Fandom High School

"Welcome back to our final class before exams," Lana said, as if they were going to have a written exam next week. Look, you never knew. "Today we thought we'd give you the chance to pose your own moral dilemmas. Are there things you've encountered or struggled with in your own life? Do you have questions for us about any of the things we've gone over or our own experiences? Today is your time to shine."

Atton pulled up a chair, around the desk, and parked it in front of the class. He sank down on it and eyed them all.

“Shoot,” he said. “We’ve been torturing you, now you can torture us. Enjoy.”

“So I’d say sorry for the lack of class last week, but I think our contracts have some clauses about what we can get away with when we get hit by avalanches of shit rolling downhill and piling up into a massive, fifty-ton crapstacle, so I’m not going to,” Atton said. He looked a touch ragged around the edges, though at least this time around he was alert and otherwise in a good state of health.

“Today we’re going to try an exercise some old scientists like to call ‘the Prisoner’s Dilemma’, which is one of those moral dilemmas some of you hate that people are still arguing about to this date,” Atton said. “It basically comes down to the question of selfishness: good policy, bad policy?”

"What a charming image." Lana rolled her eyes, but didn't argue. Sometimes things were what they were. "The prisoner's dilemma is this: you and one other are given a choice. You can cooperate or betray each other. You'll both get the best outcome if you cooperate. But if you choose to cooperate and they don't, that's worst for you." This was a very Sith game.

“So we’re going to pair you all up,” Atton said merrily. “And we brought candy.”

He held up a bag of fancy chocolates.

“We’ll do this two at a time. If one of you buzzes, and the other doesn’t, then the buzzer gets six and the other gets none. If you both stay off the buzzer, each of you gets three. But if you both buzz, well, nobody gets anything.”

"This is the lowest-stakes version of this you're ever likely to encounter," Lana said dryly. Also probably the least interesting, because Fandom people were so inclined to helping. "And no using powers." She was absolutely looking at you, Anakin. "You have to choose to trust the other person - or not."

Atton made a dryly amused noise. “And then we can decide if we can glean any kind of moral lesson out of doing this on an island full of do-gooders.”

Lana nodded at the students as they settled. "Today we'll be discussing liberalism. Which is not a political point of view, but a specific moral philosophy. According to liberalism, the greatest good is freedom. The only rules and laws that are considered good are those that prevent harm to another. Anything else should be permitted. Any action that doesn't harm another is good, particularly if it helps others gain freedom."

She spread her hands. "Of course, as with other philosophies, we're left with problems of scope and math. How can you be certain what you're doing won't harm anyone else? If one action harms some, and another harms others, how do you choose? Who decides what 'harm' or 'freedom' looks like?"

"'My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins', is the oft-quoted answer," Atton said, once again lounging behind his desk, and wearing a t-shirt with 'death metal nutritional facts' under his leather jacket. "Under this philosophy, you can construe 'evil' to be whatever gets in the way of someone else's freedom. So on the one hand, slavery, obviously evil. On the other hand, driving around your neighborhood in a big truck waving guns around? No problem, and anybody who tries to stop you from doing that because it's intimidating is a bad guy."

"So," Lana continued, "let's discuss. Is this philosophy good at its base, or is it flawed to begin? If the former, could its execution work, and what difficulties would it face? If the latter, is there a way to redeem it?"

Hey, class! It was Tuesday. Were you up for another scintillating moral debate?

“We’ve been talking a lot about intentions,” Atton said, as soon as everyone was seated. “So this week, let’s talk about the people who think intentions don’t mean anything. Utilitarians!” He clapped. Sarcastically.

“Now utilitarians believe that whatever act does the most objective good is the most moral one,” he said. “If you think that leads to some really bizarre questions I am absolutely going to force you to try to answer, you are correct. See, a lot of utilitarians approach morality and ethics as a math problem. Is it moral to ruin your clothes saving someone from drowning, when you could’ve just sold your clothes and used the money to save five people from starvation instead? A utilitarian would say ‘no, it isn’t’.”

He shrugged. “It makes the world seem kind of orderly, doesn’t it?” he said.

"It also requires far more intricate knowledge and math than most people are capable of or can be bothered with," Lana pointed out. "What if the one person you save can help a thousand more? What if your clothes are the only nice outfit you have, and you have to give a speech to people who care about that sort of thing that will fund assistance for millions? Does that justify letting some poor bastard drown? What if your speech isn't a certain thing but might help? How many levels of accountability can you reasonably be expected to be aware of?"

“Those are the types of questions modern utilitarians can get really into the weeds about,” Atton added. “They feel intent doesn’t really matter. How could it? Intent doesn’t get food into the mouths of people across the globe, or a malaria vaccine into the arm of someone who really needs it. They also don’t care about the nature of the action itself. If your goal is maximizing absolute happiness in the world, then if hurting one person means saving a million, the math is easy, isn’t it?”

"What if killing a trillion people helps two trillion?" Lana asked. "Is there a point at which you draw the line? How much cumulative good do you need to do to outweigh the bastardry of your actions? And again, who decides what good is and how much it weighs against harm? If killing one person feeds five for life, is that acceptable? What about killing one person to feed five for a year? Or a day? What if the person you kill is terrible to others? Not actively harmful, but not helpful, either. Does that make a difference?"

“And that brings us to a funny little invention of your current end-stage capitalist society,” Atton said. “‘Effective altruism’. The idea of this movement, popular among tech bros, is that you need large amounts of money to do the most good, so the most moral thing you can do with your life is to earn a lot of money and then spend it to help people. In fact, any second of your life you don’t spend on earning money so you can give it away is, more or less, an evil, wasted second.”

"Somehow most of them seem to get lost between the 'earning money' and the 'helping people' part," Lana noted. "But I suppose for the purposes of this class we can take the assumption as a whole and debate its efficacy, rather than the failings of its practitioners. Unless you feel that those failures are endemic to the philosophy."

“If you Google the word ‘kindness’, the evil-multinationals-that-be tell us it means ‘the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.’” Atton was actually standing up today, for once, though the fact that his boots touched the ground didn’t mean his leather-jacket-clad shoulder wasn’t held up primarily by the wall otherwise. “At the start of the class, at least one of you told me that that ‘quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate’ was the definition of good. And I get it. It sounds nice. Definitely looks great on a t-shirt, too. Prime Hallmark World material.”

He gave a wave in Stark’s general direction if he was there. “Problem is,” he said, “In reality, where most of us live, some of those words can actually be in direct opposition to each other, depending on context. Just to give a real simple one to ease you into it: saying ‘hi’ to someone might be friendly, but if that person is a stranger wearing headphones or reading a book, you can’t exactly call it considerate. Because they probably don’t want to hear from you."

"And it's all too easy to weaponize generosity and friendliness," Lana pointed out. "Being overly generous or excessively friendly can make people uncomfortable. Can make them feel as if they owe you, or as if you're pushing yourself at them. Presuming you don't want to do that, that's not exactly a positive."

“It might even wind up being unintentionally manipulative, forcing people into situations where they feel obligated to do things for you that they might not have done, had you not caught them with kindness," Atton agreed.

"Or take the old adage about teaching a guy to fish. If he’s starving, teaching him how to fish won’t cut it. If he’s all right but can’t feed his family, giving him one single flounder isn’t going to do much of anything besides prolong the time it takes for him to get off his ass and learn how to do it for himself.” Cough. Not that anyone here had a name vaguely resembling that of an author with far-reaching issues with charity, or anything.

He shrugged. “Or let’s take this example further. Maybe his long-suffering spouse at home is drowning in childcare and desperately needs him to get a fishing gig so he can feed them long-term, but he doesn’t see the point in doing that when kind people keep handing him fish just often enough to keep them from starving completely. And oh, the fishing company is enabling this behavior from tourists, because renting fishing gear to tourists is more profitable than giving the poor guy a job and selling the fish he catches for them.”

"Not to mention," Lana added, "what if he's allergic to fish? What if fish are sacred to him, and killing them is an abomination? What seems perfectly generous to you might be toxic to someone else, and you can't always know when that might be."

“Does that mean we should throw ‘kindness’ out the window?” Atton posited. He pushed away from the wall. “Maybe that’s taking it a few steps too far. There’s a place for that kind of thing, if you want to do right by people. But maybe we have to broaden our understanding what kindness is. And when it’s appropriate.”

"Welcome back, everybody," Lana said. "Now that we've gotten the pesky good-and-evil thing out in the open, we can talk a bit about what it means and how you might approach it. For one thing, not every philosophy does deal in good and evil. And those that do, often distinguish as some of you did, between the good a person is and the good they do.

( There's an Earth philosophy called Virtue ethics... )