“Sandy, it’s Jim Marchuk.”
Genuine warmth: “Jim! What can I do for you?”
“I’m hoping you can cut through some red tape. I need a copy of my own medical records.”
“Your own? Yeah, sure, I guess that’s no problem. You were treated here?”
“Yeah. I came in on New Year’s Eve 2000—well, after midnight, so it was actually January first, 2001.”
“That’s a long time ago,” she said, and I could hear her typing away.
“Nineteen years.”
“Hmmm. You sure about that date?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Were you maybe an outpatient? Not all records from that far back are in our central system.”
“No, no. It was emergency surgery.”
“My God, really?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you brought in via ambulance?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not finding anything. Do you remember the name of the surgeon?”
“Butcher,” I said.
“Ha,” replied Sandy. “That’s funny.”
“That’s what I thought!”
“But there’s no Dr. Butcher in the system. Are you sure it was this hospital? Could it have been Foothills instead?”
I wasn’t sure of much at this point. “I… I guess. Um, can you try my last name with a typo? People sometimes put a C in before the K: M-A-R-C-H-U-C-K.”
“Ah! Okay—yup, here it is, but… huh.”
“What?”
“Well, the date wasn’t January first—no one gets to have elective surgery on New Year’s Day: there’s too much likelihood that the operating rooms will be needed for emergencies, and all the surgeons who can be are off skiing.”
“Elective surgery?”
“That’s right. On Monday, February nineteenth, 2001, you had an infiltrating ductal carcinoma removed.”
“A what?”
“It’s a breast cancer.”
“I’m a man.”
“Men can get breast cancer, too. It’s not that common, because you guys have so little breast tissue, but it happens. Says here they cut it out under a local anesthetic.”
“No, no; that’s got to be somebody else—somebody with a similar name. Besides, I was a student at the University of Manitoba then; I wouldn’t have been in Calgary.”
“Well, what do you think you were here for in January?”
“I was attacked with a knife.”
“Jesus, really? What’d you do back then? Tell someone you’d voted Liberal?”
“Something like that.”
“There’s no record of your being treated here for anything of that nature.”
“Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Um, okay. Thanks, Sandy.”
“Jim, what’s this—”
“I gotta go. Talk to you later.”
“Okay. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I sagged back into my chair, my breath coming in short, rapid gasps.
7
“All right,” I said, looking out at the sea of faces. “Is morality subjective or objective? Anyone?”
“Subjective,” called out Boris, without bothering to raise his hand first.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it varies from person to person.”
“And,” called out Nina, “from culture to culture.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Some people are pro-choice; others are pro-life. Some believe you should always lend a helping hand; others think you make people weak by keeping them from having to struggle for themselves. Right?”
Nods.
“But Sam Harris—who knows who he is?”
“A famous atheist,” said Kyle.
“Yes, true; his best-known book is The End of Faith. But he also wrote one called The Moral Landscape, in which he argues that if you define moral acts as those that promote the flourishing of conscious beings, then there is such a thing as objective morality. Consider this: imagine a world in which every single person is suffering as much as possible; everyone is in as much physical and emotional pain as the human body and mind are capable of experiencing—something like being in hell or, I dunno, Pittsburgh.”
Laughter.
“Now, says Harris, what if we could dial it down a notch? What if we could take the physical pain from a ten out of ten to a nine out of ten, even for one individual? Wouldn’t that be objectively the right thing to do? Is there any conceivable counterargument, any possible moral view, in which not decreasing the pain would be the right thing to do? Yes, yes, we can contrive scenarios in which it’s a zero-sum game—I turn down your pain, but somebody else’s pain therefore has to go up. But that’s not the situation Harris proposed. He said every person is suffering the maximum amount possible; there’s no way lessening one person’s pain could increase somebody else’s. So, given those circumstances, isn’t turning down even one person’s pain clearly objectively the moral thing to do? And turning down two people’s pain would be even better, right? And if you could turn down everyone’s pain, even a little bit, that would be a moral imperative, no?”
Boris was unconvinced. “Yeah, but who’s to say what the maximum suffering a human can endure is?”
“Have you seen The Phantom Menace?”
Some of the students laughed again, but Boris just frowned. “If it can be a little less, it can be a little more.”
“Not if experiencing pain involves neurons,” I replied. “If every pain-registering neuron is firing simultaneously, you’re maxed out. A human brain is a finite object.”
“Some more finite than others,” said Nina, looking pointedly at Boris.
“Anyway,” I said, “we’ll talk more about moral relativism later. What I really want to get at today is utilitarianism—and utilitarianism is striving for the exact opposite of Sam Harris’s thought-experiment hell. Utilitarianism is a terrible name. It sounds so cold and calculating. But really, it’s a warm, even loving, philosophy. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were its first major proponents, and they said, simply, that all action should be geared toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. The happier people are, the better. The more people who are happy, the better.”
I looked at Boris, who was frowning again. “Comrade,” I said, “you look unhappy.”
Nina and a few others laughed.
“It just all seems so self-serving,” Boris said.
“Ah, but it isn’t,” I replied. “Bentham and Mill are both clear on that point. Under utilitarianism, you are to be neutral when weighing your own happiness against somebody else’s. True, it’s not a self-sacrificing philosophy—you don’t have to give up your own happiness for the sake of another person’s. But if doing something will cause your happiness to be diminished a little and someone else’s happiness to be increased a lot, there’s no question: you have to do it. You can’t put your needs in front of those of other people.”
“Let me know how that works out for you,” Boris said.