Speechless: Why Citizens United and Its Critics Are Both Wrong

[Author's Note: I wrote this essay a while ago, and I had hoped to actually publish it somewhere so that it could reach a wider audience, because I think this angle on the question of corporate personhood is important. But I now believe I'm unlikely to find a market for it, because it's too lengthy and rigidly philosophical to have a place in any popular magazine, but too brief, playful and topical to have a place in a philosophical journal, which I have no access to anyway. So I'm just putting it out as a blog post, instead, and hoping for the best. Fair warning: at five thousand words, it's longer (and perhaps drier) than blogs are supposed to be.]

Horses, Lambs, Children, and Conflicting Ethics

In the March issue of The Atlantic, Darcy Courteau writes about the consequences that have been faced by the horse market in the years since the last slaughterhouse that produced horse meat in the United States was forced to close. I remember that story well, as I felt at the time that I was at odds with what I perceived as a widely shared instance irrationality in American culture. It seemed absurd to me that the Department of Agriculture should place a value judgment upon the production of horse meat, which differed from that applied to all other livestock.

I disagreed in no uncertain terms with that bit of interference with free enterprise. I disagreed with it on rational grounds despite being a vegetarian and a person highly concerned with animal rights. I simply don’t see how the overwhelming public support for the removal of horse meat and only horse meat from the American market could have stood up to any measure of introspection. It relies on a false distinction between one type of animal and all others.

Being a vegetarian and an animal rights advocate, I want to see that society avoids the mistreatment and slaughter of all animals, not just the ones that I like. How I feel about the creatures is irrelevant; right and wrong are never contingent upon personal attitudes. It may be contingent upon the objective nature of different things, but this doesn’t seem to apply to the situation of horses and other livestock. I don’t see how anyone could realistically argue that horses possess personalities that, for instance, cows or lamb lack, or that horses are better able to experience pain, discomfort, or fear.

Unless one earnestly believes that horses are intrinsically different from other animals, which belief they would have to hold in absence of real evidence, I can only assume that their impulse to suppress the slaughter of horses while allowing it for other animals is on the basis of the personal relationships people sometimes have with horses.

But that doesn’t really make a difference when we’re talking about just the concept of slaughtering them for meat. It’s not as though opponents of horse meat had personal relationships with this or that particular horse. Some people have personal relationships with particular rabbits, or snakes. It’s not unheard of for someone to keep a pig as a house pet, or to feel affection for a cow that is kept solely for dairy production. Rarely is any of this used as grounds to argue that the entirety of society ought to disallow the killing of or production of meat from any animals of a certain species.

If one recoils with horror at the very thought of horse meat, but never bats an eye when filling his shopping cart with pork and beef, he is wedging an artificial dividing line into the application of his principles. Such selective defense can only be irrational. And if one is concerned with consistency of his own beliefs or ethics, instances like that ought to lead to one of three outcomes: a change in attitude leading to universal application of the principle, even if potentially inconvenient; abandonment of that principle; or production of a satisfactory account of why the dividing line is not artificial.

If a person utterly opposes the production of horse meat but neither opposes the slaughter of all other creatures nor truly believes that the mental lives of horses are significantly and objectively different from those of all other creatures, then that person is trying to hold two contrary views at once: that killing a sentient, autonomous being that’s called a horse is wrong, and that killing a sentient, autonomous being that’s not called a horse is okay.

Cognitive dissonance is the enemy of breaking points. When you give yourself license to hold views that are in opposition to one another, you strip yourself of the crucial motivation for intellectual or moral growth. Breaking points arise of conflict, and sometimes it is a conflict between two opposing ideas that you yourself maintain. A person who is concerned with rational consistency will keep an eye out for such conflicting views, and his breaking point will entail a sudden realization that either one of his ideas is wrong, or he doesn’t actually know why each of them is right.

In the case of the ranching of horses and the slaughter of them for meat, the tension between views goes well beyond the simple difference in perception of horses and other animals. Cognitive dissonance is easy when you’re operating on pure intuition. When those intuitions are directly challenged by pragmatic concerns, it’s much more difficult to make glib pronouncements that a certain action is simply wrong. Courteau writes of the fallout from the closure of the last US horse meat producers:

“In states across the country, reported cases of equine abuse, neglect, and abandonment skyrocketed. And the kill buyers of yesteryear aggregated into rarer but still more haunting boogeymen, purchasing for the abattoirs of Canada, or, worse, Mexico, where horses at some slaughterhouses are reportedly subject to torturous conditions.”

Consequentialism makes for complex ethical calculations, and if one wishes not only to release the United States from the stigma its citizenry attaches to the slaughter of horses, but to actually reduce the suffering experienced by American horses, then such a person’s intuition that it was good to force closure of the slaughterhouses is probably in error. But that error and the larger error of deliberate cognitive dissonance are both based on the same mistake of thinking that your knee-jerk intuition is sufficient grounds for all moral judgments.

When one really starts to analyze the consequences of people’s intuitive moral pronouncements, we see that cognitive dissonance is quite easy to come by once all the nuance of principle and pragmatism is taken into account. In other words, what a person thinks is wrong often fails to align perfectly with why he thinks it is wrong. We cannot permanently avoid the moral burden of having to occasionally choose the lesser of two evils. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to occur to many people who have non-inquisitive, black-and-white views of morality.

The other night, I was watching the documentary Sweetgrass, and the depictions of some of the operations at the sheep farm brought to mind these same questions of ethical complexities. The opening scenes of the film largely focus on the beginning of lives for sheep on that farm, and I was somewhat shocked by the dismissive treatment by the ranchers of both newborn lambs and nursing mothers. But if watches with a measure of objectivity, one quickly comes to realize that given such high volume of sheep, the farmers are doing what they can to promote survival of the highest number possible.

Some years ago, I had a good friend who was a devout, even zealous Buddhist. He was exceptionally sensitive to implications of animal mistreatment, and aggressively, immediately judgmental of perceived wrongdoing. It occurred to me while watching Sweetgrass that he certainly would have found the farmers’ behavior to be unforgivable, but that any alternative behavior that would have resulted in the survival of fewer sheep would have elicited just as much disdain from him. While their rationalizations were grounded in Buddhism instead of Christianity, this friend’s social and political views were decidedly conservative, and probably didn’t differ very much from those of his Christian parents.

His moral judgments, like those of many conservatives, and indeed like those of many people of any political leaning, were severely averse to nuance. I recall discussing abortion with him on one occasion and using the word “complex” to describe the breadth and seriousness of the associated ethical questions. That evoked fiery indignation from him, and he said, “No. You can kill or you can not kill. It’s actually really simple.”

And it would be simple if that’s all it came down to, if there weren’t any genuine questions about what qualifies as killing, if there weren’t any other ways of being responsible for another creature’s suffering. What my friend believed seemed simple on the surface, but at a deeper level of analysis it becomes clear that he was keeping it simple by ignoring the hard questions.

No doubt he would have agreed that his moral concern was with decreasing the suffering of sentient beings, a utilitarian concern. That view means it is reprehensible to do anything that promotes or permits the death of, say, sheep or horses. But it must also make it reprehensible to do anything that promotes or permits the hunger or severe discomfort of the same creatures.

In the case of the sheep in Sweetgrass, keeping all of the lambs alive meant separating them from their mothers immediately upon birth, forcibly compelling ewes to nurse lambs to which they had no connection, and hastily handling the creatures as if they were inanimate objects. The alternative would have been to handle them more delicately, more compassionately, but chances are that in light of the enormous numbers of sheep that needed to be handled by just a few farmers, that would have resulted in some of the lambs being neglected, and thus starving or being killed by competing sheep.

Both alternatives may well be similarly unethical, but it’s unhelpful to simply reject whichever alternative is current simply on the basis of its perceived wrongness. The choice of one wrong action is, in cases like this, the direct consequence of the rejection of another.

It may strike some people as hideously dehumanizing to draw such a parallel, but the pragmatic circumstances surrounding the abortion debate can be elucidated by thinking of the entire human race as a correlate to a herd of livestock. As population increase, the rate of survival within that population, or at least the average utility available to each individual, naturally decreases. Mandating the birth of more young is tantamount to mandating the provision of more suffering. A person who opposes either abortion or the neglect of newborn lambs or the slaughter horses doesn’t have to accept that fact as a justification of the contrary position, but he does have to acknowledge the consequences of what he’s advocating.

In fact, I find that most people refuse to do this. They are, instead, happy to embrace cognitive dissonance, presumably because it is easier to live in a fantasy world in which right actions never have unintended consequences than it is to willfully struggle with moral dilemmas. That perception, however irrational, may help an individual to remain admirably committed to his own ethical obligations, but it also results in unfair judgments predicated upon others.

It’s not rational to demand that a creature with little access to resources must both birth its child and feed it. The acceptance of cognitive dissonance results in dissonant demands and no-win situations. That is the cognitive dissonance of, for instance, anyone who repudiates abortion without compromise, but also rejects the provision welfare. Essentially, the two views in concert pronounce that it’s wrong both to terminate a pregnancy and to have a child while poor.

Again, a rational person whose views are at odds with one another must apply the relevant principle, abandon it, or explain how they can be reconciled. In the given case, if a person claims the principle of defending the lives of innocents, he must apply that principle by providing material support to unsupported children. If that is too inconvenient, he must rethink his stance on abortion, or else explain why it’s worth defending an unborn child but not one who has truly entered the world.

It’s not easy to decide upon coherent ethical theories as to what constitutes right and wrong, but even once you have, it’s not easy to determine how to apply those theories. If you want children to have both a chance at life and at least basic comfort once they’ve begun that life, you’ll eventually have to confront a situation in which those desires stand in opposition. If want the lambs to avoid both starvation and mistreatment, you’ll be horrified, when you look closely enough, to realize that it sometimes takes one to avoid the other. You can save the horses from the abattoir, but you may thus doom them stable that does them even greater harm.

There is a certain sense in which my Buddhist friend’s pronouncement is still correct. It’s very simple: you can either kill or not kill. But the operative word there is “you.” The individual often has privileges that are absent to society at large. You can choose to carry your own unintended pregnancy to term, but if you can then feed that child without fail, you’d better thank God that you never really had to face the choice between depriving a child of life and subjecting it to exquisite hardship. And you can’t conflate either situation with the broader hypothetical in which the nation is inundated with a million additional young lives that must be supported and defended.

If you raise horses and you’re uncomfortable with them being either slaughtered or abused and underfed, you can do as Ms. Courteau’s father had always done and refuse to sell them to kill buyers. But when such sales are no longer an option and the reduced demand causes the prices of horses to fall, lowering your revenue to the point where it is no longer possible to take adequate care of the horses you have, the dual ideals of defending all life and defending against all suffering are no longer sustainable.

This has been the situation of horse farming in the United States for the past four or five years. I remember it being mentioned by some as a possible consequence at the time that the last slaughterhouse dealing in horse meat was closing. But mostly I remember objecting to the irrationality of it all. I remember this very well, but somehow I missed the fact that the Congress resumed funding for these slaughterhouses in November, which may result in some reopening this year.

I won’t be happy to see domestic horses go back to slaughter. Indeed, I hope that someday in the far-distant future they all close again, but that they do so then right along with those that deal in every species of animal, and that it be on the basis of the universal application of moral principles, not on the basis of an absurd double-standard.

But despite the fancifulness of that hope, I’m not naïve about the implications. I know that many animals will suffer and die from lack of care during any possible transition away from their slaughter and consumption. But if I could be alive when that time comes, I would say that that is the unhappy consequence of doing right in a way that is more crucial to our future moral standing. It is a great tragedy of the social aspect of moral existence that we sometimes have to prioritize our values against one another. But our collective morality gains not a bit from pretending that there is no such problem.

The nuanced demands and consequences of collective ethics are discomforting, in that they may require us to accept things that don’t feel right to us. Intuition is a powerful tool in making moral judgments, but it can only lead us so far. If it guides a situation towards less obvious but more serious harms, we’ve probably made the awfully mistake of eschewing rationality in order to appease the short-sighted demands of immediate perception. Only reason, and not intuition, is capable of handling nuance and recognizing indefensible cognitive dissonances.

Rationality is a skill that must be learned for the sake of coherent, far-reaching moral behavior. It draws the dividing line between those who think they are doing the right thing and truly are, even if they appear not to be.

Courteau writes of the reversal of the double-standard regarding horse meat, “Many pet lovers are furious, but PETA actually supports the reversal, arguing that the suffering of unwanted horses increased after the demise of the kill plants.” If PETA, which is often so prone to over-the-top displays of self-righteous, black-and-white morality, can learn the value of nuance and circumstance, anyone can.

Watch More! Do Less!

When last I watched something on Hulu, I was treated to an advertisement for Hulu Plus, which almost seemed like a thematic sequel to the commercial with Will Arnett that ran during the Super Bowl. I didn’t mention that one in my post reviewing the Super Bowl ads, but I remember now just how puzzled I was by the message that it presented. Arnett played a space alien who presented himself as a member of a vast conspiracy among people in entertainment and broadcasting, observing with malicious glee all of the people around him who remained glued to television programs on their mobile devices while they sat in cafes or just walked down the street.

Obviously, the ad was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but to simply watch it, it’s hard to see any acknowledgement of the joke. I would expect that an absurdist portrayal of the would-be criticisms of a brand would show the salutary kernel of truth under the surface, but I don’t see that in the Will Arnett Super Bowl ad. Instead, it presents the criticisms of television viewing habits in an over-the-top way, but it also presents those actual habits in an over-the-top and markedly negative way. Arnett explains the evil plot that is modern television, and everyone around him sits in utter obliviousness, staring obsessively, vacantly into their screens. There is no point of contrast; there’s nothing that encourages viewers to both laugh at the absurdity and recognize the appeal of the product.

With the new commercial that I’ve seen run on Hulu itself, the company seems to have stripped the joke out of the equation altogether, leaving only a negative portrayal of their own product. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Either Hulu is engaged in some bizarre campaign of parodying itself, or my values are so hugely out of step with those of much of the culture that these advertisers see certain images as edifying while I see instead as disturbing.

That dichotomy is seen in the images of the new commercial alone, but it’s really driven home by Hulu Plus’ latest tagline: “Make the most of everything.” The ad shows a man on what I presume to be a Stair Master at a gym. I can only guess at the machine he’s using, because we don’t see it. The shot remains tight on this face and upper body, perhaps deliberately restricting our visual awareness of the fact that he is even doing anything. The man holds the handle of the machine with one hand while holding a mobile device in front of his face with the other. And as the camera lingers on the image of his distracted, staring expression, the voiceover says, “Make the most of your workout.”

How? I assume he means by doing the exact opposite of what this man is doing, seeing as he doesn’t appear to be aware of the fact that he’s working out at all. Now, I’m no fitness expert, but I’m pretty sure that if you don’t feel anything and you don’t have to concentrate on your exercise in any measure, you’re doing something wrong. The visual presentation really doesn’t give me the impression that he’s making the most out of his workout by adding television to it. It gives me the impression that he’s not getting much out of either activity.

“Make the most out of your lunch break,” the voiceover says next, at the same time that the scene changes to an image of a woman in business attire sitting on a bench outside and staring at an iPad on which she is watching an episode of Lost. The expression on the actresses face is marvelously discomforting, and it can’t be unintentional on the part of the advertisers. I wonder what the director said to her. Perhaps, “Try to look as if you’ve just dropped acid and you’re watching a dragon tenderly make love to a unicorn on a bed of rainbows.” They even have her raise a fast food beverage cup into frame and clumsily place the straw in her mouth without so much as moving her eyes. It’s an exceptionally unsophisticated image.

Nobody should look as rapturously mindless while watching television as Hulu has the subjects of its ads look. This is doubly true if the person is outside at the time. With the professional woman as with the man at the gym, the camera stays pretty close, but by all appearances it is a nice day outside. And yet Hulu’s concept of making the most of a lunch break on that day is to focus completely on an escapist fantasy and to never, ever glance for a moment at the sun. There’s no joke behind this as with the alien conspiracy ad; they’re actually saying that.

When I started to notice the popularity of watching television on DVD, I thought that there was something very positive about the changes to the way we consume media. At the same time that I miss the unifying experience of knowing that the rest of the country is watching the same thing at the same time, I considered it a worthy trade off, knowing that programs themselves were coming to be seen more as things to be sold directly, rather than just as means of delivering advertisements, and thus as things to be controlled by them. I liked the idea that Mad Men could make money because it was appreciated by its audience, and not just because it sold products. I realize, though, that that idea isn’t entirely accurate; the advertising is still primary, and it still affects the progress and direction of shows.

Now, not only does secondary advertising still hold sway over good media, the idea of entertainment as a product unto itself has proven to have a dark side. With companies now profiting not just from the consumption of their media but from the consumption of media in general, there are advertisers whose jobs have come to be to sell us on the very idea of watching television and movies, and to try to convince us that it’s better for us if we consume more, even as much as possible.

It’s only natural that a company tries to present its product as eminently beneficial to the consumer, especially in contrast to its competitors. It’s just less familiar, and quite unfortunate that in the cases of products like Hulu Plus, the major competitor is the entire outside world. Consequently the vision of such products’ ultimate benefit to your life is a situation in which you no longer have a life at all. “Make the most of everything” is a powerfully, and dangerously disingenuous slogan. With the haunting images of media addiction presented by such products as Hulu Plus and Digital Copy, about which I’ve written before, a far more fitting tagline would be, “You may as well not leave the couch.”

Super Bowl Ads

Last night’s Super Bowl provided a nice opportunity for me to visit with family and watch the game, but I must admit that the better share of my motivation was to watch the commercials and keep a critical eye upon them. Despite that, when I made my way to my father’s house, I forgot to take along my notebook, so any comments that I have to make will have to be by memory. I suppose that’s appropriate, considering the intended roles of advertising. Also, I like to assess both the good and the bad, so I think I’ll pair my reflections so that I give one bit of praise and one bit of criticism on the same topic.

The Cola Wars

Pepsi was one of the first companies to run an ad once the game had started, and its style was eminently recognizable from previous years. There seems to be no plan behind high-profile Pepsi advertisements other than to pour money into acquiring odd collections of whatever celebrity guest stars they can get to sign a contract, and then piling them on top of one another in some display of spectacle without substance, in hopes that every member of the audience will see somebody they recognize well enough to stare at for up to sixty seconds.

I wondered aloud on seeing last night’s Elton John-centered absurdity, is this strategy really working for them? I guess either Pepsi has to reach a breaking point in its patience with its advertising agency, or I’ve got to reach a breaking point in my expectations of the television audience. It would be sad to think that the modern consumer brain runs on nothing but facial-recognition. I think they’re still capable of reflecting, thinking rationally, and grasping themes.

Of course, on that latter point, I suppose Pepsi’s advertisers are in agreement, as they did try to build some reference to the Zeitgeist into the bizarre scene that they crafted for their commercial. It concludes (at least prior to Flavor Flav putting his uniquely discomforting punctuation mark on it) with Melanie Amaro refusing King Elton John’s begrudging offer of “Pepsi for you,” and insisting instead, “Pepsi for all.”

It is arguably clever to try to tap into far-reaching frustrations over upper-class greed, but hinting at a socio-economic revolution doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose in a Pepsi commercial. It’s not as though Pepsi can somehow be viewed as a commodity that is cruelly withheld from the poor. It’s just a carbonated soft drink, and it’s already familiar to all of us, rich and poor – poor especially. Adding the class conflict dimension to a Pepsi commercial just adds another level to the acid nightmare that makes up their advertising.

On the other hand, Coca-Cola advertisements have been genuinely satisfying for years. This year in particular, their Super Bowl spots clearly aimed for continuity while Pepsi continued to deliberately eschew just that. Rather than focusing their expenditures on celebrity endorsements, Coca-Cola widely spread out two or three million dollars among a few timeslots throughout the event, so as to retain the audience’s attention with a series of installments of the same campaign, as opposed to just grapping the audience’s attention with one swift, bewildering slap in the face.

And Coca-Cola’s continuity curves around a tagline, and thus an overall theme, that is simple and effective: open happiness. That is precisely the sort of concept one should seek to attach to a soft drink. It should conjure the idea of refreshment, or leisure, or camaraderie, or enjoyment. And Coca-Cola makes a plain declaration of enjoyment, and then backs it up by making their Polar Bear commercials thoroughly enjoyable.

Nostalgia

If there’s one unique social trend amongst my generation, it is an unprecedented obsession with nostalgia. Budweiser’s ads utilized this fact delicately and artistically, while Samsung did so in a clumsy way that highlighted the worst aspects of our delight at remembering the past.

Budweiser is an absolute champion among Super Bowl advertisers, and a pair of their commercials this year were quite ambitions in connecting their brand to a long and romanticized past. First, their Clydesdale commercial depicted the end of Prohibition, and thus both allowed a young audience’s imagination to recede into an historical moment and connected that imagery to a larger theme of the end of hard times, which was no doubt expected to resonate with people throughout the country in the midst of this persistently difficult economy. Indeed, the same basic concept was repeated frequently by the American car companies and others.

Later in the game, Budweiser ran another commercial that effectively continued from where the Prohibition spot left off, tracing the presence of their brand throughout the twentieth century in America. It was a distinctly ambitious advertisement, and it theoretically made that impulse towards nostalgia accessible to everyone between the ages of twenty-one and seventy. I don’t know whether it was among the most effective commercials of the game, but it was certainly among the most affective. No one who was paying attention would have failed to find something that they could relate to, either experientially or imaginatively.

Interestingly, Samsung went in quite the opposite direction, which may in fact be appropriate given that their target demographic is certainly young, and comprised mostly of young urban professionals or current students, for whom cutting edge technology is of paramount importance, but for whom nostalgia is as strong a pull as it is for anyone else.

I do not understand why the singer from the band The Darkness appeared in the middle of that commercial. And while I recognize that many people roughly my age probably responded to it, I don’t understand why that would be. The bizarre thing about the increasingly strong nostalgic tendency in American society is that it’s also increasingly close. Thus, Samsung saw fit to make the hook for their ad a rock song that was unreasonably popular for a while seven years ago – not recent enough to be at all fresh, but not old enough to be what you might call a blast from the past.

I’m not saying that it was a poor move; I’m just saying that I can’t comprehend the appeal. I’d rather there hadn’t been such a commercial to remind me of the irrationality of certain young social trends.

Sex Sells

I love the Fiat commercial all the more because I hated it for the first several seconds. As I watched it, I started wondering if there was something wrong with me, given that such male fantasies as it depicted just tend to confuse me. It made for another instance where I had to remind myself to divorce myself from the target audience and recognize that that sort of overblown sexuality does have an influence on many potential consumers. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that what I was watching was just ridiculously over-the-top. Then, lo and behold, the hilarious turn reveals that that was exactly the point. I’m guessing the advertisers read the study from about a year ago that indicated that men’s brains do indeed respond the same way to cars as they do to women. Even if one thinks that comparison is hyperbole, though, Fiat’s utilization of the parallel was hilarious. It may very well have been my favorite commercial of the night, though admittedly the competition was quite slim.

By contrast, the sex-focused ad campaign for Go Daddy wore thin years ago and it just keeps getting more obnoxious, so those were probably my least favorite commercials. If the company thinks that the suggestion of nudity is helping to sell their domain hosting, I think somebody should urge them towards the breaking point of realizing that the reason why their sales figures are good is that they have essentially no competition. The Super Bowl commercial could consist of nothing but fifteen seconds of their web address flashing on the screen and they would probably still get a spike in traffic. Pretending that there’s a naked woman off camera does nothing to sell the service. The men to whom it might appeal can imagine nudity without Go Daddy’s help, and probably already were.

Supernatural

Audi’s vampire party commercial came on early and was so satisfying I was worried I wouldn’t have room for anything else once it concluded. Headlights are an odd feature on which to focus your sales pitch, but it probably is the sort of arcane status symbol that purchasers of high-end car brands would want to be aware of.

The entire structure of the commercial parallels that focus on – if I may call it this without sound pejorative – snobbishness. It grabs the attention of anyone who is aware of current popular culture, and lets them wonder what direction it’s going. I feel as though when vampires are put on screen in front of a diverse audience, one portion of people lean in and hope people start fucking, and the rest of us lean in and hope that people get massacred. It was those of us who are completely annoyed by the modern vampire obsession who were satisfied, in part because it came at the expense of the rest. Right now, someone who feels very good about himself because of both his taste in literature and his taste in consumer goods is seriously considering purchasing an Audi.

On the bad side of usage of the supernatural in Super Bowl commercials, there’s Cars.com. I appreciate the shades of John Carpenter’s The Thing, but really, what the hell were they thinking? “Haunting” is not necessarily a negative label. You can make your message haunt your audience in a good way. This was not an example of that.

I think the above constitute a pretty good cross-sample of last night’s advertisements. I hope this is far more thought than the rest of you put into it. After all, very few of the ads were especially impressive this year, whereas the actual game was terrific. Nevertheless, it is more fun to analyze social trends and consumer manipulation than offensive rushing statistics.

Suicide and Deontological Ethics

This is interesting. I’ve hit a rare breaking point in my philosophical beliefs. Yesterday, Jack Marshall wrote about Don Cornelius’ recent suicide, and today he took it as an opportunity to recall a post from years ago regarding Hunter S. Thompson having killed himself in 2005. In the first place, Marshall was making the point that the social ethics regarding suicide may have to change as a deeply flawed health care system makes the last years of people’s lives burdensome to their families and communities. But Marshall reposted his comments about Hunter S. Thompson in order to make it perfectly clear that he has an unforgiving attitude towards suicide outside of the special cases of extreme old age and infirmity.

I appreciate the pointed focus on ethics of Jack Marshall’s blog, and I read it frequently, but I find that I am often at odds with his politics, as he is quite conservative, and I am sometimes at odds with his ethical theories, as he is unambiguously utilitarian. That latter fact explains why Marshall is able to conceptualize ethics as so flexible that suicide may be wrong in every case for one generation, but circumstance-dependent in another. I have never been comfortable with the idea that the rightness or wrongness of actions can change. I don’t believe that ethics are so flighty and inconsistent, so I have always subscribed to a deontological outlook, considering actions to be right or wrong entirely unto themselves.

Thus, I disagree with Marshall about the idea that the ethic of suicide may be different in the future than it was in the past. But as it happens, I also disagree with his aggressive assessment of the current ethic. I think the cultural revulsion at the idea of taking one’s own life is overblown and lacking in compassion. Despite using the term “victim of suicide,” we frequently tend to portray such people only as perpetrators, never as victims.

Most people, Jack Marshall certainly among them, describe suicide as the ultimate selfish act, but I consider that claim to be irrational. For something to be selfish, one must be able to expect that he will personally benefit from the act, but what personal benefit can there be if the end result of the act is that you cease to be, and thus cease to be capable of either benefitting from or being harmed by anything? I would say that in all probability, suicide is generally neutral with regard to self-interest, and indeed that the vast majority of suicide victims genuinely believe that other people will either not be affected by their deaths, or will be affected positively. Thus, I would ascribe the same motivations to most or all suicides that Jack Marshall ascribes to the theoretically defensible suicides among the elderly of the future.

As far as I can tell, I’ve always felt this way, though it recent years my forgiving stance on the issue has been helped by being on the other side of it. I have contemplated suicide extensively, and while I certainly would not encourage anyone to follow through where I have held back, I also would not pass judgment on anyone who did so. There are motivations, and mental states, and circumstances to consider, and the entirety of what drives a person to forfeit his own life cannot be adequately known. But I suppose that the essential reason to give a suicide victim the benefit of the doubt is an ethic of live and let live, live and let die. That is, there’s something to be said for the idea that one’s life is one’s own to either hold onto or cast off. And since I don’t believe in utilitarianism, the incidental, secondary consequences of suicide are not sufficient cause to judge it as unethical.

But my breaking point comes of realizing that it’s hard to make deontology mesh with attitude that says suicide might be okay. After all, my aversion to utilitarianism is clarified by any thought experiment in which murder is made okay by the promise that it will save other lives. Now, that’s the very thing that helps to convert others to utilitarianism, because it’s hard for people to imagine how a worse outcome can be associated with a better moral decision. But it is my strong intuition that we are morally culpable primarily just for our own actions, and if there are exceptions to the hierarchy of right and wrong, the entire system of morality falls apart.

I realize now that by allowing for the ethical rightness or neutrality of suicide, I am contradicting my belief that killing is wrong in its own right, rather than because of its outcomes. My natural inclination is to equate killing with murder – to think of it as an externally directed act. Yet suicide is barely different; it is an act of murder in which the same person is both victim and perpetrator. Unless I go to great lengths to explain why a self-contained act of murder is morally different from an externally directed one, it seems rationally incumbent on me to accept that suicide is wrong not only in general, but even in cases where it would end severe pain and suffering.

It’s not impossible to make that distinction. I could say that actions contain their own normative value only by virtue of their being externally directed. That’s tempting and I’ll give it some more thought, but it also seems like a manipulation of my own moral theories. To build such an exception into the concept of the intrinsic wrongness of a type of action is to approach dangerously close to utilitarianism and thus to be left with what I consider an incomprehensible moral code. And in fact, my willingness to consider circumstance in eschewing moral judgment of suicide could itself be easily labeled as utilitarian.

So it’s not easy for me to reconcile my intuitions toward suicide and self-harm with my belief in deontology. Now that the two ideas have been brought into conflict, I’m inclined to drop my existing attitude toward the specific case. The only other options are demolishing my ethical framework or twisting it to accept a contradiction, and either such action would be rationally unjustifiable. At least until I come up with a better solution, I feel compelled to declare that suicide is wrong no matter what. That extends even to the exceptions that Jack Marshall is willing to make for elderly people who feel they must take their own lives to avoid becoming a burden within the healthcare system.

However, I can see no intrinsic moral value in declining to preserve or prolong life, and that should adequately reconcile the deontological view of suicide with the utilitarian concern about becoming a societal burden. No moral imperative compels the elderly and infirm to pursue treatment, or even to actively keep themselves safe and healthy. And fortunately for my intuitions, the same goes for anyone who has motivations for suicide other than old age. It’s wrong to kill oneself, but it is not strictly wrong to accept one’s own death, to will it, or to actively pursue it.

This too is the sort of hypothetical which will drive some people fast away from deontology but that recommits me to it. It will strike others as inconsistent that euthanasia can be considered wrong while allowing yourself to die by other unnatural means is considered acceptable. But as far as I’m concerned, at a sufficiently deep level of analysis it is the only view that is consistent. And in fact it’s delightfully consistent because it appears to reconcile not only contrary intuitions but also deontological and utilitarian theories. Not only that, but it satisfies both my rationality and my romanticism. The idea that courting death can be right even as forcing it is wrong gives moral weight to the way that I hope to one day die. It means that Hunter S. Thompson, who left a suicide note lamenting the end of football season and shot himself at 67 while on the phone with his wife, is subject to ethical judgments, but that I should admire Ambrose Bierce even more than I already do for getting involved in the Mexican revolution at age seventy-one and disappearing after leaving behind a final letter that said in part:

Good-by -- if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!