The objective of last week’s Highbrow was to focus on the concepts of good and evil, right and wrong and to explore what these things meant to us. When we judge a person to one of these standards, are we judging them by our assumptions about that person or by their actions; are their actions judged by the intentions behind them or the consequences? I figured the best way to find out was to find some people and get judging...
In order to answer these questions, I decided to devise a game in which a selection of well known people were ranked as either good or evil. I compiled a list of famous faces, with a healthy cross section of obviously “good” (Stephen Fry) or “bad” (Osama bin Laden) individuals, as well as a good number of controversial ones, in which opinion could go either way (Bob Crow).
The Famous 45: let the Judgement begin!
Now in order to judge these unfortunates (or fortunates, depending on the outcome, I guess), it seemed inappropriate for a given person’s fate decided by the whole of Highbrow, so we needed a Judge and for this illustrious position I picked Highbrow regular, David Sorg. David’s a fairly decent kind of chap, even headed and the like, so he seemed like a good choice who’d be able to justify his decisions.
Now that we had a Judge, we needed a case for and a case against our defendants, so I split the rest of the Highbrow attendees into two teams – Team Good and Team Evil. For each of the famous faces, each team had about a minute to justify to the Judge whether that person was either “good” or “evil”. If the Judge eventually picked “good”, then Team Good got the person and also got a point. At the end of the game, after all 45 people were judged, the team with the most people/points were declared the winners... simple!
Now, you might think, “this is obvious, Hitler’s always going to end up as Evil”, well, that may be true, but Team Good still had to spend a whole minute trying to convince David that Hitler was ultimately a good guy – not an easy task right? This lead to some pretty funny justifications for our defendants, especially as people got a bit more, err, lubricated... Hitler “really loved that dog”, Thatcher shouldn’t be condemned as she’s “part of the Ginger minority” and Osama bin Laden was “the head of a not-for-profit organisation”.
Dividing up nicely into Team Good (far side) and Team Evil (near side)
On the Good side we had some interesting choices: Jade Goody – “an innocent imbecile”, Eminem survived his misogynist controversies as being “misunderstood by his critics”, Wynne Evans (the Go-compare guy) who, whilst reviling most of us musically, is ultimately just doing his job, and Michael Jackson didn’t have to settle out of court with David to maintain “innocent until proven guilty”.
On the Evil side, there were some massive surprises: Mother Teresa was condemned for her stance against abortions, contraception and homosexuality (whereas the Pope survived these accusations, and possibly worse to make “Good”) and Fern Britton’s dieting / stomach stapling based lies were enough to see her to the wrong side of the fence. Other Evil choices were Hugh Hefner (exploitation and women’s issues), Monika Lewinsky (kept the spunky dress) and Jeremy Clarkson (opinions about the environment, as well as general abhorrence).
The Good
Last choice on the list was slightly different from the others; instead of our Judge having to judge someone else, the last person’s fate was his own. He’d been fairly even in his decisions so far, so how would he fare? Well, in the end David was proven to be a Good Man, although by his own admission he thought he was perhaps not the person best placed to be making this decision. While you can see his point, it raises the question; if morality doesn’t start at home, how can we decide whether we’re doing the “right” thing?
So what else did we learn?
The final results were 24 Good and 19 Evil, with two fence sitters left undecided (nameless US and German soldiers, spared for their anonymity). Both Good and Evil had a similar mix of men and women – 5 women to 14 men for Evil and 8 to 16 for Good; non-whites didn’t seem to fair as well though, with another 5 to 14 whites ratio for Evil where as a worrying 2 non-whites to 22 whites on the Good side (Obama and Jacko, and Jacko’s pushing it really). We were going to check out how people with smiling pictures compared to non-smilers, but everyone had got fed up with counting and had reverted back to shouting again by this point.
So focusing on specifics, with Osama being Evil whereas Gerry Adams making Good, it seems that even terrorists can be absolved from their past if given the opportunity. We discussed this decision for a while and forwarded the question that if Gaddaffi’s fate had continued down the “world leader” path rather than the recent flip back to “crazed despot”, whether he’d have ended up on Team Good in a few years? It’s hard to say, but it seems we’re possibly more willing to judge people by their recent actions more than their former ones.
The Evil
Convicted criminals fared badly overall, which would seem to suggest that we hold at least some faith in our concepts of justice. Maxine Carr was condemned and, whilst it was understood that she was proven to be a largely naive accomplice to Huntley, she still broke the law and ignorance is no excuse.
Quite surprisingly, politicians did better than expected, our Judge, even being something of a Lefty, was willing to absolve David Cameron. Nick Clegg and Barack Obama also survived the chop, as did David “the other brother” Milliband. It was felt that even though we may not agree with their policies, these politicians are ultimately doing what they believe is right. I’m not sure that’s how everyone sees it but that’s how it ended up on the night. Had it been a bad news week for the Coalition (has there been a good news week?), then the chips might have fallen slightly differently.
After we’d exhausted the Battle conclusions and a few early leavers made their excuses, the remaining Highbrowers saw in a few more beers, discussing whether Good and Evil actions are judged by person’s motives (or sense of duty - the opinion favoured by Emmanuel Kant) or whether they should be judged by the consequences (which is the John Scott Mill side of things). Overall, I think we decided it was a bit of both for the majority of circumstances but my notes from the evening became somewhat haphazard by this point, to say the least.
Religion reared its head towards the end of the night, with some opinions that it had usurped humanity’s sense of morality as we evolved; that as we developed a more defined set of moral opinions, we used Religion to fill in the blanks as to why we’d made that choice not to kill etc; that religion was a social evolution, used to explain our naivety to both moral and scientific issues. I’m pretty sure Richard Dawkins would have enjoyed this section of the evening, especially as he likes getting his opinions across in the loudest possible manner (which condemned him but ironically by this point seemed the favoured way of making your point heard for the remaining Highbrowers).
See... actual proper note taking, with a pen and everything
To summarise, did we reach any real conclusions? Well, some perhaps, but that wasn’t really the point. What we did do was learn about the way we make those choices and encourage ourselves to re-examine the way we reach decisions about our morality, e.g. do you forgive famous people you like and condemn those you don’t? From the feedback I’ve had over the last few days, everyone who came along had a good time, learned a bit and generally went home if not wiser then certainly more open minded, which can only be a good thing.
The Highbrow team will be assembling again soon, hopefully next time not to exonerate Bono from his musical crimes (I can’t believe he got let off); until then, HIGHBROW is over and out.
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