In my last essay, I promised to work through the “Boiling Baby” dilemma to reach a morally justifiable course of action for the actor in the hypothetical. It’s been awhile since the original post, so I’ll start by restating the dilemma:

Imagine that you are a federal law enforcement agent in New York. In the course of your duties, you capture an Islamic terrorist just before he can set off a nuclear explosive in the heart of the city. The terrorist tells you that another bomb has been planted in Chicago, where your family happens to live, that he knows where it is, and, unless it’s stopped, it will be detonated within the hour. The catch is that he won’t tell you the specific location. Other agents attempt to torture the information out of the terrorist, but he knows that he only has to hold out for an hour to prevail. Torture is therefore ineffective.

Another agent locates the terrorist’s newborn son. The baby is brought to the interrogation room and handed to you. One of the other agents prepares a large pot of boiling water.

You are certain of four things: (1) the terrorist is telling the truth about the existence of the second bomb and his knowledge of its location; (2) there is no way to discern the bomb’s locations before it detonates without being told; (3) if the bomb is not located and defused, it will detonate and kill hundreds of thousands of people; and (4) if you begin to boil the baby, the terrorist will reveal the location of the second bomb.

The first step in the methodolgy we’ve been using is to determine against what metestick to measure the morality of our actions. Although our options may seem limitless, there are really only three general approaches: a nihlistic ethic, in which the will of the actor is the only moral imperative; a consequentalist ethic, in which the morality of an action is judged by its outcomes; or a deontological ethic, in which the morality of an action is judged regardless of its outcome. I concluded previously in “Jesus, Jeremy Bentham, and Ann Frank” that a Christian is compelled by scripture to follow a deontological ethic. I will proceed from that conclusion.

Deontologically, our decision whether to boil the baby is judged independently of its consequences. That is, the fact that deciding not to boil the baby may contribute to hundreds of thousands of death is simply irrelevant to the morality of the decision.

Boiling the baby is self-evidently wrong, taking the action in a vacuum. We cannot, then, boil the baby, regardless of the consequences of failing to do so. (Boiling the terrorist himself is a closer question–reasonable people can disagree over what morally may be done to an aggressor to stop his aggression). We are prohibited from boiling the baby, and, by the terms of the hypothetical, can only watch helplessly as New York counts down to destruction.

Some of you will, undoubtedly, find the conclusion hard to swallow. How can the rights, or even the life, of one baby–and a terrorist’s baby, at that–outweigh the lives of hundreds of thousands of other innocent people? The answer lies in the fundamental difference between consequentialist and deontological thought.

Consequentialism, by its own terms, holds actors responsible for the results of their actions, and asks only that those results cause more good than harm. Consequentialist virtue requires accurate prediction of the results over time of any action–a Godlike knowledge that lies beyond human ability. Although strains of consequentialism recognize and seek to limit this “omniscience problem” (such as by holding people accountable only for what they actually foresaw, or what a reasonable person would foresee), these limits are unprincipled, and inherently contradict the central premise of consequentialism.

In the Boiling Baby dilemma, the consequentialist must seriously consider boiling the baby, because the harm of doing so would be outweighed by the good of saving all those lives. The chain of causality of the decision does not, however, stop with the disarming or explosion of the bomb.  If the morality of the decision is a function of its consequences, moral responsibility for the boiling baby decision must continue beyond the immediate consequence of detotonation or disarmament.  It is possible–arguably likely–that boiling the baby would outrage the Islamic world and inspire further attacks on the United States, resulting in greater loss of life than if the New York bomb had been allowed to detonate. Boiling the baby might thus result in greater death than refusing to do so. Alternatively, the bomb could be defective. Boiling the baby would then be reprensible, because it caused significant harm with no countervailing benefit. On the other hand, it is possible–arguably likely–that a successful nuclear attack on New York could result in nuclear retaliation by the United States, magnifying the consequences of refusing to boil the baby.

There is no way to predict with certainty the primary effects of the decision, let alone the secondary and further removed consequences, or to divine the final balance of harms and goods that will result. Consequentialism thus makes intentional virtue-and even intentional vice–impossible. We cannot know whether we have acted for good or evil until all the consequences of our actions have played out, and the benefits and harms can be weighed.

Deontological reasoning, by contrast, assigns moral responsibility only to intentional actions. We are not morally responsible for the terrorist’s decision to place a bomb in New York. We should try to stop him, certainly, but if we fail, moral culpability for the deaths lies only with he who intended them to occur.

While a deontological actor knows no better than a consequentialist the results over time of boiling–or refusing to boil–the baby, the deontological actor knows that boiling the baby is wrong. He knows that if he chooses to boil the baby, he is morally responsible for that wrong. He also knows that while he should use his best efforts to stop the bomb from exploding, he is not morally responsible if it does.

So, how can one baby outweigh the lives of hundreds of thousands of other innocent people? Deontological ethics tells us that we lack the ability to weigh those lives accurately against each other in the context of a moral decision affecting them. More importantly, we have no moral responsibility or right to weigh lives in that fashion. Our responsibility is something more attainable for mere mortals–to judge the intrisnic good or evil of our own intentions and acts, to complete those which are good, and to avoid those which are evil.