Rollback

They were doing general cleaning up. With both of them working during the days, housework ended up being a low priority. Don was dusting the mantel. "You know what I’d like?" he said absently, looking at the framed Emily Carr print on the wall there. "One of those big sixty-inch flatscreen TVs. Don’t you think it’d look great right here? I know they cost a fortune right now, but I’m sure they’ll come down in price."

Sarah was gathering up sections of newspaper. "You should live so long."

"Anyway," he continued, "you were saying about the Dracon questio

"Yeah. Even if we did want to fake it and have a committee draw up all the answers, for some of the questions we honestly don’t know what the ‘right’ answer is."

He moved on to picking up the used mugs from the coffee table. "Like what?"

"Well, like question thirty-one. You and another person jointly find an object that has no apparent worth, and neither of you desire it. Which of you should keep it?"

Don stopped to ponder, two yellow mugs in his right hand, and one in his left; at sixteen, Carl was learning to drink coffee. "Umm, I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t matter, does it?"

Sarah had finished gathering newspapers, and nipped into the kitchen to dump them in the blue box. "Who knows?" she called out. "There’s obviously some moral point here that the aliens are getting at, but no one I’ve spoken to can see what it is."

He followed her in, rinsed the mugs under the faucet, and then put them in the dishwasher. "Maybe neither of you should take the object. You know, just leave it where you found it."

She nodded. "That would be good, but that’s not one of the allowed answers. The survey is mostly multiple choice, remember."

He was loading a few plates into the dishwasher. "Heck, I don’t know. Um, the other guy should take it — ’cause, um, ’cause that’s me being generous, see?"

"But he doesn’t want it," she said.

"But it might turn out to be valuable someday."

"Or it might turn out to be poisonous, or to belong to somebody else who’ll be angry over it being taken, and who will exact revenge from whoever stole it."

He shook his head, and put an Electrasol tab into the detergent cup. "There just isn’t enough information."

"The aliens think there is, apparently."

He started the dishwasher, and motioned for Sarah to follow him out of the room; the machine was noisy. "Okay," he said, "so you can’t just give the Dracons the answers that’ll make us look good, because you don’t know what those are in all cases."

"Right," said Sarah. "And, anyway, even for those questions we do understand, there’s debate about which answers would make us look good. See, some of our morals are rational, and others are based in emotion — and it’s not clear which ones the aliens would prize most."

"I thought all morals were rational," Don said. He looked around the living room, gauging if anything else needed tending to. "Isn’t that the definition of morality: a rational, reasoned response, instead of a knee-jerk, visceral one?"

"Oh?" she said, straightening the pile of current magazines — Maclean’s, Mix, Discover, The Atlantic Monthly — that lived on the little table between the couch and the La-Z-Boy. "Try this one on for size. It’s a standard puzzle in moral philosophy, a little number called ‘the trolley problem.’ It’s called that because a British philosopher came up with it. Her name, by the way, was Philippa Foot — two fetishes in one, if you stop to think about it. Anyway, she said this: say a streetcar is out of control, rushing along its tracks. And say there are five people stuck on those tracks, unable to get away in time — if the train hits, it’ll kill them all. But you happen to be watching all this from a bridge over the tracks, and on the bridge are the switching controls, including a lever that if you pull it will cause the streetcar to be diverted to another track, off to the left, missing the five people. What do you do?"

"Pull the lever, of course," he said. Deciding there was nothing else that needed doing tonight, he sat down on the couch.

"That’s what almost everyone says," Sarah said, joining him. "Most people feel a moral obligation to intervene in situations where human life is at risk. Oh, but I forgot to tell you one thing. There’s a really big guy stuck on that other track. If you divert the streetcar, he’ll be killed. Now what do you do?"

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."