Is cancer 'evil'?

At his trial for heresy, Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I’m absolutely sure that Mike would have agreed with that statement, and that if Mike had lived 2500 years ago, he would have been thrilled to share a regular coffee with Socrates over some philosophical conversations. (Mike would have provided much of the comic relief … if he were ever able to get over how damn good Greek coffee is.)

Morality and ethics is a good chunk of what philosophy is all about. They address how we ought to live our lives, and can there really be any more important question than that? So what is good, and what is evil? What do these words mean and do they ever make any sense, let alone when we might want to apply them to a disease like cancer?

Some people think that good and evil only make sense if there is some kind of Divine Being who determines what good and evil are so that moral truths are objectively true, at least in the sense that they are true regardless of how any people might feel about them. However, under these circumstances, I don’t see how morality could be anything other than the subjective preferences of the Divine Being. On the other hand, if moral truths were objectively true independent of the Divine Being, well, then what would we need the Divine Being for vis a vis morality anyways? So much for “Divine Command Morality”. This is known as the Euthyphro dilemma, and it, like the quote at the beginning of this post, can also be credited to, you guessed it: Socrates. If the Euthyphro dilemma isn’t enough of a problem for Divine Command theories of morality, another issue that they face is that arguments and evidence for the existence of a Divine Being have not yet succeeded in establishing that a Divine Being is likely to exist. If no Divine Being exists, well, that would pose the most serious problem of all for Divine Command theories of morality, since they couldn’t possibly be true.

What clearly do exist, and what I’d like to propose are relevant for moral considerations, are desires. We all experience them, and it would therefore seem that we can’t deny that they exist. Desires are an excellent foundation for moral considerations because, as opposed to Supreme Beings, we know that they are real. Notice that we don’t have any moral obligations to rocks or vegetables, because they do not experience (as far as we can reasonably tell, anyways) any desires.

A good desire is one that tends to fulfill other desires. Conversely, an evil desire is one that tends to thwart other desires. It’s that simple.

Let’s look at an example:Why is rape an evil desire? Because the desire to rape thwarts more desires than it fulfills. If this isn’t clear to you, then consider the following (which, I’m sure, Mike would have thought of as a pretty cool way of considering whether a desire is good or bad): Imagine that you have in front of you, a knob, and that by turning that dial up, you can increase the prevalence among people for the desire to rape. Notice that as you turn the knob up, and more and more people want to rape, the desires of all of their victims to avoid rape will be thwarted every time the rapists succeed, and the desires of rapists will be thwarted every time they fail. On the other hand, if you turn the dial all the way down, and eliminate the desire to rape, then no desires are thwarted. The desires of the potential victims to avoid rape are no longer thwarted, and the desire to rape itself can no longer be thwarted because it no longer exists!

Notice that all desires – both the desires of the rapists, and the desires of their victims – are taken into account. There are no privileged desires. All that matters is whether a given desire tends to thwart (bad desire) or fulfill (good desire) other desires.

We can turn the knob up on good desires by praising them and rewarding those who act on them, and we can turn the knob down on bad desires by condemning them and punishing those who act on them.

So what about cancer? Clearly, cancer thwarts our desire to live, achieve goals, and be happy. If we could turn a dial on cancer up so that more and more people developed cancer, it is clear that many more desires would be thwarted than if we turned that dial down. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we actually had such a dial, or if there existed, at least just once and for one special person, a dial that we could have turned all the way down to shrink and eventually eliminate the tumor that grew in Mike’s brain? How many times and in how many ways did we all make that wish?

On the other hand, cancer itself has no desire. In that sense, we can’t really think of it as any more evil than a tsunami, or the AIDS virus. Still, there can be no doubt that cancer thwarts our desires, plain and simple. Accordingly, we have a word for that type of evil in English: natural evil.

Mike was naturally good, wasn’t he? I was never privy to any hint that there was an evil connective tissue, let alone bone, in his body. I’d like to think that one of my tasks in life is to turn the ‘Mike-dial’ up by remembering and praising the things that I loved about Mike, the characteristics that fulfilled so many desires in the lives around him. The Mike-dial is wired directly into this blog, so my thanks go out to Sarah for setting it up and for all of the contributors who have been cranking it so far.

I wonder what Mike would have thought about desirism – the moral theory I have begun to describe in this post. I sure wish that I could talk to him about it. I guess that’s one more desire thwarted by cancer.

[If you’re interested in learning more about desirism (formerly known as desire utilitarianism, and not to be confused with desire fulfillment utilitarianism) as a moral theory, then Google is your friend, as is iTunes, where you can subscribe to a free podcast specifically devoted to systematically explaining it. The podcast is called “Morality in the Real World”. You won’t read about desirism in any philosophy textbooks, nor in any philosophy journals (yet!).]