National Book Award for Fiction winner William T. Vollmann is wildly prolific on many fronts, but is arguably best known as the creator of a "moral calculus" which considers the right and wrong of numerous acts of human violence. In seven long and considered volumes entitled Rising Up and Rising Down, he examines an exhaustive list of scenarios wherein readers may find cases in which exercising violence is never justified, possibly justified, or truly justified from a moral standpoint. One instance, with which few disagree, is the application of minimal yet appropriate levels of violence in the immediate defense of an innocent.
I was reminded of Vollmann's work when I came upon a recent story out of Nigeria. The American-based, global pharmaceutical firm Pfizer, Inc. has been sued with allegations that it improperly conducted drug experiments on some 200 children in a 1996 drug study. The end result, it is proffered, was that these children suffered serious effects ranging from brain damage to paralysis, slurred speech and even death.
Who would argue this doesn't sound like violence?
Certainly, on the surface, it's appalling, but the drug study in question was undertaken during a meningitis epidemic which killed some 12,000 children. Further, it is unclear how to separate the effects of contracting meningitis from the effects of the proposed drug therapy administered to treat it. All parties appear to disagree on every point in between. Regardless, the ethics of a scientific drug study involving any child weigh heavily alongside the desire to bring effective medical technologies to children everywhere.
The need for a moral calculus here could not be more apparent.
There is no reason to go further into the details of the story, for there is plenty to chew on already. If we never test drugs on children, we can never with all good conscience administer drugs to children. But no drug study can be guaranteed to go without a hitch ... for this is science. We do not know the answer. We are seeking the answer. And here's the sticking point: We are as morally culpable in risking suffering and death in just a few children, as we are in foregoing the potential to alleviate suffering and prevent death for thousands.
The reason I found this news story at all was because a large pharmaceutical firm had reached a significant monetary settlement with the nation of Nigeria itself, the state government of the state within Nigeria where the study took place, and finally, the families of the children. Ah, yes. Follow the money trail. It always makes the news. But I still wondered - I don't recall hearing about the 12,000 children who died of meningitis, nor the thousands more who must have suffered in this remote area. And why not? Well, for one thing, it was 1996, and the Internet was not what it is today.
We are no longer dependent on the media to feed us what we need to know in bite-size chunks. How could the three or four simple facts it is possible to convey in a few column inches or a 90-second news slot be enough to determine right from wrong? With today's Internet, all that has changed.
Many have looked askance at William Vollmann's 3,300 pages of mind-bogglingly crafted and analyzed scenarios, which he developed over some twenty years. Yet, perhaps, it takes this kind of commitment to begin to make sense of it all.
I, for one, would like to see others pick up the baton of William Vollmann and begin to outline in detail for all of us the ethical considerations of technology, science, social norms, individual pressures, religious faith, and the reach and potency of both global and local players in this drama we call life in modern times.