In the previous article, I said I wanted to make a transition from one thing to another; in fact, I only wrote half of it. I had originally planned to move from the Olympics to media, but the Olympics piece ended up being about the right length, and the latter half was a bigger theme. So let me pick it up again now.
At the time I mentioned that, although on the one hand we were paying attention to the reeducation-through-labor case and satirizing politics, on the other hand we were also thrilled by the Olympics’ gold-medal contest. That is not a contradiction, much less something shameful. Recently I reposted an article, “Why Explore the Universe,” which asks: why, when children in Africa are dying of hunger every day, should we still spend billions to explore Mars? These questions all involve some kind of real moral shackle, something that would bind our pursuit of ideals. Of course, I try to separate the two—what does Tang Hui have to do with gold medals? What do African refugees have to do with Mars exploration?
But this attempt to draw a line, of course, is not limitless. We think it is admirable that Thales forgot to worry about the pit at his feet and became absorbed in the starry heavens; but if Thales’ son had just fallen into a pit, with life or death unknown, and the old gentleman was still leisurely gazing up at the stars, then that would probably be hard to justify. If it were not Tang Hui but my own father and mother who had just been seized for reeducation through labor, and I were still talking animatedly about Olympic gold medals, that would also be rather unbecoming. If a child who is about to starve to death is right beside me, groaning, and I am still engrossed in academic research, without even lifting my head, that would be far too cruel.
If, before my eyes, there were a poor person about to starve to death—or, to put it more mildly, just a pitiable hungry wretch—then I certainly would not keep my head down and eat and drink heartily; I would be willing to share some food with him, or even give him all of it. But if I am cheerfully eating a birthday cake, and you say to me: there are still so many starving people in Africa, how can you be so shamelessly happy while eating? Then I might keep my head down and pretend not to hear, or even get so angry that I smash the cake in your face. Where, then, is the difference? The person in front of me and the African refugees may both be strangers to me; the value of their lives is not higher or lower in itself. Their difference is entirely relative—relative to my “distance” from them.
In fact, very few people would seriously accuse me of not sharing my cake with Africans—I couldn’t even get it there if I wanted to. Am I supposed to make a special trip halfway across the globe just to divide up a cake with the starving? Or should we simply run off to the Sahara Desert and share weal and woe with the most miserable people there in order to avoid criticism?
Of course, in a certain sense everyone’s life is blameworthy; everyone bears guilt, more or less. But we do believe, after all, that not handing the cake to the starving person right in front of me is more culpable, whereas not immediately rushing off to a camp for African refugees is something that, relatively speaking, should not be blamed.
This calls to mind a classic example in ethics: the so-called trolley problem.
A speeding train is about to run over 5 people. In the first scenario, as a switchman on the scene, the only way to save those 5 people is to throw a switch and divert the train onto another track, but that would kill 1 person on that other track. In the second scenario, suppose there is a fat man on the platform beside the tracks; the only way to save those 5 people is to push that fat man off the track, thereby sacrificing him to save the lives of the 5 people.
The mainstream answer to this problem is: in the first case, one should throw the switch, while in the second case one should not push the fat man. The reason is that in the first case, the sacrifice of the innocent person is merely an incidental result of the rescue action, whereas in the second case the fat man’s sacrifice is used as “a mere tool.” As for doubts about this standard answer, I already wrote quite a bit in the assignment from that year. In short, the real key here is not whether the fat man is used as a “tool,” but the issue of “distance.” Let us slightly change the assumption: suppose there is a large chair on the platform, and the only way to save those 5 people is to push that chair off the track—except that, by coincidence, a fat man is tied to the chair? Or, to make it even more extreme: the fat man is wearing a conductive golden-thread robe; if you throw this robe onto the track, it will short-circuit the railway and save the five people, but there is not enough time for the fat man to take off the robe. Then should you throw down the robe together with the man? In this case, the “tool” used for rescue is not the fat man as a person, but the chair or the clothing; it just happens that there is also a fat man in there. This is the same as the case of using another stretch of track that just happens to contain one unlucky fellow in order to save the five people. The fat man’s death is an incidental result; he himself has not become a tool.
Forget the word games of ethics or logic and look at it from intuition and emotion: we feel that the switch-throwing option is more acceptable, while the act of pushing the fat man is hard to bring oneself to do. This is reasonable. The a priori problem of modern utilitarian ethics lies not only in the fact that it overemphasizes the calculation of value rather than the pursuit of the good; it also lies in the fact that, even in terms of calculation of value alone, the calculations of mainstream ethics are objectified, objective, absolute perspectives, and do not consider the relative “distance.” Ethicists calculate the weight of one person against five, weigh the labels of tool versus non-tool, but rarely calculate “distance.” Merely because that fat man is “closer” than the unlucky fellow on the switch track, do we therefore have more reason to sacrifice the latter? Yes. Human life has no absolute hierarchy of nobility or worth, but it does have relative differences of nearness and remoteness, kinship and estrangement. In the Chinese context, “ethics” itself originally means a theory of closeness and distance; to assess a person’s conduct, one cannot avoid placing him within the real environment in which he exists, viewing him in the actual distances that he has at hand.
In a certain sense, the blind spot of modern value ethics is the blind spot of modern “value” itself—we use a unified, neutral, linear monetary number to measure the value of things, but we often forget that “price” is only the final result of all actual acts of exchange and communication. Separated from the real environment of contact and exchange, anything is worth nothing at all. If no one can come to trade, then even ten thousand taels of gold on a desert island have no value. The “value” of those ten thousand taels of gold only “happens” when they come into contact and exchange with things nearby.
To measure the value of a thing, like measuring the “value” of an action, is not simply to conduct an objectifying analysis of its “content”; it must be weighed within a real field of nearness and distance.
In my ontology of media, this field of nearness and distance is precisely media. “Distance” in space and time is fundamentally mediatic; “distance” is first of all not a coordinate relation measured in meters, centimeters, or millimeters, but something revealed by media. If I am in a control room operating everything through indicator lights, intercoms, and electronic buttons, then even if the track and the unlucky fat man are in fact just outside the wall, they are still extremely far from me. And if I am watching every glance and every gesture of the sacrifice from a monitor far away, I may find it hard to act, as though I were right there on the scene.
“Money” is also a medium. The cake beside me may have nothing whatsoever to do with African refugees, yet the money in my bank card is another matter: it seems that as long as I click the mouse lightly, this money could “immediately” be transferred to a charitable account in Africa. Then, through television and the internet, we can once again sympathetically see the living conditions of people on the other side of the globe, to the point that one even feels that world is closer than the world of one’s neighbors.
But does that mean we should transfer the money right away? No. Although globalization and mass media have made every corner of the earth seem close at hand, in a certain sense distance has merely been forcibly leveled, and everything has become equally remote. Right after television finishes broadcasting the most brutal disaster, it may immediately switch to the most boisterous celebration; all locations are “equal,” overwhelming you, even disorienting your sense of time-space scenes and causing you to lose your bearings. Even when people are truly experiencing certain landscapes or events firsthand, they would rather pull out a camera (or a phone) and keep shooting from a spectator’s point of view, then go home and watch the footage later, than immerse themselves fully in the scene. New media bring a world that ought to be far away closer to us, and then make us stand on opposite sides from a world that ought to be near. This is the fundamental reason for many ethical dilemmas. The aim of traditional ethics is that rulers should be rulers, subjects subjects, fathers fathers, sons sons; each person occupying his own position, maintaining proper distance, near and far, intimate and estranged, so that the whole society has a measured rhythm of tension and relaxation. But now the situation is that new media have stirred up all positions and distances, and ethics has not yet adapted to the world’s new changes.
Modern ethics must also become part of “philosophy of technology”; ethics must bring technology (media) into view, just as philosophy of technology must also pay attention to the ethical intentions of technical things. When we say that technology (media) is not neutral, that technology has “value-ladenness,” this does not mean that there is a ready-made value system into which every technical thing is born with some inherent bias—good or bad. In fact, human value systems are historical too, products of the environment of an era. That is to say, every new technology, while constructing a new life-world, is also participating in the formulation of new value standards. A knife contains the intention of killing, but is killing good or bad? What kind of killing counts as the act of a hero? In a world where knives are the main weapon, the value of life is measured with the participation of knives.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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