For FHE* tonight, we had an interesting discussion about ethical dilemmas and moral absolutes. It started with the following question:
If you were a prisoner of war, would you consent to have sex with the prison warden if it would set you free?
The overwhelming answer, predictably enough (at least from a bunch of Mormons), was “heck no!” So then, the teacher upped the ante by asking: what if it would free one hundred other prisoners who were scheduled to die the next day?
I was a little surprised (but not really) when I was the only one who admitted that I probably would. After all, there’s precedent for something similar in the Book of Mormon, and a very real question of whether or not the blood of the dead prisoners would be on your hands if you didn’t. Also, I would still consider it rape, since I draw a distinction between the act of sex and the act of saving lives–IOW, the sex itself isn’t strictly consensual; it’s the cost of saving the other prisoners.
Laying aside completely the question of whether or not you can take the warden at his word, it’s a very interesting dilemma, and one that gets at the heart of what people really believe. The fact that so many of my Mormon peers wouldn’t sleep with the guy tells you a lot about Mormon culture. My follow up question would be: if it meant freeing yourself and the other prisoners, would you kill the warden? Because I’m pretty sure most of them would say “heck, yes!” even though murder is typically considered to be a more heinous sin than fornication.
But anyway, the point here is that all of this makes excellent story material. For your characters, what are the moral lines that they absolutely will not cross? The ones where they’re a little more fuzzy? What, for example, would a character be like whose method for choosing between two undesirable courses of action was to flip a coin–no matter the stakes? And what about the characters like Ender Wiggins who flip the dilemma on its head by stabbing the giant in the eye?
This is the kind of stuff I love to read, and the stuff I love to write as well. I’m hoping to pull off a really good one in Into the Nebulous Deep, but not for a couple of chapters. Gotta set things up, get the story moving, and give the romance a little momentum. But once the characters are all fleshed out and the stakes are insanely high, that’s when the fun begins. Bwahahahaha!!
Man, I would make an awesome prison warden. ;P
Image courtesy postsecret.
*FHE (Family Home Evening) is, for young single Mormons, roughly the equivalent of a college-aged church youth group meeting.
Hmm…thought provoking. That’s not something that I’d ever considered (also, your FHE group sounds…interesting).
I think if I’d been there, my instant reaction would have been the same as the rest of the group. But if I had a little time to think about it…commit one sin to save lives, or commit one sin and take a life? After looking at the heart of both situations, it finally came down to this: Which one could I live with myself after? My final answer wasn’t the one I initially thought it would be, but I think it’s the one that is the truest to my core morals. Deep thoughts.
Killing a corrupt warden to save the lives of a hundred people would not be “murder.” It would be killing, but not murder. We’re in a POW camp, right? That’s a wartime situation. Killing is generally justified in a war (as long as you’re on the good side). Meanwhile, having sex with the warden WOULD be fornication. This question is also essentially asked in Crime and Punishment in the character of Sonya, who is a prostitute to support her family. However, she recognizes that what she does, as necessary as it might be, is morally wrong, and she pleads with God on a regular basis for forgiveness. What God thinks about this would be an incredibly tough call for anyone to make. Both sides are pretty justified. I think it would depend on the details and what the Spirit tells you. (Is that cheating?)
Nephi was asked to kill someone so that his people would have the scriptures that his family needed. I also agree that war time situations are different. You would definitely need the Lord’s guidance. That being said it would be very hard to take someone’s life.
Why don’t we examine WHY murder is wrong– then decide how best to approach the situation. This is such an oblique and unclear presentation of the ‘dilemma’. Murder, as far as I understand LDS doctrine correctly, is wrong because it takes from an individual their agency to act in whatever manner they wish, because they are no longer living. Given agency– and not life, as the issue here, then the manipulation of the prison warden– to attempt to seduce someone, upon threat of death, is an attempt to violate that agency– to subvert it. It seems to me this is a far more heinous crime than fornication– this man has commited both in his heart, and in defense of life and agency, it seems perfectly reasonable to ‘execute’ him.
Lol. I love moral dilemmas–because maybe it’s just me but I’ve had to come across them A LOT in life…and so I take some sort of pleasure in making my and other people’s characters confront them as well.
I’m running a game currently where the dilemma is – when do you justify killing someone else in order to stay alive or have a good life? Only when provoked? Only if she’d kill you first? Etc, etc. This to an ex-Prince who lost his rule and now finds himself trapped in a small-town where there ARE no rules.
Anyway, it’s fun. Also–necessary. I think the decisions we make in moral dilemmas can be the most telling of all of who we are and what we stand for. The Pioneers had it difficult, yes, but in a way once you start crossing those plains you either give up and die or you keep walking. But new moral dilemmas can appear every day, and your own self-identity and morals can be warped and tweaked in subtle ways.
As for my answer to the question at your FHE–I would probably say neither. I don’t believe in taking the choices others give me. If I could, I’d try to get everyone out another way. I believe in breaking the rules–even the rules of someone else’s “What if” game. *amused* That, also, is telling. It also makes it frustrating to RP with me on occasion. :p GMs out there, watch out. I will bend your rules!
I agree with the previous posters – 1. what a weird FHE, and 2. there must be ANOTHER way out.
Other questions: would it make a difference if your prisoner was a man and you were a fertile woman who could very well conceive? Or if you were a man and your prisoner was a woman and SHE could conceive? Or if your prisoner was a man and you were a man, and you were heterosexual? Would it make a difference? Should it?
Given the fact that I’m not likely to enter into that situation any time EVER…I’d probably go with the first group of Mormons and say, “No way!” Because guess what, the question is totally weird and disturbing, and I’m really NOT sure that examining that type of moral absolute questions really *is* helpful/necessary like above commenter Laura says. I dunno, maybe it is. Haven’t thought much about it. There are way, way, way too many other daily moral absolutes to deal with, ya know?
This reminds me of a string of questions a teacher asked regarding Germany and the Jews. I don’t remember all the questions or the order, but you can pretty much imagine…
Would you rat on a Jew?
If it meant saving yourself?
What if the Jew was your best friend?
What if you were promised your parents and family would be saved by doing so?
etc…
Holy conflict, Batman! I think I see a story.
When I first heard the question, I thought, “yes, I would!” However, after thinking about it, I felt the best response for me to make would be to say no unless I really had reasons to do otherwise (a prompting by the Holy Ghost). The reasons aren’t, however, based on fornication, but lie more in the fact that by saying yes, i feel that I would be “saving” the perpetrator from their own sins – not saving as in encouraging them to do better things, but saving as in making them unaccountable for the wrongs they desired to do. I feel that by consenting, I would be essentially saying, “Don’t commit that sin; commit this one instead!” If I consented, I feel that part of the sin would rest on my head. By not consenting, I would not be encouraging them to to kill, but i would simply be making it clear that i wasn’t going to play a part of thier scheme.
I think that’s a really fascinating way to examine your characters. I would bet that most of the world would probably sleep with someone to save 100 lives, even though many with my same belief system would not. It’s a good way to examine the characters and realize that most of our characters probably don’t operate on the same cultural assumptions that we do.
Onto the actual dilemma–everyone who justified the killing of the warden seems to be under the assumptions that he/she was a terrible person that deserved death. What if the warden was a law-abiding solider that ran a completely humane POW camp? Or better yet–what if the guy was an LDS bishop?
As far-fetched as these examples sound (i.e., “real life is never like that, so why even think about dilemmas like that”), isn’t that exactly what fiction is all about–putting your characters in unreasonable moral and ethical situations and having them come out the hero (or the villain)? Who of us will ever make the decision on whether or not to kill a possibly sentient alien race (Ender) or wipe an entire city from space and time because of one evil person it it (Rand Al’Thor)? But it’s the big, dramatic, unrealistic moments like that which help us see the complexities of real life and make us want to come out the hero in our own, much smaller dilemmas.
That’s why, imho, speculative fiction is awesome.
@Stephen: You seem to be ignoring the original premise– this warden is attempting to extort sex in exchange for 100 prisoners lives.
Given that premise, I don’t think that the warden would be likely to be an LDS Bishop… although he might have run a relatively humane camp…
If you want to ignore Joe’s conditions, I suppose that’s an interesting dilemma… but I don’t see how it would very often be a DILEMMA then…
@ Mykle – I think I read the post differently. I read it as “Would you kill a warden to save 100 lives,” not “Would you kill the warden [i.e., the warden from the sex question].” In other words, I thought the questions asked about 2 separate wardens., because it seemed that the original intent was to show that from a certain cultural/religious perspective, killing to save lives is okay but fornicating to save lives is not.
Personally, I think the dilemma is watered down if you ask if someone would kill a scumbag warden that trades sex for lives–it’s not as hard [for me, at least] to justify killing that type of person. But “Would you kill a generally good guy if it would save 100 lives?” That seems like a tough one…
That’s interesting–the murder over sex thing. If I could save 100 people, I’d probably do it, to be honest, assuming I knew the warden would keep his word. Otherwise… I don’t know, I’d have to be in the situation. It would suck to do it and then be tricked, you know? But I think my husband would forgive me.
I can see the murder thing, though. The warden is a repulsive figure. To kill him is to be rid of him, to sleep with him is to merge with him, in a matter with speaking. You’re taking the filth in instead of ridding yourself of it.