Did Chase Do the Right Thing in Killing Dibala?
Monday, November 23rd 2009(Continued from Ethics in Role-Playing, Part IV)
Well, we can now understand “Chaotic Good” to mean “Brave Altruism.” As an altruist, this type of person believes that to do good, one has to have a “genuine concern for the welfare of others”—moral actions are selfless ones. And as a “Brave” altruist, this type of person is willing to weigh the consequences when acting morally, in order “to generate the most good for the most people.” That often means breaking rules. Without a doubt, we know Dr. House is a Brave Altruist: he has no respect whatsoever for the “rules,” and always tries to maximize the good for his patients. When Cameron chides Dr. House for taking risks with his patients in their final exchange at the end of the episode, Dr. House reminds her that what matters is that the patient is alive at the outcome of the procedure: the ends justify the means.
James Earl Jones as Dibala in House Episode Instant Karma
In killing Dibala, it can be argued that Chase was striving to generate the most good for the most people, because he believed that if the dictator died under their care, he would be preventing genocide. At the same time, however, we know Chase’s motivations were conflicted at the outset: on the one hand, Chase feared Dibala and didn’t understand the full complexity of the situation in the dictator’s country; on the other hand, he hated Dibala for his callousness, his calling Chase a coward, and his criticizing Cameron. So it can also be argued that Chase’s actions were not entirely altruistic.
What convinces me most that Chase’s actions do not qualify as “chaotic good”—or bravely altruistic—however, is not whether taking someone’s life to save another’s counts as morally good. The difference between what Dr. House does on a regular basis—flouting the rules and endangering people’s lives in order to save them—and what Chase has done in murdering Dibala, is a matter of ontological distance. Both doctors are consequentialists. Both determine the rightness or wrongness of their actions based on the end result. But for Dr. House, the intended outcome is always only a few steps away: create risk to save an individual whose fate is immediately tenable. Chase made the mistake of extrapolating the consequences of his actions so far into the future as to make his justification for maximizing the good untenable. Chase can’t know if there will be a 1:1 correlation between his murdering Dibala and lives saved in Africa. He can’t know if by killing Dibala he has saved lives or allowed an even worse dictator to assume his job. Therefore Chase’s actions are neither brave nor altruistic.
I hope this has been an interesting exercise in rethinking some of the basics in role-playing. Since I’m no philosophy major, I can’t say my integration of some of the real ethics involved in this recasting of alignment is entirely accurate; like any academic discipline, there are bound to be semantic disagreements and misinterpretation, and I’m sure I’ve made my fair share. The goal, I think, is to create depth where there wasn’t before, so the floodgates are open.
