On a recent drive to Phoenix, Simon and I were chatting about this, that, and the other thing. It's a 2-hour minimum drive, so we have plenty of time to talk about all manner of things. Sometimes our conversations are silly, sometimes they are serious, but frequently, they're completely random.
On this particular drive, I posed the question to Simon: If you were on the Titanic and you were offered a spot in a lifeboat, would you give that spot up for a child? Simon, ever the pragmatist, simply stated that he would not give up his seat, but that he would hold the child in his lap, ensuring that both of them survived. Of course he finds a way to thwart the problem with physics. Okay, so what if the child was a teenager and too big for a lap. No dodging this one. He stated that he probably wouldn't give up his seat for a teenager. What if it was a teenager he knew? He thought for a moment, and then said that yes, he would give up his seat for a teenager that he knew. I asked him how it was different to give up his seat for a teenager he knew versus a teenager that he didn't know. He thought about it again for a moment, and then stated in all reality, he would give up his seat for a teenager that he didn't know as well.
We continued the conversation. Would he give up his seat for a woman? He said that he would give up his seat for a woman if she was the mother of other children in the boat. A single woman? No. He did say that he would give up his seat for me, and which point I stated that if he was going down with the boat, I was going down with him. He told me that was silly; I told him that I wouldn't want to survive something that traumatic without him. He said that Rose survived the sinking of the Titanic and did just fine without Jack. In reference to the movie, Simon also stated that if we went down together, he would absolutely find a way for both of us to fit on a floating piece of wood together. He chastised Rose and Jack for not being able to do it, and said that Jack didn't need to die at all.
The questions then turned to me. Would I give up my seat for a child? I had thought about this situation randomly last year, and at that time, I had decided that no, I would not give up my seat for a child, any child (the lap idea had never crossed my mind). This was my main reason why: I am a person who meaningfully contributes to society, and who still has several years to continue to contribute. How do I know that the child I give my seat up to won't turn out to be a murderer, a rapist, a swindler, a person who skips out on a child support, or a drug addict? I know it sounds really messed up to think about people that way, especially children, but in a situation of life and death, who is the better candidate to survive? In short, I wasn't thinking about who would best survive physically, but about who deserved to survive based on what he or she could contribute after the fact. Is denying a child the potential to become someone great, or someone nefarious, considered selfish? Am I putting too much importance on what I'd already accomplished, and what I knew I still could accomplish if given a full lifespan? At what point does one life become more important than another?
When I now think about the situation with the knowledge that I know the child...if, for instance, the child happens be my niece or nephew, or the child of close friends or family members, then it becomes a little more tricky. Of course I would want them to survive, and how could I look their parents in the face and tell them that I was keeping my seat and that their child would die with the boat? In that situation, I would have to give up my seat, but I still probably wouldn't want to. In a sense, if I gave up my seat for any reason other than selflessness, it would be out of guilt, rather than out of consideration of future potential contribution. In my mind, that takes away from the gesture of giving up the seat, regardless of the fact that the outcome is the same...the child survives and I die.
I told Simon all of this, all the while afraid that he was going to think I was some sort of evil person who believed that non-contributing members of society don't deserve to be there at all, regardless if they are children. He thought about it for a bit, and he didn't necessarily agree with what I said, but he understood where it was coming from. Why do the lives of children trump the lives of adults? Why is the death of a child so much more tragic than the death of an adult? I know these sound like silly questions, and some will dismiss my questions as the ramblings of someone who has never had children, and therefore doesn't understand how a child's life is more important than an adult's, but I think they're rather thoughtful questions, and they're questions that people don't ask because they make others uncomfortable.
In the end, given the idea that children are able to sit on laps and would therefore automatically survive, Simon would give up his seat for a teenager, but probably no one else. I would give up my seat for a teenager I knew, but no one else. Does that say something about our ethics? In this situation, is Simon ethically better than me? It's easy to come to these conclusions when not actually faced with this situation in real life, but it's something that was interesting to both think about and talk about.
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