously wrong away in the bush, you come upon a stranger opinions possibly be right? not to save the life of one distant childwith a wounded leg. The leg is in a bad way. 2. Whether right or whether wrong, what even more seriously wrong than it would be Unless the stranger reaches a hospital right psychological m echanism causes us to not to save the wounded stranger's legaway, amputation may be unavoidable. You respond so very differently to the two cases? then why is it not equally wrong not to save have business of your own to attend to. The two ques tions are well worth a book, the life of the next distant child? And the Taking the stranger to hospital would cost and that is the book Peter Unger has given us. next, and the next .. . ? you time and bother. Further, for reasons And a very fine book it i : carefully argued, There is nothing to shut the argument we need not stop to explain, it would cost imaginative, fearless. Whetheralsoitiscorrect off after you have saved one life. Or after you quite a lot of money. Also, you would in its conclusions remains to be seen. you have sent your $100 for the yearhave to commandeer resources that belong Unger's answer to the ethical question enough, Unger informs us, to save many to someone else, knowing full well that the is uncompromising: our commonsensical lives or after you have sent $1000. Or after owner would not consent. Still, what else opinions are not right. Failing to aid the you have sent whatever contribution would can you do?-you do what m os t of u would distant child is seriously wrong. When we be your fair share if, somehow, the burden do, and take the stranger to hospital. think otherwise, we are under an ethical of paying for life-saving m edical care were Another day, you find in your mailbox a illusion . He does not res t his argument being fairly divided among all the world's printed letter from UNICEF. It tells you, affluent. When you have so little left that credibly, that in some distant and povertyit becomes doubtful whether you can live stricken place, children are dying for lack to give again another day, then the arguof emergency medical assistance. It asks ment shuts off. But only then. Talk about you for a contribution. The trea tment giving until it hurts! required is ch eap, and sending your If we follow unflinchingly w here contribution is easy. Saving a di tant argument leads-and Unger does-the child's life would cos t you far less time, conclusions that await us are still more less bother, less money than saving the extreme. wounded stranger's leg. And you know If you give all you have and all you that your contribution would m ake a earn, keeping back only enough to provide difference: UNICEF has not enough money upon any contentious system of utilitarian for your own survival, that is not enough . If to pay for all the lifesaving work it would do ethics . Rather, the case of the wounded you could give more by devoting yourself if it could, so the m ore contributions, the stranger is taken to reveal the basic values single-mindedly to the pur uit of wealth, more saved lives . that we already accept. Then we have only you should do that too. And you should give Understanding all this, you do what to ask how those sam e values apply to the not only all that you can earn (beyond most of us would do: nothing. You send no case of the distant child. Unger's conclusubsistence), but also all that you can beg, contribution, you discard the letter without sion may come as a surprise; yet it is meant borrow or steal. For did we not agree that you fur ther thought, you let m ore die instead of to have the au thority of established ethica l might have to commandeer someone else's fewer. Most of us would think it seriously common sense. Unlike some ofthe utili tarproperty in order to take the wounded wrong to refuse to come to the aid of the ians with whom he is de facto allied, Unger stranger to hospital? And is it not more wounded stranger. Yet we would think it is not trying to reform the foundations of important to save a life than to save a leg? notveryseriouslywrong, perhapsnotwrong ordinary m orality. He is claiming instead What is required of you, if Unger's at all, to refuse to come to the aid of the that we are terribly, disastrously wrong argument is right, turns out to be very distant child. about what ordinary morality requires of much more than just a substantial annual Sending the contribution that would u s. In the case of the distant child-and in contribution to UNICEF. It is a life devoted save the child's life strikes us not as doing very many similar cases-ordinary morality entirely to serving those what one mu t, but as a commendable act is far less lenient than we like to think. 1 endangered distant children. of op tional generosity. Very stra nge! If Unger were arguing that each of us Because, after all, the cases are much alike. ought to send UNICEF $100 every year, or F IT WERE THE LIFE OF A SAl T, or of an Insofar as they differ, it would seem that even $1000, hi argum ent would be hard to ou tlaw robbing the rich to give to the poor, you have m ore reason to aid the child than resist . But his conclusion is far m ore extreme it might have its attractions. But if it is the to aid the stranger: the benefit is more, a life than that. Willing contributors are few, life of an unscrupu lous money-grubber, instead of a leg, and the co t is less. distant children dying for lack of m edical toiling away at dirty business so as to serve The remarkable contrast in what we assistance are many; and so their need for the distant children in the most efficient think about the two cases poses an urgen t lifesaving contributions is inexhaustible. possible way, it is altogether repellent. You question. Or rather, two questions: An argum ent that is cogent once is cogent are not asked to give away your life so that VOLUME 6 N UMBER 10 • EUREKA STREET 35 the distant children may live. But nei ther are you asked to give away just a few trivial luxuries. You may well be asked to give away most of what makes your life worth living. And this in the name of our ordinary morality, in the name of the basic values we already accept! Somewhere, we have crossed th e line into a reductio ad absurdum. The conclusions that supposedly follow from our ordinary morality are so violently opposed to what we ordinarily think that, somehow, the argument must have gone astray. It is hard to see just what has gone wrong. But even if we cannot diagnose the flaw, it is more credible that the argument has a flaw we cannot diagnose than that its most extreme conclusion is true. But if the argument for the extreme conclusion is flawed, that does not m ean that we are left with a cogent argument for so m e less extreme and more credible conclusion. More likely we are left with nothing. However much we might welcome an argument that we are required to contribute, say, $100 annually that is not what we have been offered . Flawed is flawed. Unless somehow the flaw resulted only because we pushed Unger's argument too far, it will not automatically go W away just because we stop short. ELL THEN, WHAT IS THE FLAW? The lesson of the reductio ad absurdum is just that something must have gone wrong somewhere. To arrive at an answer-an admittedly tentative answer-we do best to approach the question indirectly, by way of Unger's answer to the second, psychological question: what causes us to respond so differently to the case of the wounded stranger and the case of the distant child? Here is Unger's explanation: Often we view th e world as comprising just certain situations. Likewise we view a situation as including just certain people, all of them then well grouped together within it ... often we view a certain serious problem as being a problem for only those folks viewed as being (grouped together ) in a particular situation; and, then, we'll view the bad trouble as not any problem for all the world's other people. (p.97) It is easy to see how this phenomenon of 'separation' might apply to our pair of contrasting cases. When you decide that you must do what it takes to save the wounded stranger's leg, you and he have met face to face, far away from anyone else; no wonder you and he are grouped together psychologically within a salient situation. Nothing like that happens in the case of the distant child. If you limit your aid to those who are grouped together with you in a psychologically salient situation, of course you will go to far greater lengths to save the stranger's leg than you will to save the child's life . Unger illustrates the phenomenon of separation with a plethora of examples. But his examples are fantastic, and often comical as well, and so it is harder than it ought to be to appreciate their lessons. I substitute my own contrasting pair of examples . The first is a true story. When London was under attack by German missiles, the British devised a trick. They could have deceived the Germans into thinking that the missiles were hitting too far north . The Germans would have adjusted their aim to make the missiles hit further south. Instead of killing more people in densely populated London, the missiles would have killed fewer peoplebut different people-in the less densely populated southern suburbs. The deception was not tried: the Home Secretary was averse to 'playing God'. Many of us would think he had no alternative to playing God: whether he intervened to stop the deception or whether he let it go forward (or whether he acted to bring about the deception or whether he prevented it by inaction), the allocation of danger depended in any case on him. His only choice was whether to play God in a more or a less lethal fashion. If we describe his choice that way, aversion to playing God is beside the point. The right choice seems clear: to try the deception. Contrast that case with another, set this time in the near future. Transplant surgery has been perfected, but there are not nearly enough organs to go around. Shall we snatch some young and healthy victims and cut them up for piecesl For each one we kill, many will be saved. By snatching involuntary organ donors rather than letting them live, we would play God in a less rather than a more lethal fashion. Then should we do it l-of course not' The idea is monstrous. Why the difference in our response to the two cases? Both times, what we have is a plan to sacrifice a few to save many . When the few are suburbanites and the many are Londoners, many of us (though not all) approve. When the few are the donors and the many are those who need transplants, all of us (near enough) disapprove. Unger's psychological hypothesis provides an answer. The Londoners and the suburbanites, and the rest of the British as well, are all in it together. Wherever the missiles 36 EUREKA STREET • D ECEMBER 1996 may happen to be aimed, all of Britain is under attack. Those who would be sacrificed and those who would be saved are all involved together in the same salient situation . Not so in the other case. Those who need organs are united by a shared predicament. But those who could be butchered to provide the needed organs are most naturally viewed just as uninvolved bystanders. Why should others' need for spare organs be seen as their problem? (Just because their organs could solve it?} So separation explains why we approve (insofar as we do ) of diverting the German missiles; and why we disapprove of snatching the lifesaving organs. Unger casts separation as the villain of his story: the malign psychological force that generates 'distorted ' moral responses and prevents us from seeing what our ordinary morality really requires of us. But here Unger is resorting to mere obiter dicta , very exceptional in what is otherwise a tightly argued book. I am inclined to think that Unger is right, and importantly right, about the psychology of separation; but wrong when he treats this phenomenon he has uncovered as a distorting force that clouds our moral judgment. On the contrary, separation might be a central, if under-appreciated, feature of our ordinary morality . Unger has made it his task to find out what is required of us by the basic values we actually accept. (To repea t: he is not trying to rebuild morality a priori on new foundations. ) If he goes in search of our accepted values, and what h e finds are judgments shaped by the phenomenon of separation, why doubt that h e has found just what he was seeking? Why as ume that he has instead found a veil of illusion that conceals our basic values from our view? If indeed separation is a legi timate feature of our ordinary morality, and if separation breaks the parallel between the case of the wounded stranger and the case of the distant child, then we have diagnosed the flaw in Unger's argument. It has not been shown that failure to save the child's life is as seriously wrong as failure to save the stranger's leg. It ha not even been shown that it is wrong at all. We can go on disagreeing about whether failing to respond to UNICEF's solicitations is seriously wrong or mildly wrong or not at all wrong. Doubtless we will go on disagreeing. Unger's argument, if flawed as I suggest that it is, is powerless to settle the matter. • D av id Lewis teaches philosophy at Princeton University.