A few weeks ago, P decided to break my solitary confinement here in the solarium by bringing home two kittens. She had been discussing the project for days beforehand, showing me pictures of adoptable critters on the phone and endlessly texting their keepers in search of just the right feline. The plan had been, as far as I know, to bring back one kitten; imagine my surprise when she came through the door last month holding two.
How did this happen? Peg explained that the smaller of the kittens had scampered up to her and tried to crawl into her lap at the animal shelter, while the other remaining kitten sat aloof in the corner of the cage. Once it became apparent, however, that P was going home with only the runt, the other began to cry and howl. "They're brothers," the shelter lady explained, "and they've never been apart. They're the last of the litter."
Thus, rather than bringing home one kitten, Peg was guilted into bringing home the pair, named by the shelter folks Ghost and Goblin (it was Halloween season, after all).
After renaming the two Dean (the little one) and Slane (after a favorite Irish whiskey here at Wyldswood North), we began to notice differences. Slane was twice the size of Dean, and the gap just seemed to grow over time. Slane had long hair; Dean's was short. Slane had a white chest and paws, with swirls down his flanks; Dean was just a gray tabby, head-to-toe. Slane will share the room with you, but keeps his distance--at night he sleeps at the foot of the bed. Dean can't bear being anywhere but my lap all day, and sleeps like a cat-beard draped around Peg's chin at night.
Clearly, these two brothers did not have much in common.
Here's Slane this morning.
And here is his elfin brother, Dean.
At some point we started thinking they did not entirely share the same DNA. Peg, having taken and passed college biology (unlike your author), recalled that female cats stay in heat long enough to have litters of kittens by different fathers. Maybe Slane and Dean were simply the result of two separate cat couplings.
Or, maybe not.
A couple weeks ago the two of them went back to the shelter for the big orchiectomy and vaccinations, and afterwards the vet sent us their medical records and some tags for the collars we've never bought them. I was scanning the cover sheets and noticed that Slane's birthday is shown as 8.15.20, while Dean's is 8.29.20. Unless momma endured fourteen days of labor, therefore, they are no more siblings than you and I. In order to clear the cage for the next litter, our friend at the animal shelter had lied to Miss Peggy.
The episode had me mulling over this morning my ethics classes back at seminary. What would the best-known ethicists have to say about whether it was ethically permissible, or even desirable, to lie and cause the adoption of two stray kittens rather than one?
Kant, with his deontological approach, would tell us that there is no set of circumstances in which lying is permissible. Rules are rules. If the Gestapo knocks on your door and Anne Frank is up in the attic, you have to tell them the truth if asked who's upstairs. It's a simple, brutal ethic.
Or not. Anyone who's been forced to read Kant and try to understand the Categorical Imperative pounded out in Kant's turgid prose will tell you his thinking can be a little intimidating in its complexity.
On the other side of the ledger is a consequentialist ethic of the sort espoused by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In their world, the ethical imperative is to choose whatever brings the greatest good. It sounds simple, but like Kant's deontological approach the devil is in the details. The greatest good for whom? Am I bound always to make my daily choices in a way that benefits those around me? May I occasionally lie on the couch watching football, or am I bound to spend each day at the food bank?
Bentham was a bit of an eccentric. This is a photo of him taken in the last few years, although he died in 1832. He had himself mummified so he could continue to attend board meetings, or so the story goes. He made a tour of New York in 2018, sitting in his box and bolted to his chair. Having served on a few boards, I count as a saint anyone who would want to sit through a board meeting posthumously, rather than simply decomposing somewhere. A consequentialist to the end, and beyond.
Finally, there are the virtue ethicists, a line that runs from Plato and Aristotle through a 20th century revival, who hold that moral virtue must guide ethical decisionmaking. Aristotle is the philosopher who is most closely associated with this approach, given its empirically-based reliance on "practical wisdom" to guide the decisionmaker.
Unfortunately, like the other approaches, virtue ethics is easier articulated than applied. Virtues can be subjective. Virtues sometimes, often, come into conflict. Telling the truth is a virtue; so is compassion. If Peg has a patient wheeled into the operating room with a likely fatal condition, and the last thing he asks her is, "Am I going to make it?", how should she respond? Telling him he's likely to die in the next few minutes may make for a miserable end, and in fact make the bad outcome more likely depending on the condition. Is it better to lie a little as an act of kindness and a means of instilling hope? Have we just bled into consequentialism again?
One of the things that has made life worth living for me over the years is pondering these dilemmas as they appear in ordinary life. It is not when we find ourselves at a dramatic crossroads of our existence that we must deal with ethical imperatives, but when we approach the quotidian challenges of each day. If we treat the exercise as something reserved for matters of life-and-death, we will be too ill-practiced to have any hope of getting it right when the stakes are high.
So it's not a waste of brain cells to ponder the adoption myth of Slane and Dean, and whether a little white lie was not only okay but an ethically desirable behavior, given that it led to two happy cats curled up in my lap here at the computer, secure in the knowledge that they'll spend their lives together so long and P and I are around.
Meanwhile, the snow keeps falling outside, and it's time to get ready for a Zoom mediation. Selah.
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