Guilty until proven innocent

Do whalers feel the burden of wiping out an entire species? Representation pic

Two days ago, Russia bombed a school in Ukraine. Some weeks earlier they bombed a hospital where old people, women and children were sheltering. Some Russian finger fired the missiles that killed these people. Someone else ordered him to do it. At the top of it all, a wretched man called Putin knows that simple people living ordinary lives are being slaughtered at his behest.

Do you ever wonder if any of them feels a twinge of conscience as they do the deeds?

Russia is not the world's first brutal country. The USA is right up there with them, raining napalm down on helpless Vietnamese villagers, destroying lives and livelihoods in Iraq in the name of a democracy their own country is rapidly losing. What do those soldiers feel? Guilt? Anger? A wrenching feeling that no one should be asked to do this to another human being?

Does a rapist feel remorse when he is caught? One of Nirbhaya's rapists staunchly defended his actions saying that any girl who stayed out that late was asking for it. He believed that he was upholding some foggy moral standard by raping her.

You could cast your net wider and ask whether shoplifters regret their kleptomaniac impulses? Do whalers feel the burden of wiping out an entire species? Do farmers who burn their crops and pollute entire states with a thick heavy smog agree that they are killing the planet that is home to them?

Of course they don't, and you don't have to be an activist or an ecologist to guess that. Environmentally damaging actions fall in the beguiling category of things that do not ‘feel' wrong. Sawing down a sequoia does not seem like a killing; harpooning a whale seems like a legitimate food-seeking enterprise in a cold land without agriculture but, hallelujah, such fertile fishing waters. And how could your ageing mother feel moved by the information that her refrigerator might contain a coolant which, when it is liberated at the end of the fridge's life, will eventually deplete ozone in the upper atmosphere, and thus increase the incidence of skin cancer in a place called New South Wales, Australia?

We're all in this grey zone from time to time, when we do something that we are told is harmful or even brutal, and yet - it doesn't feel wrong. Here's why: there's a simple calculation that we all do very well, no matter how much we declare that every person matters. It's called the greatest good of the greatest number.

Human suffering is usually treated as cumulative, even by environmentalists. One person's pain is considered to be less than 10 people's pain and the crusader must seek out those issues where she sees the greatest harm befalling the greatest number. Crusaders are rather good at such cost-benefit analyses. Few activists would even blink if asked to choose between spending several years saving one individual or the same time saving a whole tribe.

For most people, It doesn't make sense to fight for small things, even if you know that small things add up to big things.

People consider only their own gain because the harm they cause seems trivial. Imagine you were a cattle herder in Africa's Sahel region suddenly faced by the opportunity to buy 10 cows, in a community where wealth is measured in heads of cattle. But the land has been overgrazed, only bracken remains. More cows means even less grass. But your logic tells you that you gain greatly by buying the cattle.

The effect on the remaining herders is merely that each of their cows would have just a little less to eat. The gains are large and all yours but the losses seem small because they are divided over all the herders.

But if each herdsman bought 10 cows using this same logic, the land would be barren in one season. The cattle would starve and the humans would pay a heavier price. It would piously be called a humanitarian crisis.

I often wonder how safe planes are, but I already know it's a foolish question. No one would believe an aircraft manufacturer who claim his planes were accident-proof no matter what he'd spent on R&D. However, you might find him more credible if he said he'd greatly reduced the chances of fatal accidents on his plane.

What you don't question and the aircraft manufacturer doesn't say is the horrible assumption that a certain number of people are surely going to die in that plane. The manufacturer has done an internal calculation about ‘acceptable losses' - the number of human lives whose death in his plane he is willing to have on his conscience.

I'm neither an environmentalist nor an aviation expert. But people are saying and doing things that kill people and explaining them in reasonable words. If we don't question their answers, we're letting killers walk free.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.