Word: unger
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ridiculously sinister Depalowski goes out of his way to persecute (and believe me, he really goes out of his way) a black boy out of all the black boys that are in his jurisdiction. Nor are we ever told the process by which the three Canadians (John Hannah, Deborah Unger, Live Schreiber) suddenly become best friends with Carter and decide to move to New Jersey (!) to fight for his release. And because so much of the movie centers round Carter and Carter alone, the other characters are left curiously two-dimensional, with no real reason for the audience to relate...
These are precisely the moral issues that the philosopher Peter Unger addresses in his recent book, Living High and Letting Die. Unger comes down firmly on the side of contributing. As he writes, "Is it really seriously wrong not to do anything to lessen distant suffering; or is it quite all right to do nothing?....I argue that the first of these thoughts is correct and that, far from being just barely false, the second conflicts strongly with the truth about morality...
Most of us, I suspect, would disagree with the latter half of Unger's proposition. It seems a bit extreme to assert that we are morally obligated to help remote, starving children. Few of us do (at least not by mailing in $1 to UNICEF), and even fewer of us feel bad about not doing so. Why? Because, intuitively, it just doesn't seem wrong to switch the channel when something like that comes on the screen...
...Unger's deeper point in the book is to reject just that kind of a reaction. Behavior we intuitively consider to be moral, he argues, is often in fact immoral. "[E]ven as our responses to particular cases often are good indications of behavior's moral status," he writes, "so, also, they often aren't any such thing at all." He dedicates the rest of his text to explaining, through various puzzles and analogies, why "living high and letting die" is immoral behavior...
...Unger, though, unfortunately does not address the most fundamental question in the living high and letting die scenario: Why do humans suffer in the first place...