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An Indecent Proposal

This is my answer to the “moral puzzle” posed in the “Boatman Puzzle“.

Elsewhere I described a “moral puzzle” in which you had to rank 5 people according to their actions in a scenario in which a lady (L) in love with one man (M) accepted payment for sex from a second man (S), in order to pay a boatman (B) to take her across the river to be reunited with M. A mutual friend (F) told M, who then ended things with L.

In order from best to worst, this is how I rank them:

Top is L: the only one who has not only done nothing wrong, but is positively admirable. A key to morality is never to sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. L did not want to sleep with S: but that was the only way she could return to M, who was her greatest value. She did what she had to do in order to win the one value which meant the most to her, while harming nobody: and that is an essence of virtue.

Next I put B, the boatman, whom I consider about morally neutral. He did exploit L’s problem by charging her twice his normal fare: but there is nothing necessarily wrong with acting according the law of supply and demand, and L didn’t have even his normal fare (if she could raise $10, why not $20?). B is an interesting case because he illustrates the nature of values: how he should act depends on his values, and how good that is depends on whether those values are rational. That is, what is moral for him depends on how much he values the money versus how much he values L’s happiness: and whether the values he puts on them are reasonable. Anyone should value the quest of someone like L: so how they should act depends on how much they objectively need the concrete value of the money, compared to that more abstract value. Depending on how much he needed the money, it could be moral for him to overcharge her, to take her across on credit, or do it without charge: his payment being the value and pleasure of helping a good person achieve her values and happiness. But if he simply refused to take her across at any price, out of some mean-spirited hatred for human happiness, then he would be very immoral: he would be acting in accordance with his values, but his values would be anti-life. I see the boatman as a man who works hard and has little; who sees a woman who’d pay anything to cross the river; and to whom a double fare means roast dinners for a week, some small luxury to make life sweeter, or a new dress for his own wife. Then he’d be a moral man – though without the heroism of L.

Next comes S. He didn’t commit a crime of force against L: it was a voluntary trade, which she could have refused. However, it is clearly a nasty kind of exploitation, given why L needed the money! Hence he is worse than B even if B is a plain exploiter, as B didn’t really do anything negative to L.

Fourth I put F, the “friend”. I found F the hardest one to place, as his motivation is problematic. Perhaps he thought M deserved to know, out of some sense of truth or justice, or because he admired what L did and thought M would too – in which case I’d put him second. But it seems more likely that he was just out to cause trouble – the Iago of the puzzle. And to deliberately set out to destroy a value such as the love between L and M, for no reason except the destruction, is a contemptible and anti-life action. F is far worse than S, because while S exploited L, at least he did so by offering her the value of being reunited with M: whereas F seeks and offers nothing except the destruction of values and happiness.

Last is M himself, a position which follows from my assessment of L. To reject someone for doing what she had to do in order to win something of supreme value to both of you, to hold sexual fidelity so paramount and context-free as to reject the relationship which is its meaning and purpose, is about as low as you can get. To throw away the person you love because she values you so much, that the price she’d pay to be with you is so high, is appalling. M should have been proud: proud of her, that she would show such heroism and strength of character, and proud, that she valued him so much.

The original meaning of the puzzle was that how you rank the 5 people reveals how important different things are to you: it reveals how you rank Love, Morality, Business, Sex and Friendship. This is of course highly dubious. The entire puzzle is about morality: and to equate morality with “sexual fidelity” says more about the composer’s morality than about you!

Puzzle Reflections

Further discussion of the “moral puzzle” posed in “The Boatman Puzzle“.

[In an issue of TableAus,] PB wrote that the Boatman puzzle I related was as arbitrary as the Bill’s Fishers puzzle which I criticised; that the characters’ motives were ambiguous; and that he expected my analysis to be on the basis of freedom of trade.

On the first point, I agree that the boatman puzzle is arbitrary: but there is a big difference between using an artificial scenario as an interesting way to explore morality, and using it as evidence in a moral debate. Illustration, application and investigation are valid uses of such a puzzle; derivation is not. For example, although I ranked L as the most moral in the Boatman puzzle, it would be completely unjustified to extrapolate from that to a claim that promiscuous, gratuitous adultery is the ideal basis of a relationship. It is similarly invalid to argue from “I can make up a bizarre scenario in which force might be justifiable” to “the proper role of government is the initiation of force against some citizens to satisfy the wishes of others.”

On the second point, I didn’t create the puzzle: and the ambiguities actually make it more interesting. But of course the “correctness” of one’s moral assessments are in the context of your judgment of why they acted as they did.

The last point is the most significant. The basis of my ethics is not trade but value. That life and happiness are conditional is the link between what is (reality) and what ought to be (ethics). Whatlife and happiness require – what they are conditional on – is the achieving of values. How one achieves values is by virtues. The morality of trade is not a primary assumption but a consequence of this value-based morality: that is, since all values that aren’t free for the taking have to be produced by someone, the only moral way to acquire them from the people who produce them is by offering them a value of your own in trade, which they must be free to accept or reject according to their own standards of value. Any other system is anti-life, because it punishes those who create the things life requires; it is the morality of looters, as opposed to producers.

Life Imitating Art?

In Time magazine, June 18 2001 (p. 75), is this information on the life of film director Ingmar Bergman:

In 1949, Bergman and a journalist named Gun Hagberg, both unhappily married, entered into a passionate affair, beginning with a long tryst in Paris, and continuing after their return to Sweden, where she discovered she was pregnant with his child. A bitter wrangle with her husband over custody of their children ensued. One night, Hagberg’s husband called and proposed meeting to discuss an amicable solution. He was lying: he would settle with her only if she would sleep with him one more time. Hagberg succumbed to what amounted to a form of rape.

Bergman immediately discovered the truth and, instead of offering sympathy, flew into a jealous, unappeasable rage. There was an attempt to patch things up, and their child was born, but their love died, and they separated. Hagberg died years later in a car crash, having inspired, according to Bergman, at least five of the women in his films, a model of “indomitable femininity.”

Though there are obvious differences, there is a remarkable similarity between the three players here and the characters in the Boatman puzzle. Also remarkable is how Bergman behaved so much like the man M from the puzzle – and spent the rest of his life regretting it.

To say that Hagberg’s husband’s action “amounted to a form of rape” is however inaccurate. The essence of rape is physical force, which was notably absent here. While he drove a nasty bargain, it was not “a form of rape.”

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