Do You Think You're Clever? Page 3

  Ultimately, though, I suspect that whatever I care to think about it, many others wouldn’t hesitate to confirm that I’m not remotely cool in any way! I possess none of the attributes that would make me cool, I guess, such as a sense of style, insider knowledge of trends, nonchalance, calm assertiveness and sexual swagger. Yet nor can I say I’m driven by fiery hot-blooded Latin passion. So perhaps I would have to say I’m not cool but tepid …

  If there was an omnipotent god, would he be able to create a stone that he couldn’t lift?

  (Classics, Oxford)

  This is an ancient question asked by theologists and philosophers to throw into doubt assumptions about God. It’s called the stone paradox. It’s intended to suggest that God cannot logically be all-powerful – and so probably doesn’t exist. The argument goes that either God can create a stone which he cannot lift, or he can’t. If he can create this stone, then he can’t move the stone, in which case he’s not omnipotent. If he can’t create the stone, then he can’t be omnipotent either because there’s something he can’t do. Amazingly, theologists and philosophers have been debating this question for hundreds of years, trying to work out what a stone that could not be moved even by an omnipotent being could possibly be like – what it would weigh, what would stop it moving, and so on.

  Yet actually it’s not really a paradox, because it’s simply a question of using mutually exclusive terms. There simply cannot be a stone that cannot be moved by an omnipotent being. It would be the equivalent of a square circle, a married bachelor, a sunny night or a wet desert. So the question is pointless. An omnipotent god cannot create a stone that he cannot lift, but that doesn’t mean he is not omni potent. It’s just false logic.

  Of course, many theologists would say that God is beyond logic anyway. So in answer to the question, ‘Can God create a stone he cannot lift?’ the answer is ‘Yes, and he can lift it’. His powers are said to be miraculous beyond human understanding. That’s how he created the universe from nothing and could, if he wanted, make 2 + 2 equal 5. QED.

  In some ways, though, this leads on to fundamental questions that continue to intrigue yet remain impossible to answer, and that appear to be genuine paradoxes. What was there before the beginning of time, for instance? What is beyond the universe, if the universe is everything there is? Cosmologists now say they believe the universe is finite. But how can a universe, which by definition includes everything, be finite? How can the limitless be limited? How can eternity start and end? It’s asking questions like these that has, ironically, turned some cosmologists to belief in God, because it seems there are things that it’s genuinely impossible for the human mind to comprehend.

  Should someone sell their kidney?

  (Medicine, Cambridge)

  Ever since organ transplants first became common in the 1960s, there has been a problem sourcing suitable donor organs. An estimated 170,000 people are on the waiting list for kidneys in the USA and Europe, and each year another 5,000 join the queue. Most kidneys for transplant come from dead donors, but since people can usually survive with just one of their kidneys, they can also come from living donors – about 1 in 10 in the UK do and 1 in 4 in the USA. Kidneys from living donors are generally in better condition, and there is a better chance of finding a good match, especially among relatives. Taking a kidney from a living donor also avoids the horrible unpredictability of waiting for someone with a compatible kidney to be killed accidentally or die quickly without damage to the organ.

  The problem is, of course, that not everyone has a generous relative sitting by, which is why desperate kidney sufferers in the world’s richer countries may look for a donor in the developing world. And with kidneys fetching well over $5,000, many poor people in countries like Pakistan and Colombia have been tempted to sell one of their kidneys. Most governments try to stop the trade in organs, but kidney sufferers in rich countries are desperate for health, and people in poor countries are desperate for money, so the trade continues on the black market, even where it isn’t allowed legally. At least 6,000 kidneys are traded around the world each year. In Pakistan, there are many villages where more than two out of five people have just a single kidney.

  Those who partake in the trade justify it like this. The kidney sufferer is very ill, and if someone else can help them by donating a kidney, why shouldn’t they? And if the kidney sufferer is rich and the donor very poor, why shouldn’t they show their gratitude with a generous cash payment? That way, two people benefit: the recipient who gets his new kidney and a new lease of life, and the donor who gets a cash payment that transforms his life and maybe that of his entire family. According to David Holcberg of the Ayn Rand centre, it’s a matter of self-determination: ‘The right to buy an organ is part of your right to life. The right to life is the right to take all actions a rational being requires to sustain his life. This right becomes meaningless when the law forbids you to buy a kidney or liver that would preserve your life.’ Holcberg argues that poor people ‘do have the capacity to reason’.

  But, of course, it isn’t as simple as that. Donating a kidney is not an everyday, harmless procedure like selling a chair. Undergoing the operation to remove the kidney can be traumatic, and very occasionally fatal. Sometimes a botched operation carried out in secret can leave the donor desperately ill. Even if the operation goes smoothly, the donor may survive perfectly well on one kidney, but is left with no back-up. Many poor fishermen in southern India who sold a kidney in the wake of the 2004 tsunami now bitterly regret it.

  The question does not address whether someone should buy an organ, but it’s a question worth answering – and the answer, to my mind, has to be ‘no’. Of course, it’s wonderful if a kidney is donated freely and generously, but as soon as money is involved, the pressure of payment becomes the dominant issue. You cannot avoid the possibility that you are exploiting someone’s desperation – and risking their health. It’s no coincidence that paid donors cannot be found in the rich countries of the world; they can be found only in poor countries where people often feel they have no choice and would willingly sacrifice their health for the sake of a better life for them or their families. As William Saletan wrote in Slate magazine in 2007, the donor will be ‘a fisherman or an out-of-work laborer who needs cash and can’t find another way to get it. The middlemen will open him up, take his kidney, pay him a fraction of the proceeds, and abandon him, because follow-up care is just another expense. If he recovers well enough to keep working, he’ll be lucky.’

  Interestingly, though, the question comes at the issue from the donor’s point of view and asks should the donor sell a kidney. Here the answer isn’t so clear. As a (comparatively!) rich Westerner, of course I can’t say the donor should sell, and yet nor can I disapprove of the donor who chooses to sell, even at risk to his or her health. I would never want anyone put in the position where they are tempted to sell a kidney, but I can entirely understand how someone would willingly accept the suffering and risk to give themselves or their family a better life. Indeed, maybe I would even admire their courage, while condemning the terrible inequalities that drove them to it. If the question was ‘would I?’ and I could transform the lives of my friends and family by acting as a donor, I might hesitatingly say ‘yes’ and prepare myself to live with the consequences. The hesitation would be that by putting myself at risk I could increase, not reduce, my family’s hardships, and that might be enough to stop me. But to the question ‘should someone?’ the answer must clearly be ‘no’ – because that is a question only the donor can decide, and no one else. It’s a hard choice; there is no ‘should’ about it.

  Is it moral to hook up a psychopath (whose only pleasure is killing) to a reality-simulating machine so that he can believe he is in the real world and kill as much as he likes?

  (Philosophy, Cambridge)

  It’s certainly a gruesome, distasteful idea and reminiscent of some low-budget horror film – with the terrible twist being that the simulated killing turns real. A
nd the idea of allowing a psychopath to indulge in this ghastliest of fantasies seems deeply shocking. But however much the idea provokes outrage, it is a valid question.

  Of course, if the situation posed were to arise, the chances are it would be in a hospital where the psychopath was already being treated for his affliction. In this case, it would be our moral duty to ensure his well-being. It’s hard to imagine how the killing machine could be anything but a retrograde step in his treatment. So unless there was strong evidence to the contrary, allowing him to indulge in simulated killing would be neglecting our duty of care.

  If, however, someone were to demonstrate strong evidence that playing the killing machine actually helps in the psychopath’s treatment, then it would be entirely moral to hook him up. But should we hook him up against his will? A similar moral question arises over chemical castration or libido-diminishing treatments for dangerous paedophiles, which may increase their chances of living freely without posing a threat to children. Most liberally-minded people would agree that we should never forcibly castrate paedophiles. What we can do at most is to allow them to make that decision themselves – and we’d have to consider carefully the way we provided advice and assistance.

  In the same way, it would be moral to hook the psychopath up to the machine only if he actually agrees to it. But we cannot morally force him to, even if we have powerful evidence that it helps; we can only try to persuade him. The same is true of all patients being treated for mental health in hospitals; the treatment must be with their consent. Only if they are genuinely incapable of making an informed decision should any treatment be carried out without their consent, and even then only with the informed consent of those charged with their care. It doesn’t matter what we think. Mental patients, even psychopaths, have a right to decide for themselves, as long as they are capable of making a decision and as long as their decision doesn’t harm anyone else.

  Interestingly, though, while we might reel in disgust from the idea of the killing machine, a crime in the mind is actually very different from a real crime. We all have fleeting thoughts and fantasies about doing something that could be criminal. When angry we might momentarily have had a vision of burning the school down or killing the boss. But most of us know even at the moment we think it that we would never really do it. We may not be able to control all our thoughts and fantasies, but we can control our actions. And while we might personally fight against ‘evil’ thoughts, and others might fight to stop us having them, society cannot and should not police our thoughts, only our actions.

  So if the psychopath’s game with a cyber killing machine harmed no one, then we would not necessarily have the right to interfere in a hypothetical situation in which he has access to the machine. There is no reason why we should actually help him, of course, either by providing him with the machine or hooking him up. And if he is in prison, the prison authorities would be entirely right to refuse to provide a machine and to hook him up if they chose to. Interestingly, though, prison authorities do allow prisoners access to computer games in which they can commit virtual, often quite violent crimes. Whether this is wise or not is open to question, but it’s certainly not a problem of morality.

  Should obese people have free NHS treatment?

  (Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge)

  Of course they should. The NHS is intended to provide free treatment for all. The question may be intended to arouse indignation in a diminishing majority of thin people. Obesity is a major risk factor in some illnesses, such as heart disease, and some people are obese because they choose to overeat. It could therefore be implied that their illness could be, in part, self-inflicted and therefore shouldn’t be treated free. However, there are almost no grounds on which to make a good case. In no illness, for instance, is there a direct cause-and-effect link with obesity, and only in some is it a major risk factor. Moreover, many of the health problems that obese people suffer are nothing whatsoever to do with their weight.

  More importantly, even if every illness an obese person suffered could, in fact, be shown to be directly caused by their weight, it would be completely unreasonable to refuse them free treatment. We cannot be sure that they chose to be obese (very few people do!). Yet even if they did, we must acknowledge that people also persist in indulging in dangerous activities such as riding motorbikes, smoking, drinking, working on oil rigs and down coal mines – all of which put their health at risk. Yet the NHS quite rightly treats all these people free, even if there is a direct cause and effect between their health problem and their lifestyle. The ethos is for the NHS to treat all people who need treatment without charge, not treat them according to their lifestyle.

  That said, the NHS does have finite resources and so, to some extent, has to distribute treatment according to need. That means, of course, that urgent, life-threatening or severe illnesses must always get priority. Doctors must also decide how much of their resources they are going to put into treating each case. Some patients will not necessarily be prescribed a drug that would alleviate their condition simply because it is very expensive for the benefits it produces, and money and resources are deemed better spent elsewhere. Such decisions about priority are being made all the time and provoke a great deal of questioning and controversy.

  It’s in this light that questions such as the one about not treating obese people must be seen. Doctors are within their rights to refuse to treat doggedly persistent smokers for smoking-related ailments and recalcitrant alcoholics for alcohol-related illnesses. The cause-and-effect relationship between obesity and illness is not quite so clear-cut. Nevertheless, levels of obesity are steadily growing in the UK, and the health problems it creates are imposing a growing burden on the NHS. One in four people in the UK were obese in 2007, and the proportion is swelling all the time, especially amongst young people. Health experts talk of an obesity time bomb, with the associated health problems likely to put massive pressure on resources in the future. This is why the government is under pressure to launch as powerful a public information campaign against obesity as past governments have against smoking. Refusing to treat obese people on the NHS, however, will solve nothing.

  Why did they used to make the mill chimneys so tall?

  (Engineering, Cambridge)

  Actually most chimneys are tall; mill chimneys were just taller. Chimneys need to be tall for two reasons. The first is to vent smoke high up into the air where it can be carried away and dispersed by the wind. The second is to provide a good updraft for the fire, and this is probably what really mattered for the mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, who I suspect weren’t that worried about pollution as they created the dark, satanic mills that filled the skies with black smoke in Blake’s bleak vision. The mills of the early Industrial Revolution were of course driven by steam power, and the tall chimneys provided the powerful up-current make the fire burn intensely enough to create the steam to drive all the mill’s machines.

  Tall chimneys provide a good updraft because of the pressure difference between the inside of the chimney and the outside. The heat of the fire makes the fumes or ‘flue gases’ expand and become less dense and so rise up the chimney. The result is that the flue gases filling the chimney are at a much lower pressure than the outside air. The pressure difference draws air into the fire through a vent near the base of the chimney and so makes the fire burn more fiercely. On the whole, the taller the chimney, the more pronounced this effect, known as the stack effect, is. Build a tall chimney and you get a big pressure difference, a strong updraft and a roaring fire hot enough to generate the steam to drive a lot of heavy machines.

  Build your chimney too tall, however, and the flue gases cool too much by the time they reach the top of the chimney and the effect is diminished. So the height of the chimney needed to match the needs of the mill’s steam engine, which is why the chimneys at the onset of the Industrial Revolution were shorter than those later on. As the machines got bigger and the steam engines got more pow
erful towards the mid-nineteenth century, so the chimneys soared to amazing heights. (I suspect that the updraft in a tall chimney is also enhanced by the stronger, more reliable winds that blow over the chimney top far above the ground. Tall chimneys may also be less affected by the temperature inversions that sometimes virtually stop smoke rising in certain atmospheric conditions.)

  The tallest mill chimney of all was the Port Dundas Townsend chimney in Glasgow, built in 1859, which at 138.4 metres (454 feet) was the tallest man-made structure in the world until outstripped by the Eiffel Tower in 1889. But there were many other mill chimneys in mid-Victorian times that towered well over 100 metres. As steam engines gave way to other kinds of power, however, mill chimneys gradually became redundant, and the tallest stacks belonged to steel smelters and power stations. Once the dark, smoky skies of industrial regions were filled with the mill chimneys that rose up like forests of gaunt, leafless trees across the landscape. Now only a few survive – haunting reminders of the origins of the modern urban world.

  Why can’t you light a candle in a spaceship?

  (Physics, Oxford)

  Well, actually you can light a candle in a spaceship. It would just be a very, very foolish thing to do if it was a conventional wax candle. Out in space, of course, there is no air, so spaceships must create their own oxygen-containing internal atmosphere for the astronauts to breathe. If the candle burns oxygen faster than the spaceship’s systems can replenish it, the astronauts would soon die of oxygen starvation. Even if the ship’s oxygen supply could keep pace with candle’s oxygen consumption, it would dramatically shorten the mission.