X-Message-Number: 1513
Date: 26 Dec 92 02:33:44 EST
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS Moral Dilema #1

Keith Henson writes:

   >>My guess is that Steve [Harris] never realized how much the
background of Saul and Co. contributed to our difficulties (which
were very much *his* difficulties too) or he has suppressed the
memory.<<

   Answer to Keith: Bad guess.  I was aware of all that was in
your posting, and more.  No, it hasn't been suppressed, either--
it is merely that I have more important fish to fry.  

Keith goes on to write:

    >>I don't claim the kind of conspiracy construction you see
in Kunzman's testimony (which led up to the second and much more
damaging raid) is fair, because it is not.  I do think it is
about typical of what we can expect from police investigators. 
(Many of you are aware of the Secret Service excesses such as
Steve Jackson was subjected to.)  Even though it was plenty bad,
the search could have gone a lot worse than it did.  Next time,
we (including the patients) might not be so lucky. <<

   And now we hit the core of the problem.  We see that I have
been set up (we all have been set up) for a really classic moral
dilemma.  In its most pungent form, such a dilemma involves a
number of people who are subject to some awful form of coercion,
such as being inmates in a prisoner of war camp, or even a death
camp.  The dilemma revolves about what a moral prisoner should do
about a fellow prisoner who is found to be breaking the prison
camp rules.  Prisoner A might be hiding food, or making plans to
escape, or something else.  Whatever it is that Prisoner A is
doing, it is something that is not intrinsically immoral, and
indeed which may be life-affirming.  Under the rules of the camp,
however, it is something that threatens other prisoners (and,
say, their children) by association, because of the unjust way
the system operates (perhaps all people in the same barracks as a
given prisoner are shot when that prisoner tries to escape, or is
found hiding food, etc.).  Now, the moral dilemma is: are
prisoner A's fellow prisoners ethically allowed to coerce him to
follow the rules?  Can they do it for the sake of their children? 
Is it ethical for them to shun him?  Does the argument that
prisoner A must be coerced or isolated for the sake of the
children have any moral force, or is it merely a pragmatic option
without ethical taint?  

   Now, the above is an ethical dilemma for a very good reason:
it's a really tough problem.  *I* don't have the answers.  It's
quite easy to make a really good pragmatic argument that one
should end one's association with less-than-perfect prisoners
when one is in a prison camp, that one should end one's associa-
tions with Jews in a country undergoing the political contortions
of Naziism, that one should end one's association with communist
sympathizers or Leftists when one is in a country undergoing the
madness of McCarthyism, etc, etc.  The *problem* is that all
these pragmatic arguments make me a little sick at the stomach.

<cont>



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