When I first wrote these words, the Internet was alive with the death of Leonard Nimoy. I couldn’t post them here, because Nowa Fantastyka got them first (or at least, an abridged version thereof), and there were exclusivity windows to consider. As I revisit these words, though, Nimoy remains dead, and the implications of his legacy haven’t gone anywhere. So this is still as good a time as any to argue— in English, this time— that any truly ethical society will inevitably endorse the killing of innocent people.

Bear with me.

As you know, Bob, Nimoy’s defining role was that of Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock, the logical Vulcan who would never let emotion interfere with the making of hard choices. This tended to get him into trouble with Leonard McCoy, Trek‘s resident humanist. “If killing five saves ten it’s a bargain,” the doctor sneered once, in the face of Spock’s dispassionate suggestion that hundreds of colonists might have to be sacrificed to prevent the spread of a galaxy-threatening neuroparasite. “Is that your simple logic?”

The logic was simple, and unassailable, but we were obviously supposed to reject it anyway. (Sure enough, that brutal tradeoff had been avoided by the end of the episode[1], in deference to a TV audience with no stomach for downbeat endings.) Apparently, though, it was easier to swallow 16 years later, when The Wrath of Kahn rephrased it as “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. That time it really caught on, went from catch-phrase to cliché in under a week. It’s the second-most-famous Spock quote ever. It’s so comforting, this paean to the Greater Good. Of course, it hardly ever happens— here in the real world, the needs of the few almost universally prevail over those of the many— but who doesn’t at least pay lip-service to the principle?

Most of us, apparently:

“…progress isn’t directly worth the life of a single person. Indirectly, fine. You can be Joseph Stalin as long as you don’t mean to kill anyone. Bomb a dam in a third world shit-hole on which a hundred thousand people depend for water and a thousand kids die of thirst but it wasn’t intentional, right? Phillip Morris killed more people than Mao but they’re still in the Chamber of Commerce. Nobody meant for all those people to die drowning in their own blood and even after the Surgeon General told them the inside scoop, they weren’t sure it caused lung cancer. “Compare that to the risk calculus in medical research. If I kill one person in ten thousand I’m shut down, even if I’m working on something that will save millions of lives. I can’t kill a hundred people to cure cancer, but a million will die from the disease I could have learned to defeat.”

I’ve stolen this bit of dialog, with permission, from an aspiring novelist who wishes to remain anonymous for the time being. (I occasionally mentor such folks, to supplement my fantastically lucrative gig as a midlist science fiction author.) The character speaking those words is a classic asshole: arrogant, contemptuous of his colleagues, lacking any shred of empathy.

And yet, he has a point.

He’s far from the first person to make it. The idea of the chess sacrifice, the relative value of lives weighed one against another for some greater good, is as old as Humanity itself (even older, given some of the more altruistic examples of kin selection that manifest across the species spectrum). It’s a recurrent theme even in my own fiction: Starfish sacrificed several to save a continent, Maelstrom sacrificed millions to save a world (not very successfully, as it turns out). Critics have referred to the person who made those calls as your typical cold-blooded bureaucrat, but I always regarded her as heroic: willing to make the tough calls, to do what was necessary to save the world (or at least, increase the odds that it could be saved). Willing to put Spock’s aphorism into action when there is no third alternative.

And yet I don’t know if I’ve ever seen The Needs of the Many phrased quite so starkly as in that yet-to-be-published snippet of fiction a few paragraphs back.

Perhaps that’s because it’s not really fiction. Tobacco killed an estimated 100 million throughout the 20th Century, and— while society has been able to rouse itself for the occasional class-action lawsuit— nobody’s ever been charged with Murder by Cigarette, much less convicted. But if your struggle to cure lung cancer involves experiments that you know will prove fatal to some of your subjects, you’re a serial killer. What kind of society demonizes those who’d kill the Few to save the Many, while exempting those who kill the Many for no better reason than a profit margin? Doesn’t Spock’s aphorism demand that people get away with murder, so long as it’s for the greater good?

You’re not buying it, are you? It just seems wrong.

I recently hashed this out with Dave Nickle over beers and bourbons. (Dave is good for hashing things out with; that’s one of the things that make him such an outstanding writer.) He didn’t buy it either, although he struggled to explain why. For one thing, he argued, Big Tobacco isn’t forcing people to put those cancer sticks in their mouths; people choose for themselves to take that risk. But that claim gets a bit iffy when you remember that the industry deliberately tweaked nicotine levels in their product for maximum addictive effect; they did their level best to subvert voluntary choice with irresistible craving.

Okay, Dave argued, how about this: Big Tobacco isn’t trying to kill anyone— they just want to sell cigarettes, and collateral damage is just an unfortunate side effect. “Your researcher, on the other hand, would be gathering a group of people— either forcibly or through deception— and directly administering deadly procedures with the sure knowledge that one or more of those people would die, and their deaths were a necessary part of the research. That’s kind of premeditated, and very direct. It is a more consciously murderous thing to do than is selling tobacco to the ignorant. Hence, we regard it as more monstrous.”

And yet, our researchers aren’t trying to kill people any more than the tobacco industry is; their goal is to cure cancer, even though they recognize the inevitability of collateral damage as— yup, just an unfortunate side effect. To give Dave credit, he recognized this, and characterized his own argument as sophistry— “but it’s the kind of sophistry in which we all engage to get ourselves through the night”. In contrast, the “Joseph Mengele stuff— that shit’s alien.”

I think he’s onto something there, with his observation that the medical side of the equation is more “direct”, more “alien”. The subjective strangeness of a thing, the number of steps it takes to get from A to B, are not logically relevant (you end up at B in both cases, after all). But they matter, somehow. Down in the gut, they make all the difference.

I think it all comes down to trolley paradoxes.

You remember those, of course. The classic example involves two scenarios, each involving a runaway trolley headed for a washed-out bridge. In one scenario, its passengers can only be saved by rerouting it to another track—where it will kill an unfortunate lineman. In the other scenario, the passengers can only be saved by pushing a fat person onto the track in front of the oncoming runaway, crushing the person but stopping the train.

Ethically, the scenarios are identical: kill one, save many. But faced with these hypothetical choices, people’s responses are tellingly different. Most say it would be right to reroute the train, but not to push the fat person to their death— which suggests that such “moral” choices reflect little more than squeamishness about getting one’s hands dirty. Reroute the train, yes— so long as I don’t have to be there when it hits someone. Let my product kill millions— but don’t put me in the same room with them when they check out. Let me act, but only if I don’t have to see the consequences of my action.

Morality isn’t ethics, isn’t logic. Morality is cowardice— and while Star Trek can indulge The Needs of the Many with an unending supply of sacrificial red shirts, here in the real world that cowardice reduces Spock’s “axiomatic” wisdom to a meaningless platitude.

Trolley paradoxes can take many forms (though all tend to return similar results). I’m going to leave you with one of my favorites. A surgeon has five patients, all in dire and immediate need of transplants— and a sixth, an unconnected out-of-towner who’s dropped in unexpectedly with a broken arm and enough healthy compatible organs to save everyone else on the roster.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Everyone knows that much. Why, look: Spock’s already started cutting.

What about you?

[1] “Operation: Annihilate!”, by Steven W. Carabatsos. In case you were wondering.