Newsletter No. 445

445 • 19.10.2014 3 Letter 3: The Curious Case of Many Bosses 13 October 2014 Dear K., It was a pleasant surprise every time I received your letter. You must stop apologizing for intruding upon the serenity of my retirement. With a full working life ahead of you, you have no idea you could not possibly intrude upon anyone’s retirement. And, forgive my cynicism (which has nothing to do with retirement), retirement does not equate to serenity. Would I find it troublesome or tedious to write back? Hemingway once said to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Letter-writing is such a swell way to keep from working and yet feels you’ve done something.’ I am in bliss when engaged in this converse of the pens. You wrote half-jokingly that you sometimes found yourself serving more than one boss. I’d like to take it up half-seriously . I cannot say I have not heard such a comment before. Neither can I deny that at some points in my serving years I had not harboured similar feelings. But I was once sagely advised by a senior academic-cum-administrator that the university is neither a company nor an organization but a community. In a community, roles are seldom defined or demarcated purely along lines of command and responsibilities. Loyalties are not only divided but, in a good sense, multiplied to achieve communal ends. Also, in a community, people don’t just work there. They live there. You must know what solid lines and what dotted lines mean within a management structure. In a university setting, the dotted lines are perhaps more interesting than the solid ones. It is important to connect the dots, or better still, see the dots where there aren’t any. The essence of a working relationship can be captured by any one of three prepositions: On the lowest rung, you work under someone (‘the boss’); one step up, you work for someone (‘the supervisor’); on the summit, you work with someone (‘the colleague’ or, at the risk of sounding utopian, ‘the comrade’). Regardless of your respective ranks, you (plural) can choose which preposition to use, with results that may not be too subtle to give you cause for reflection. It has not escaped people’s notice that many types of job have disappeared in the last decade or so. What many did not realize is that employers are disappearing, too. In his new book The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad For So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It (2014), David Weil analyzes the vanishing of regular payroll employment. Weil estimates that one third of the workforce is now employed through intermediaries (independent contractors, franchisees, third-party management, etc.) with more and more exacting demands but tougher and tougher terms in wages, job security and benefits. When I learned that the University is promoting a positive workplace for all and has put in place some stringent guidelines for outsourcing, I could not suppress a cheer. You do not only have an employer but an old-school employer who cares. In the calculating world of maximized profit and value-for-money, what company or organization would go to some length to give recognition to their employees of 20, 25 or even 35 years? In my days, an ex post facto letter of appreciation was often sent to the helper, and carbon-copied to his/her supervising officer. As new generations of administrators may do things differently and electronic means of communication are inevitably preferred, this may have become a rarity. But when you are in a position where you have been helped out by someone dottedly connected to you or not at all, think what this generous and genial gesture can mean. At the very least, it would give the recipient as much satisfaction as yours that arrive at my doorstep. Sincerely yours, H. 一封家書 Letters to a Young Executive P rof. Li Hon-lam is the only member in the planning committee of the newly established CUHK Centre for Bioethics who is not from the medical or biological fields. He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy of CUHK and specializes in practical ethics. He believes that philosophical examination of issues of public concern (whether abortion, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, etc., are morally permissible) can lead to their clarification and resolution. Professor Li explains his areas of inquiry with a few dilemmas and the Doctrine of Double Effect. The Transplant Case Suppose a doctor has five patients, each with failure of a different organ. She can save them by killing a healthy person who came in for a regular checkup, and transplanting his organs to her five patients. Most people would think that it is wrong to kill the innocent person in order to save the five patients. Now suppose we can save either five strangers in Place A or one in Place B, but not all. Most people would think that we should save the five strangers in Place A instead of the one in Place B. What accounts for these apparently different conclusions? The Doctrine of Double Effect states that there is a moral difference between directly intended harm and harm that is merely foreseen. In the above case, killing an innocent person for his organs is a directly intended harm and therefore morally reprehensible, whereas not saving the stranger in Place B (while saving five in Place A) constitutes harm that is merely foreseen. The Doctrine also requires that the bad effect (or harm) must not be the means by which to achieve the good effect. That is, I cannot take a stranger’s kidney by force in order to save my friend, even though I do not intend the stranger’s death. That is because the harm (taking away someone’s kidney) is the means to achieving the supposedly good effect of saving another human being. Furthermore, the Doctrine requires that the good effect achieved should neutralize or even outweigh the bad effect indirectly caused (or foreseen). The Doctrine is, however, untenable. Suppose a surgeon can save five patients but in the process must generate lethal fumes, which will seep into the room next door and kill the patient there (who for some reason cannot be removed). Although the Doctrine would justify this operation, moral philosophers generally believe that the Doctrine gives the wrong answer in this case. The Trolley Problem A related problem has attracted quite a bit of enthusiasm among academic philosophers lately. It goes like this: you are driving a trolley. Some terrorists have tied five innocent people to the track ahead. The brakes have been sabotaged so that you have no way of stopping the trolley. You would run over the five people if you do nothing. The only possible way out is to turn right onto a sidetrack where only one person is tied to the track. Should you turn right, or let the trolley run straight ahead? Almost everyone (supporter of the Doctrine of Double Effect included) would say that it is morally permissible to turn right. What if, instead of making a turn to the right, the terrorists gave you the alternative of pushing a fat man in front of the trolley in order to have it stopped in time so that the five people will not be hit (whereas the fat man will be killed)? This is sometimes known as the Fat Man Problem. Equally abominable it seems, but some people may think that steering the trolley right is more permissible than pushing a man in the flesh next to you. It is thought that you are ‘using’ the fat man. The Loop Case Further consider this: if you turn right onto the man on the sidetrack, the trolley will run over him, but (in this version of the example) it will come back in a loop that will run over the five people on the main track. However, if you control the steering in a certain way, then upon impact the trolley will sink into the man on the sidetrack, thereby coming to a stop. You would be ‘using’ him as a stopper, in the same sense that you had used the fat man in the previous scenario. Yet stopping the trolley this way seems to be more permissible than pushing the fat man. Why? Professor Li looks at these cases this way: it is impermissible to kill the healthy patient in the Transplant Case. To kill him without his consent would violate his right to life. And there might be a more just solution: the five patients with organ failure can agree (say, by drawing lots) who should give up treatment and donate his good organs to the other four patients. In the Fat Man Problem and the Loop Case, Professor Li thinks that there is a moral difference between using someone (the fat man) impermissibly, and using someone (the man on the sidetrack who would prove to be a stopper) permissibly. One might argue that the man on the sidetrack would die anyway. Whether the trolley sinks into him or not is therefore morally irrelevant. But if we push the fat man, we would be violating his right to life. The Crisscross Problem Finally, Professor Li offers a variant of the Trolley Problem: at a crisscross, the driver of the runaway trolley must turn either left or right. Turning left would hit five people, whereas turning right would hit only one. The consequences would be the same as in the Trolley Problem, but the choice is more obvious as averting a crash on five (the good effect) outweighs, arithmetically at least, squashing one (the bad effect). If one can argue that inertia, or doing nothing, on the part of the driver (in the Trolley Problem) is not morally valuable, the Trolley and Crisscross Problems would look alike, and consequently the drivers in both cases should turn right. It is finding and comparing answers to these questions that exercises a philosopher’s mind such as Professor Li’s for the investigations undertaken at the Centre for Bioethics from a philosophical perspective. 觀看錄像，請掃描QR碼或瀏覽以下網址： To watch the video, please scan the QR code or visit: www.iso.cuhk.edu.hk/video/?nsl445-li-hon-lam