HUMAN beings are remarkably inconsistent creatures. They devote huge resources to designing and constructing weapons of war and to training and maintaining armies, navies and air forces, and they frequently put these to use, resulting in anything from thousands to millions of deaths.
Yet they also make huge efforts to train doctors and nurses, build hospitals, run ambulance services, rush to the rescue of victims of natural disasters and toil endlessly to save lives in the rubble of an earthquake or the devastation of a tsunami. They may even risk their lives to rescue a cat hanging on a branch over a cliff鈥檚 edge.
The scientific research that supports these contradictory endeavours is both part of and fundamental to the immense effort involved. Billions of dollars go into each side of the equation. I sometimes wonder whether scientists designing weapons consult trauma surgeons to see which types of injury are most incapacitating in order to adapt their weapon designs accordingly. Funding councils like interdisciplinary work.
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Both these contradictory phenomena are matters of simultaneous social choice, the rationalisation being that they both serve the similar goals of protection and succour: the army is there to defend us, the rescue services are there to save us. How could any rational society not choose both?
In that question lies the problem. If humanity were one society, not divided into competing and sometimes hostile nation states, it would need only the hospitals and rescue services. Because that is a utopianly impossible hope (but one that spent the last decades of his life arguing for), we need the hospitals and rescue services even more, precisely because we have all got armies too.
So the quest for rational social endeavour has to proceed with more limited objectives and by more piecemeal steps. Let us, for an obvious instance, try to keep war confined to wartime, by not dropping thousands of landmines that persist for decades after a war鈥檚 end, killing and maiming arbitrarily.
If landmines are essential to slowing the advance of an oncoming force, or interdicting areas of a battle zone, how about some research into biodegradable landmines? One could make many such suggestions 鈥� and they do not have to go so far as (for example) antibiotic-coated bullets: we would not like to make the absurdities of our contradictions too obvious to ourselves, now, would we?
鈥淎ntibiotic-coated bullets would make the absurdity too obvious鈥�
Another example of an attitude which creates more problems than it solves is the very common aversion people feel to donating the organs of their deceased loved ones, or even to signing a donor card on their own behalf. There is a powerful cross-cultural sentiment in this. When China鈥檚 last Emperor, Pu Yi, was driven out of Peking鈥檚 Forbidden City in 1924, all the palace鈥檚 eunuchs had to go too, but they refused to leave until each had been given the little box containing his testicles, because no Chinese person was allowed to return to his ancestors at death incomplete.
A recent article in 快猫短视频 described how the illegal trade in body parts is prompted by a similar kind of reluctance felt in almost all societies (10 May, p 50). Most people deeply dislike the idea of treating the remains of the departed as something to harvest, dismember and exploit in utilitarian fashion. Yet there is a shortage of donor organs, and much remediable suffering results from the squeamishness that people feel. A black market in organs stolen from corpses is another result; and because it is illegal these are typically not screened for HIV or other pathogens.
This, like the contradiction of simultaneous military and humanitarian endeavour, is a matter of attitude. Education and experience can change attitudes: both are needed in both these cases.
Read all A C Grayling鈥檚 articles here
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