Rollback

He put his arm around her. "Well, um, I’d — I guess I’d still pull the lever."

She leaned her head against his shoulder. "That’s what most people say. Why?"

"Because only one person dies rather than five."

He could hear in her voice that she was smiling. "A Trekker to the core. ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.’ No wonder that’s what Mr. Spock believes; it’s clearly the product of rational thinking. Now, what about this? Say there’s no second track. And say instead of being the one hapless fellow stuck on the left, the big guy isn’t stuck at all. Instead he’s standing right next to you on the bridge. You know for a fact that if you push him off so that he falls in front of the streetcar, hitting him will be enough to make it stop before it hits the five other people. But you yourself are a little guy. The streetcar wouldn’t be stopped by hitting you, so there’s no point in jumping yourself, but it’ll definitely be stopped by hitting this big fellow. Now what do you do?"

"Nothing."

Don could feel her head nodding. "Again, that’s what most people say — they wouldn’t do a thing. But why not?"

"Because, um, because it’s wrong to… well, ah…" He frowned, opened his mouth to try again, but then closed it.

"See?" said Sarah. "They’re comparable situations. In both scenarios you choose to have one guy die — the same guy, in fact — to save five others. But in the first, you do it by throwing a lever. In the second, you actually push the guy to his death. The rational equation is exactly the same. But the second scenario feels different emotionally. For most people, what was judged right in the first scenario is judged wrong in the second." She paused. "The aliens didn’t ask that specific question about the streetcar, but there are others for which there’s an emotionally ethical response and a logically ethical response. As to which one the Dracons would prefer to see, I’m not sure."

Don frowned again. "But wouldn’t advanced beings naturally prefer logic to emotion?"

"Not necessarily. Fairness and a desire for reciprocity seem to be emotional responses: they occur in animals who obviously aren’t reasoning in an abstract, symbolic way, and yet those are some of the things we prize most. The aliens might prize them, too, meaning the emotional answers might in fact be what they’re looking for. Still, some of my colleagues do argue that the logical answers are the better ones, because they denote more sophisticated cognition. And yet giving the purely logical answers wouldn’t really portray who we are. I mean, consider this, for instance — the aliens didn’t ask about it, but it makes a good point. We’ve got two kids, a boy and a girl. Suppose when Emily’s older, Carl and Emily both went away somewhere for a weekend, and decided to have sex with each other — just once, just to see what it was like."

"Sarah!"

"See, you’re immediately disgusted. And, of course, so am I. But why are we disgusted? Well, presumably because evolution has bred into us a desire to promote exogamy and avoid the birth defects that often come out of incestuous unions. But say they were practicing birth control — you know any daughter of mine will be. That means the concern about birth defects isn’t relevant. Plus, say that both were free of venereal disease. Say they only did it that once, and that it caused them no psychological harm at all, and they never told anyone else about it. Is it still disgusting? My gut — and I bet yours, too — says yes, even though we can’t articulate a rational reason for the disgust."

"I suppose," he said.

"Right. But for an awfully long time, in a lot of places, homosexual unions were greeted with disgust, too, as were interracial ones. These days, most people don’t react negatively to them at all. So, just because something disgusted people once doesn’t mean it’s universally wrong. Morals change, in part because people can be won over to new positions. It was mostly rational argument, after all, that made the women’s rights and civil-rights movements possible. People became convinced that slavery and discrimination were wrong on a principled basis; you educate people about an issue, and their view of what’s moral changes. In fact, that’s what happens with children. Their behavior gets more moral as their reasoning powers develop.

They go from thinking something is wrong simply because they might get caught, to thinking something is wrong in principle. Well, maybe we’re grown up enough for the Dracons to want to continue being in contact with us, and maybe we’re not, and if we’re not there’s no way we can guess what the right answers are." Sarah snuggled against him. "No, in the end, I think the only thing we can do is exactly what they asked: send a thousand, independent sets of answers, each done in isolation, each one as honest and truthful as possible."

"And then?"

"And then wait for whatever reply they might eventually send."

Chapter 20