Episode 179

And the Moral Is...

It is entirely conceivable that some people go through life with nary an ethical moment. Not that they are entirely unethical, but that they are never faced with a serious challenge to the ethics they profess to practice. If they practice any at all.

(A pair of sentence fragments like the two above would seem to require some explanation. Contentwise, not grammarwise.)

To begin with, some people never think much about right and wrong one way or the other, period. They are not amoral, although that is possible. More likely they have been handed a moral structure from their family and/or their religion, and this moral structure is flexible enough and clear enough to cover them for anything that happens. An opportunity arises to steal money that belongs to someone else, and it doesn't take a Kant scribbling feverishly in the attic to decide that it is not a good thing to do. Deciding whether to cheat on a test, or a spouse, doesn't require weeks of feverish ethical analysis. Drive-by shootings on the local freeway, however much pleasure you might derive from them, are hardly something you will wonder about come time to 'fess up at the Pearly Gates. What is right and what is wrong in these cases is never in question, and while some might freely choose wrong over right, it is not because they don't know the difference, but because they don't care about the difference. For whatever reason, they are willing to do wrong and to accept (or expect to avoid) the consequences. Muggers are not pensive souls unsure of what they are doing, unclear as to the moral validity of their actions; they are muggers, who know they are breaking the law, but do it anyhow. If they are caught and arrested, their defense is never, I didn't know that mugging was wrong. Their defense is, You got the wrong guy. Which is a lie, which is also wrong, which is yet another example of why two wrongs don't make a right.

In the main, however, most people do the right thing, because their inherited moral structure allows them to figure out what the right thing is, and provides a rationale for doing that right thing: for example, if you do the right thing, you'll get into heaven. Even if they only do the right thing only to avoid punishment -- for example, your father'll whup you upside the head, or the law will be on your butt like drosophilae on rotten bananas (a metaphor you hardly ever hear anymore nowadays) -- they still do the right thing, and while the moralists among us may opine that doing the right thing for fear of punishment is not as moral as doing the right thing in order to do the thing itself, the results are identical, at least in this world.

There are, however, those serious challenges to ethics noted in the first of the two sentence fragments opening this episode. These challenges are those instances when it is unclear what the right and the wrong actions are, the situations that Kant and Mill and Sartre and company would sit around the table arguing about until the cows come home. These are the situations so clouded by nuance that it is impossible to ascertain what they are really about.

These are the situations that now face Tarnish Jutmoll, who, at least, is equipped to deal with them, insofar as he has studied all the great philosophers from Greece to Princeton, and knows all the philosophies that allow that this is right and this is wrong, and how to do the math to distinguish between the two.

Which, of course, doesn't make his problem any easier to solve, since none of the philosophers seem to actually agree on what is right and what is wrong. From the categorical on one end to the consequential calculus on the other end, with more than a Frenchman or two thrown in the middle, making an ethical decision is about as easy as… doing something… that… really isn't… easy.

Metaphors suddenly elude us.

Tarnish Jutmoll teaches his fifth period class, A.P. American History, thinking about nothing that he is saying about the Alien and Sedition Acts, simply repeating his decades-old notes, prepared as always for the wiseacre who throws out a bonehead comment about extraterrestrials, his mind weaving around the subject of Cartier Diamond, who is sitting in the back of the classroom, watching him with an expression that could be anything from total rapture to total boredom. Is she thinking of John Adams? Is she trying to remember the names of the songs on the latest Moby album? Is she happy, sad, engaged, detached, dead, alive? It is impossible to tell from her blank expression.

It is also impossible to tell why she tossed a car off a cliff.

Through the grapevine of gossiping teachers, a network every bit as active and informative as that of gossiping students, to which it is connected at many points, Tarnish has learned that Cartier's parents have recently and abruptly separated. Tarnish has no idea why this may have happened; Cartier was hardly one of the students on his forensics team to which he was especially close. In the three plus years that they traveled together, they barely exchanged ten words that weren't DI related. But nonetheless, the breakup of parents, or in Cartier's case, a parent and stepparent, is a traumatic experience. Maybe even it's traumatic enough to somehow warrant the tossing of a car off a cliff. A protest? A cry for help? A cry of anguish?

As far as Tarnish knows, only Tarnish, and of course Cartier's familiar, Mordred Prentice, whom Tarnish saw with her that amazing night, know that Cartier has committed automobicide. Could it have been a complex act of vengeance? He has no idea. What he does know is that he possesses the knowledge of this action, and that by any measure, the action has to be at best ethically dubious. The value of an automobile is high enough to set its destruction in the legal neighborhood of grand larceny, although the morality of larceny is not evaluated by whether it is grand or petite, but if it is larceny at all. The law places an objective overlay on top of whatever circumstances might have brought Cartier to this precipitous action. And the law also places Tarnish as an accessory after the fact. Tarnish clearly knows that a law has been broken. He has seen it broken, and he knows who broke it. As a result, he himself has broken a law by virtue of his silence. None of which takes into consideration that Cartier is one of his students, and that he therefore bears some special responsibility for her.

But on the other hand, maybe her being his student mitigates his responsibility to society in her favor.

Or does it enhance his responsibility to society?

When the bell rings he is no closer to an answer than when he started, but at least he is finished with John Adams and can get on to the election of Thomas Jefferson and, in two days, the Hamilton-Burr duel. Aaron Burr comes along just when any American History teacher really needs him the most.

Tarnish watches his students file out the door, and since his next class is freshman Social Studies, and one of the students in that class is Camelia Maru, he allows himself to switch gears from cogitating about Cartier to cogitating about Camelia.

Camelia. What in the name of all that is holy is her story? He can understand that she quickly caught the debate fever, if for no other reason that her older sister's participation in the activity had predisposed her to the life and its odd seduction. How she got hooked up with Quilty Prep he can't imagine. They are not all that far away geographically, but they are a world away financially. The town of Quilty sits atop the county that also includes Nighten Township like a crown atop the head of royalty. Tarnish's image of the Quilty slums is a place where the homes of the homeless people only have five bedrooms, three baths and it's getting hard to find the money to tip the pool guy come Christmas this year. His image of the rest of Quilty is proportionately grand, and the snobbishness of the school's students is legendary on the debate circuit. It is not that the Quilty kids are particularly nasty or unfriendly, just that they stick to themselves mainly because they're the only ones who can afford to engage one another in conversation. How did Camelia get hooked up with them?

But the real issue, of course, is what did Camelia do wrong by going to the Venerable with them? Sure, she ducked out of school on Friday, and lied about it to boot, but she did it to engage in an extracurricular activity that is at least every bit as demanding academically as the school classes she would have otherwise attended. Where is the real harm in that? She is probably smarter for her weekend at the Venerable Bede, at which she actually broke, than she would have been from one more day of Nighten Day School. Tarnish could conceivably get Camelia into a boatload of trouble, but it is trouble of the confusing, bureaucratic kind, trouble of the not doing precisely what you should have done when in fact you were doing something better, so the only problem is you broke a rule, even though it may be that the breaking of the rule was in the long run a better action.

But wait a minute. Tarnish looks down at Camelia, sitting in the middle of the room next to the wall of windows, looking up at him with an expression mixing fear and challenge. She was truant from school. It is highly unlikely that her parents truly knew what she was doing. Her trip back home on the Bisonette bus was wrapped in mystery, although Amnea had strongly argued that Tarnish should leave the girl alone. She had already suffered enough, was Amnea's argument. Camelia's heart, apparently, was broken.

But should Tarnish let a student's broken heart determine that student's culpability for obvious infractions of school rules?

But on the other hand, what would he gain by enforcing those rules, if she is already suffering enough? Granted, the suffering is not the direct result of the rule-breaking, but the suffering is equal to if not greater than the suffering that would result from being punished for the breaking of the rules.

Tarnish Jutmoll sighs right in the middle of explaining what Gandhi was doing in Africa in the first place, if, as one of his freshmen put it, he was supposed to be an Indian.

Tarnish hates teaching freshmen….

He continues to go through the motions, a part of his mind on a trail from Thoreau to Gandhi to King, another part on the trail of Camelia to Quilty to the Bede, and yet another part wondering on the whole's ability to break down into parts, the biggest part of all being the question of the tainted funds.

The tainted funds. As Tarnish tries to establish a dialectic between Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall and their relative positions in the Civil Rights movement, he wonders about the offer from Tom Starbuck. The money Starbuck is waving under his nose is, Tarnish imagines, money gotten by the Vitelli organization through criminal activities. What do these Mafia types do nowadays to make money? Drugs? Prostitution? Computer operating systems? Starbuck insisted that the Vitelli money was clean, but of course he would insist that. He would hardly come to Tarnish out of the blue to suggest that Nighten Day School join hands with Cosa Nostra to launder its money from the numbers racket.

But was Vitelli really in the rackets? Did they still call it the rackets, for that matter? In Tarnish's mind Vitelli represented local organized crime, but what evidence did he have to go on? Some dark memories dragged from old newspaper articles read decades ago? A lingering stigma from the present Vitteli's long-deceased relatives? If the present Vitelli was indeed innocent of any wrongdoing, and was a legitimate businessman -- in what business? -- how far down his family tree would one have to go for the sins of the fathers not o stick?

Which leads to the ultimate question of, even if the money is tainted, if it is used for a good thing, does that use intrinsically become a bad thing? Would it be wrong for Tarnish to agree to enhance the lives of his students in a way otherwise unachievable, because the opportunity is opened to him not for the wrong reasons but from the wrong auspices?

The answer that echoes in his mind is an unequivocal… sort of. Sort of wrong. If he knew for a fact that the money was tainted. If he knew for a fact that there was some ulterior motive. If he didn't know that if the money weren't spent on this wrong thing, it probably wouldn't be spent on any right thing. If the wrong of taking the money were so clear that no one could fail to identify it, no matter how morally muddled they are themselves.

Which goes back to the life of unchallenged ethics. Tarnish Jutmoll is far from that point now. His ethics are being not merely challenged but bombarded from all sides. The more he thinks about any of his problems, the less clear they become. He can apply all the guides of his philosophy and come out not more certain of the right action but less certain.

Choose the law or Cartier? Society or the individual?

Choose school policy or Camelia? Play out the bureaucracy or let life handle its own indiscretions?

Choose the money and revive an extracurricular activity that has a chance to change the lives of his students or take the apparent high moral ground when in fact he is completely uncertain of that ground's altitude?

There is only one thing to do. Decisions must be made. Someone has to make them.

Let the someone be you.

What should Tarnish do? We have no idea. So next week we will launch a poll allowing you, faithful reader, to decide the fates of Cartier, Camelia, and the tainted money...

Your vote counts! Be there on or about election day for: "Tarnish's Dilemma, or The Whale."

Go to the next episode due Nov 7, 2001.