Monthly Archives: December 2012

We Find Discrimination Everywhere!

by Juan Bernal

Before the passage of civil rights and voting rights legislation in the 1960s and 70s, many southern states required that voters answer questions meant to show their qualification for voting.  White people would get some softball question like “How many eggs in a dozen?”; whereas, blacks would be hit with questions about relativity physics or quantum physics: “Explain the Copenhagen version of quantum phenomena.”   Who do you suppose was qualified to vote?

 The Joke 

In his latest book for the non-scientific layman, Leonard Mlodinow  (See* below) recounts a joke in his discussion of the stereo-typing and categorization of people.  As Mlodinow tells it, three gentlemen (a white Catholic, a white Jew, and a poor black man) die and head for the gate of heaven where the Lord will question them to determine their qualifications for entry.

(I’m not sure why Mlodinow puts the Lord performing the function normally assigned to St. Peter; maybe it has something to do with Leonard’s Jewish background.)

What follows is paraphrase of the joke.  I have altered Mlodinow’s words slightly.

At any rate, the first man, a white Catholic, comes to the gate and stands before the Lord who asks that he state his qualifications for entry into heaven.  The Catholic answers: “Lord, I followed all the rules of the church, regularly attended mass, and was kind to my fellow humans, even if others were biased against me because of my Catholicism.”  The Lord says fine, but before I let you enter you must correctly spell a word.  “What word, Lord?” the Catholic asks.  “God”, says the Lord.  The Catholic easily spells G-O-D  and is granted entry.

Next, the Jewish gentleman comes to the gate and stands before the Lord who asks this fellow the same question: what are his qualifications for entry into heaven.  The Jewish man answers: “Lord, I followed your commandments, studied and revered the Torah, and treated all people as I wanted them to treat me, despite all the anti-Semitism directed against me.”  The Lord says fine, but before I let you enter you must correctly spell a word.  “What word, Lord?” the Jew asks.  The word is “God”, says the Lord.  The Jew easily spells G-O-D  and is granted entry.

Finally, the poor old black man, comes to the gate and stands before the Lord who asks the same question as with the other two. The black man answers: “Lord, I despite all the racist discrimination that I had to endure I never became bitter but always tried to follow your teaching, and I always tried to treat every one kindly and fairly, regardless of the color of their skin.”  The Lord smiles and says that’s good,  but before I let you enter you must correctly spell a word.  “What word, Lord?” the black man asks.  “Czechoslovokia,”  says the Lord. …

(Some things never change!)

(No people.  This is not a racist joke!)

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An Elaboration on this instructive joke.

According to an anonymous reviewer of Mlodinow’s book, the joke was read to a conference of community college philosophy instructors (Western States, including California), 650 of whom were given a questionnaire to get their interpretation of the joke.  (I have not been able to confirm that this survey really did take place, but simply describe what was reported to me.)

The respondents distributed as follows:

32% correctly read the joke as commentary on the universality of racial prejudice and hypocrisy (even the Lord..)

16% correctly noted that the joke said something about our ideas of justice and fair play

12% did not even see the point of the joke at all, asking lame questions like, “Why Czechoslovakia?”

(These are philosophy instructors, you must understand their limitations.)

8% were bothered by the story’s placing God and not St. Peter as heaven’s gate keeper, and could not get past that bit of incongruity to answer other questions.

10% were Christian theists who objected strongly to the way the joke characterized the Lord as being unjust to the black man.  Why, God would never do that!

12% did not understand why Mlodinow would include the joke in a chapter on our unconscious stereo-typing and categorization.

5% were offended by what they mistook as a racist joke.

The remaining 5% were black philosophy instructors who just laughed, asked “So what’s new?” and went about their conference business.

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* Subliminal, How your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Mlodinow is a physicist at Caltech who co-authored The Grand Design, with Stephen Hawkin; and had an earlier, very entertaining book, The Drunkard’s Walk – How Randomness Rules our Lives

Is torture of a person ever morally justified?

By Juan Bernal

A corresponding philosopher, call him “John,”  posed the following example of “justified torture”, and followed with a few questions:

Suppose that a kid-napper has taken a child, and holds it for ransom. The kid-napper buries the child in an underground vault with limited air supply. The police capture the kid-napper who refuses to divulge the whereabouts of the vault.

Would Dirty Harry, the detective, be morally justified in using torture, since there is not sufficient time to obtain truth serum, or any other means of obtaining  the information needed to save the child’s life?

Do you believe that the example shows that torture is sometimes justified if done with a good will?

Or is torture always wrong?

Or is torture only justified if the actual results (not the intended results) are good?

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I replied with the following remarks:  John, I cannot imagine too many real-world case in which torture of a human being (with or without a good will) would be morally justified.  So, I’m inclined to say that torturing of a human being is not morally justifiable; although it is not always an inhumane or criminal act. 

How’s that for hedging?!

In your example, we have to buy into the premise that torturing the kidnapper will result in the information necessary to save the child.  Then the question is whether this means of extracting the information (torture) is morally justifiable, if it will save the victim, the kidnapped child.  Likely, most of us are inclined to say that  such torture is morally justified; but we’re inclined to do so because of the way the case is presented: The criminal is at the receiving end of the torture; he probably deserves it; and this is the only way of saving the kidnapped child.  What rational, morally conscientious person would ever trade the well-being of the kidnapper for the sure death of the child?  Not many, if any.  But this is a made-up case, probably only good as a classroom example for discussion. It is not the type of case that people are likely to confront.

In the real world, nobody knows at the outset of the torture session that it will result in the life-saving information.  Nobody can even be certain that the child is still alive. In many real-world cases, we often don’t know that the person being tortured is really a criminal or bad person deserving such intense pain. With reference to a real-world case, let’s ask your question again: Is torture of the kidnapper morally justified?  Here the answer is not so clear.  Here we have to make a ‘judgement call’ which may or may not be correct.  Here we cannot be certain that we would be doing the morally right thing, either by torturing the alleged Kidnapper or refusing to torture.

A similar dilemma arises concerning the CIA’s use of waterboarding to try to get information from suspected terrorists.  Is such torture justifiable when the information can only be gotten from that individual?  Is it justifiable when other sources might be available?  Is it justifiable when the information might prevent another deadly terrorist attack?

Of course, philosophers are fond of imagining crazy cases in which one might be inclined to affirm that torture of a person (even of an innocent child) is morally justified.  For example, if by allowing such torture, the suffering of millions would cease and be replaced by great well being for all (a paradise on earth; millions of children no longer suffer sickness, hunger, and cruelty).  Then the questioner, maybe a Utilitarian, will press the issue by pointing out how great the ratio of happiness is gained over the suffering of the one victim, 200 million / one.  Then how could any rational, morally attentive person deny the moral justification of the torture?


Plug in your own answer; but it probably won’t say much about real-world moral dilemma that people often face.

So I will go out on the limb and declare that torturing people in attempts to extract crucial information is not a morally justifiable act.  It might turn out to be a prudent or utilitarian act, one that yields some desirable result.   But in the end, the torturer (if he/she is honest) might have to admit to gaining a desirable result through immoral means.  It is similar to the acts in a war in which our warriors have to kill enemy soldiers.  Is the killing of human beings morally justified?   Or is it merely the prudent, practical thing that must be done when one is a soldier and the nation is at war, with no implication that it is the morally justifiable thing to do?  Or probably a better example is the case of Israeli secret service agents tracking down and killing suspected anti-Israeli terrorists.  They get very good at this and probably do something that reduces the terrorist threat against Israel.  But do they do something that is morally justifiable?  It is likely that some of them conclude that in hunting down the suspected terrorist they (Israeli agents) have had to become terrorists themselves.   That is not a case of moral justification.