a novel by Liam Durcan
EXCERPT
THE VILLAGE HAS been captured by enemy soldiers with orders to kill all civilians. A woman is among a group of townspeople who have sought refuge in the hayloft of an abandoned barn. They can hear the soldiers outside; the soldiers are coming towards the barn. At that moment, the woman’s infant daughter begins to cry. She covers her mouth to block the sound. If she removes her hand from the child’s mouth, the soldier will be alerted and will kill the woman, her child and all the townspeople. To save herself and the others, she must kill her child.
Patrick thinks about this dilemma as he walks the deserted streets of Den Haag to where the streets end. The crying baby dilemma is meant to highlight the conflict between group welfare and personal moral conviction. The emotional response, the abhorrence associated with the thought of killing one’s child, competes with the abstract understanding that the child will die under either circumstance and that many lives can be saved by committing this act.
It is a terrible thing to contemplate. Something visceral occurs, Patrick has felt it. He’s watched as the faces of his undergrad students furrow, as though for the first time, while considering this dilemma. They answer slowly, toeing their way along the process as though they can hear ice creaking.
Philosophers have had the question to themselves for centuries. Utilitarianism versus deontology. John Stuart Mill against Kant in the ultimate cage match. The philosophers fail, with the world a flaming laboratory where this question is dealt with every day, they fail. Now neuroscientists like those in Patrick’s old group have been eying the dilemma—specifically, what part of the brain was activated in a decision-making process, and whether relatively greater activity in certain parts of the brain reflected utilitarian response.
He’s thought of this a lot in the last two years. He’s wanted to do the experiments himself, to define a neural basis of conflict in moral judgments, to understand how they are resolved. He wants to know what happened in the brain to allow the Nazi doctors of Auschwitz to continue with their day. He wants to know what sort of brain activity, what deft imbalance between competing regions made it possible for Hernan García to participate in the torture and killings of civilians, in the death José-Maria Fernandez, a boy he knew.
Of course, Patrick didn’t do this experiment. He was busy getting a prospectus together and figuring what parts of Globomart’s new promotional campaign were maximally activating temporal lobe structures. But the study was done, and done well, and showed that the Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex were activated during these dilemmas, and that the Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was even more strongly activated when a decision was made to follow the utilitarian route.He cannot imagine Hernan as being a true believer. Instead, Patrick thinks Hernan traded the lives of those held at Batallion 316 for those of his family. That must be it. He must have been threatened, his family threatened. Patrick can’t make sense of it any other way other than thinking of Hernan García’s brain being activated in the way that any brain is when faced with a conflict: the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, a strip on the inner aspect of the frontal lobe that abuts its partner on the other side, is activated. This is the equivalent of moral hesitation, when the reflexes of what one does are stripped away and one has to consider one’s actions. The Anterior Cingulate Cortex blushes with blood, he’s seen it, and the machines he’s used show this part of the brain light up like a landing strip.
That is how he needs to think of Hernan now, that his Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was activated at a crucial moment, resolving the conflict. In some ways it absolves him. It makes smothering easier to contemplate. Evil is unfathomable, but Patrick knows how to measure blood flow.
This is Den Haag at dusk. This is Patrick walking. This is the sea.