Are good and bad quantifiable or absolute?

In Fowles book The Magus, Conchis tells a purportedly true story about an event in a Greek village during the Nazi occupation. Partisans from the region and from the village itself had been carrying out guerrilla activities against the Nazis. Nazi troops had then occupied the village, rounded up all the residents and the Mayor, and presented the Mayor with a choice of himself executing ten villagers, all of whom he knew, or if he refused to do so, the Nazis would execute everyone there.

The Nazi officer gave the Mayor a rifle with which to execute his choices of villagers. Of course, the Mayor immediately turned the gun on the Nazi officer and pulled the trigger. The gun was, of course, unloaded, the officer said. You must carry out the executions with the butt of the rifle, he added.

The latter detail doesn't change the ethical shape of the dilemma, of course. It only makes the choice more dramatically unpleasant. It's the choice itself that is of interest. Is it ever morally acceptable to carry out an evil act in order to prevent a greater evil? The dilemma can be rephrased: Are ethics absolute, or are they relative and quantifiable?

The United States has taken both sides of this question, sometimes simultaneously. For instance, we held "war crimes trials" after the second World War. Shortly before this event (or events) we had dropped atomic weapons on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, on the grounds that the horrific deaths of the civilian population could be justified if they caused the Japanese to surrender and thus avoid many more deaths. We firebombed Dresden using the same logic. We excoriated the Germans for bombing London, but used their own tactics against them.

I'm not taking a side here. If I had to, I would probably take an absolutist side. The question is a legitimate one, though. Is it better to kill a few in order to avoid the deaths of many more? Is it acceptable to kill mice in order to save people? Is it morally correct to send men to death in battle in order to protect the majority population? I think it's amazing that when we advocate most loudly for a relativist moral position we are generally among the population that is most benefited by it.

In the choice offered in the story in The Magus, a linguistic trick is played on the reader to make it seem that the Mayor has a terrible choice. The Mayor is told, in effect, that he will be responsible for the deaths that result if he chooses not to take part in the executions. This is not true, of course. The soldiers who follow their orders will be responsible for the outcomes of their action, not the Mayor. If he chooses to try to spare the majority of the villagers by himself killing ten, he is clearly carrying out an unethical (or at least immoral) act. If he doesn't do that, he is not responsible for what the soldiers might or might not do. He will have no way of knowing that the Nazi officer will carry out his part of the "agreement"; he could kill the ten and then the Nazis would do whatever they chose to do.

It seems to me that no matter what conditions are assigned to a choice, the individual who makes the choice carries the responsibility for his own actions, as do those of the others (if any) involved. Such a position of absolute morality doesn't fit well with our more modern and politically astute positions of moral relativity. Something is acceptable if it isn't as bad as the alternative. Really? And are we sure that the alternative is our responsibility too?

How Values Change

Values only begin shifting when new behavioral changes continue over time. As values shift, so does internal consonance, and emotional reactions eventually follow as well. First you make the actual change. Secondly you consistently continue the new pattern of choices. Thirdly your feelings shift so that eventually you are emotionally "motivated" to continue the changed behaviors.

You can't "want to" first. You must do it first, then "want to later".

The kinds of intellectual and verbal insights into patterns that develop during psychotherapy do not, by themselves, lead to significant behavioral change. People can talk indefinitely about what's the matter with them, can recognize quickly dysfunctional patterns of behavior, deplore the childhood that "makes them" the way they are, and NOTHING will happen until they change their behaviors.

AFTER the behaviors have changed, the personality structures and value systems will shift to accommodate the changes in behavior. Frequently, at this point, the person begins to "understand" in a new way what it was they were doing and why. But that understanding is subsequent to behavioral change, not prior to it.

Three kinds of personal values

As a psychotherapist I spend much time listening to people rationalize and defend the choices they make. I'm particularly intrigued by the claims of people who have behaved badly that they are "really better people than that", as if having a set of internal values to which they do not adhere is really a better measure of their quality as a person than their behavior is.

I want to offer the premise that values come under several headings or flavors. For instance, if you ask me what my values are, I can describe the ideal choices that I would make. I can generalize about my religious or political beliefs. I can tell you that I would do "x" if given a choice between "x" and "y". This set of values comprises my public and verbal values. I can be pretty vehement in defending them.

I can also have a set of private values which I may or may not admit. The private values are frequently less socially acceptable than the public verbal values, or they may be socially acceptable only in limited or semi-private circumstances, such as in a private discussion.

My behavioral values are the ones that I actually make. If you kept a record of the choices I actually made when given the opportunity, you would have a pretty clear set of behavioral values which would be good predictors of my future choices. In fact, they would be a much better predictor of my future choices than either my public verbal or private values.

So I can assign an order of primacy to these three sets of values. The set that is the least useful predictor of my future behavior is the set of public verbal values. A somewhat better prediction is based on my private values, but the best predictor is the set of my behavioral values, the choices that I have actually made in the past.

An interesting fact is that when you change your behavioral values by making different choices, your private and public verbal values tend to change. Festinger’s research on cognitive dissonance establishes pretty clearly that when we make a previously-unacceptable behavioral choice, even under coercion, our private values begin to shift. When we act on a choice, we begin to change in that direction. We begin to become what we do. Even “temporary” departures from our values start shifting us.

It’s very interesting to me that we can have sets of private values that are totally inconsistent with one another, and they are not accompanied by any sense of discrepancy or conflict. A person can believe in the dignity of man and enjoy a boxing match; one can believe in the precepts of Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) while shooting someone to death. The list of such discrepancies is nearly boundless, and we all have them, and we all are unaware of them (for the most part) UNLESS something or someone brings them simultaneously to our conscious awareness. If we begin at that time forcing ourselves to act on one of the sets of conflicting values and not on the other, our value set will begin to shift and become more consistent.

I think it is a good thing to become more consistent in my behavioral, verbal and private values. I think that this may be what “maturity” consists of. I don’t have any scientific proof of this, of course, but on the personal level I find that as I bring my values into greater consistency I feel better about myself.

Disconnecting

I think we deliberately disconnect ourselves from each other. I sometimes find myself disconnecting myself from someone whose pain I don't want to feel. Maybe the word "dis-identify" describes the process better. It's as if I were to say to myself, when watching someone in a painful situation, "that's not me". I don't let myself feel what they are feeling. I'm afraid sometimes that what they might be feeling is unbearable.

Watching someone enduring terrible pain or facing a miserable death, I find myself becoming detached, distant, analytic. How interesting, I might think, as if I were watching an actor on the screen. It's really a pretty basic way of protecting myself from pain, I suppose. However, I begin to wonder if splitting may not lead to dehumanization and denial of reality. Maybe that's how we can look down the sight of a gun at another person, and think of them in a detached sort of way as just a "target", like a video game. We don't at that moment think of the other as someone's child, lover, best friend, father or mother, good cook or bad cook, having terrible moments of fear or pain or longing. If we did, how could we hurt them?

Perhaps we have to keep pretending that we are not like every other person in the world, but somehow separate and unique, not doomed to suffer the same miseries but magically exempt, and "special". This is, of course, a kind of child-like narcissism, arising not from a false sense of superiority but from fear that we are capable of suffering the same pain they are.

Young people look at us old people through the wrong end of the telescope. They want/need to see us at a great distance, not just themselves grown older, but as a different breed. I remember how frightening it was to see my parents age, and to comfort myself with the (delusory) thought that their age, illness, and death were because they were old, not like me. I didn't really believe it could happen to me.

I remember having a fantasy as a young man, a fantasy so vivid it really frightened me. I started to look in a mirror one morning, brushing my teeth, and suddenly wondered if by magic I would somehow see myself as an old man, looking back out the mirror at myself, and would find that I had suddenly "jumped" forty years and had most of my life behind me. When I made myself finally look up, I saw I was still young, but I also saw the old man i would become behind that smooth exterior. I could imagine myself old and remembering the youth I had lost with great sadness. It was at that moment that growing old became (at least for the moment) real for me, and I knew in my bones that someday I too would grow old, sick and die. I suppose I really lost my fantasy of eternal youth in that moment when the veil seemed to dissolve.

It's just us, wherever we look. We each feel the same. The greatest irony of all is that we each think we are unique in exactly the same way. It's the same looking out from my eyes as it is from your eyes. One thing we absolutely have in common is our sense of unique identity.

Leverage and personal responsibility

As infants, we struggle with the problem of how to get what we want in a world in which we don’t have the power to get it ourselves. Perhaps one of the first lessons we learn is that we need to get others to do things for us, things they may not want to do. Not many parents like changing diapers or getting up at 2 am to feed the baby, but babies learn that their crying and unhappiness can result in others meeting their needs. As we get older we learn (hopefully) that the more primitive tactics, like screaming, kicking and crying, are not as effective as they once were, so we develop increasingly subtle ways of trying to get others to meet our needs.

When we need something done for us by another person, our choices are only two: we can try to make doing something for us a positive experience, or we can make NOT doing something for us an unpleasant experience. Generally speaking, it’s not always easy to get people to want to do something for us, unless it’s something they want to do for themselves as well. Even things that are mutually pleasurable may not be mutually convenient. A time when an 8 year old wants to go to the movies may not coincide with the time adults are available, for instance. The alternative is to make it as unpleasant as possible for the adult NOT to go to the movies. That is easier to manage and doesn’t require such careful timing. The 8 year old can do his/her best to make life miserable for a parent, while simultaneously reminding the parent that things could be better if they went to the movies.

It’s easier to irritate someone than to please them. People’s responses to negative behaviors are often more predictable than to positive ones. Suppose I want to go out for dinner tonight, and you are tired and don’t want to. I can try the positive method of cajoling or trying to tempt you with promises of great food. Alternatively, I can throw a mini-tantrum or sulk in silence or weep loudly or threaten violence or withdraw or… until it’s easier for you to do what I want than to face the unpleasantness of my behavior. Of course this is emotional blackmail; I’m attempting to make staying at home with me more unpleasant than going out to eat with me even though you are tired. I expect this to “motivate” you to do what I want.

Although we group all these negative behaviors under the heading “manipulation”, truthfully that’s not such a bad word. Positive behaviors are manipulative too, and we don’t want to imply that attempting to get our own way is necessarily a bad thing. Manipulating by negative behavior always results in bad feelings, though, which is a bad way to start a positive experience. Several patients have told me, for instance, that when their spouses aren’t interested (at the moment) in sex, they “sulk” and withdraw. It rarely occurs to them that this is a poor atmosphere in which to encourage sexual pleasure.

The central issue is one of trying to get one’s way by doing things that can be expected to make the other person emotionally uncomfortable. We imagine that if they become uncomfortable enough, it will become their problem to solve, and we let them know what the “right” solution is. We can think of this as trying to make the other person take the responsibility for solving our problem. We may believe, rightly or wrongly, that we have no power ourselves to make things different, but that the other (or others) do have that power.

Examples are abundant and ubiquitous. Suppose my partner/friend/spouse is obese, and further suppose I object. Clearly I can’t make the other lose weight. I don’t have the power to do that. A positive attempt to get them to lose weight might be through encouragement to go on a diet or join a health club or to urge them to get medical help so that their health isn’t damaged. If that doesn’t work, I have the vast range of negative behaviors at my disposal. I can rage at the partner, threaten to leave, show signs of disgust, withhold affection, withdraw emotionally, nag, whine… the list can go on. I don’t have the power to “make” the other go on a diet, so I’m driven back into using the tactics of powerlessness.

As long as we believe the power to change rests with the other person and not with ourselves, we experience helplessness. In actuality, we are not helpless to change the situation, though we are powerless to force the other person to change. We might prefer to believe we are helpless rather than recognizing that the things we have the power to do will result in some difficult and painful choices. In the example above, there are choices that can be made. The partner of the obese spouse can decide to accept the person as they are and try to make the best of it. Alternatively, if that option is not acceptable, they can opt for a divorce or separation; they can set a time frame for action. Other choices are also available, and all come at a price.

The price of recognizing one’s power is that of having responsibility for the consequences. It also means you have to solve your own problems, and that, as Branden said, "Nobody's coming".