Moral Dilemmas and Cold Equations

 

I don't remember how we got into this discussion, but recently, while driving to church, Angela began to tell me about an ethics course she'd taken in college, in which the teacher would give them moral dilemmas. Things like "You are part of a wagon train hiding in a cave from Indians. A baby starts crying. Do you kill the baby to keep it from giving you away or do you allow the Indians to find you and kill everyone?"

Angela's criticism of this is that it was difficult to come up with a definitive "either-or" solution. She felt there was always an Option C or even an Option D after you gave the problem some thought. Human ingenuity was nearly always a wild card tossed into the problem.

Well, as a Totally Geeky Nerd (or would that be Totally Nerdy Geek?), I immediately thought of Tom Godwin's classic short story "the Cold Equations," published in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. By golly, THERE'S a definitive "either-or" moral dilemma.

A pilot is rushing badly needed medicine to a frontier planet. He needs to get that medicine there or a lot of people will die. But then he discovers an 18-year-old girl has stowed away on the ship, because she wanted to visit her brother, who works on that planet. Her extra weight means that the ship no longer has enough fuel to land safely. So the pilot either has to toss her out the airlock or both he and the sick men on the planet all die with her anyways. 

It's a story that is justifiably considered a classic. Ironically, Godwin submitted it three times to Astounding's editor John Campbell, each time coming up with a clever way to save the girl. But Campbell kept sending it back until Godwin acknowledged in the story that the laws of physics were immutable. There could be no way to save the girl. Simple mathmatics dictated she must die. Human ingenuity didn't mean a darn thing.

She had unknowingly subjected herself to the penalty of a law that recognized neither innocence nor youth nor beauty, that was incapable of sympathy or leniency.

Angela and I talked about the story for awhile and she agreed that, dramatically, the tragic ending was the proper one for this story. We both, though, were able to get picky about one aspect of the story's general premise. The emergency ship carrying supplies was launched from a large cruiser, which was carrying civilian passengers. The girl had been one of those passengers and she had apparently sneaked aboard the smaller vessel by simply ignoring a KEEP OUT sign. We both felt that any spaceship carrying civilians would by necessity have much better safety precautions on the assumption that sooner or later a civilian would try to do something incredible stupid.

The story has also been criticized by others for being an example of faulty engineering via giving the emergency ship absolutely no margin for error as well.

These are legitimate criticisms, yet the human emotions in the story are so strong and generate so much empathy that "The Cold Equations" still works beautifully.

In a 1991 issue of Analog Science Fiction, Don Sakers published his answer to the original story, in which human ingenuity does provide a gruesome but successful solution, saving the (in this case) young boy and still delivering the medicine. It's a great story (voted the readers' favorite for that year) and still makes it clear that there are consequences for the decisions we make, though one can fairly argue that Sakers gave his pilot a specific piece of equipment and a bit of technology that didn't exist in Godwin's universe. But I do like what Sakers wrote in an Author's Note when the story was anthologized, making it clear that his story was not a condemnation of or lack of appreciation for the original tale:

The important point is not any given solution to this particular scenario... it's something larger, just as Godwin's point was something larger. Just as SF once need to hear that there are times when the girl has to go out the airlock, in 1991 SF needed to hear that the girl doesn't always have to go out the airlock. That there are two ways of looking at the world, and both of them are valid and necessary.

You can find "The Cold Equations" online HERE.