This article contains spoilers for the Black Mirror episode “White Bear”. If you have not seen it, I strongly encourage you to do so before reading on!
Ethics has always been a topic I find extremely intriguing. Across the entertainment scene, movies and TV shows such as The Good Place or The Walking Dead often present us with sticky situations in which characters try to make the right choice when faced with a moral dilemma. News stories also flood us daily with reports on crime or socially unacceptable behaviour in communities around the globe. While some have argued that the concept of morality (or rather, a “moral feeling”) is innate to humans, most would not dispute the claim that morality may be inculcated in our young. This shows the importance of ethics education and appropriate laws which guide citizens to better distinguish the good from the bad.
What is Justice?
Before we (nose)dive into the episode, it would be good to first understand the complex relationship between morality and justice. According to John Stuart Mill, one of the most influential thinkers of political philosophy and an avid proponent of Utilitarianism, “Justice implies something which is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual can claim from us as his moral right” (Utilitarianism, 1861). This sentiment of justice that we share as a species is grounded in two things. First, the desire to punish someone who has done harm; And second, the belief that there is some person or persons to whom harm has been done. In essence, it is universally considered just if a person receives the good or evil that they deserve from their actions. Further, in alignment with moral behaviour, the punishment exacted on the offender must be proportioned to the offence, or in Mill’s words, “exactly measured by the moral guilt of the offender”. Justice can thus be understood as a tool which elucidates our abstract conceptions of morality.
Now that we are armed with a basic knowledge of justice and morality, we can finally turn to the moral issues explored in the Black Mirror episode and attempt to explain why we felt sorry for a murderer.
White Bear Justice Park
“White Bear” tells the story of a convicted child murderer*, Victoria, who is kept permanently at White Bear Justice Park, an entertainment facility of sorts where ordinary folks can visit and watch her go through a scripted action story in which actors are employed to frighten her and put up a show for the audience. Every night, the reason for Victoria’s psychological torture is revealed to her and her memory gets wiped clean to “reset” her mind for the next show.
*Victoria is actually an accomplice to the murder. For the sake of simplicity, she is referred to as a murderer in the analysis.
I’m sure many who have watched this episode walked away with a “bad feeling” after the end credits rolled. Part of this feeling may be attributed to our fear of living in a future world where memories could be so easily wiped clean. Another part may be attributed to the fact that we were just as stressed out as Victoria throughout most of the episode. A huge part of this “bad feeling” , however, is actually our “moral feeling” telling us that what we just witnessed cannot be justice, despite them purporting it to be. And here are the reasons why.
1. The punishment was not proportionate to the crime.
The idea that “punishments ought to fit the crime” is shared by many major thinkers of moral philosophy, including John Stuart Mill (as quoted above) and the “Father of Liberalism” John Locke, who states in the Two Treatises of Government (1689) that we ought only to “retribute to him, so far as calm reason and conscience dictate, what is proportionate to his transgression”. In the episode, Victoria was psychologically tortured for her crime every single day. While we may regard murder as possibly the worst crime to be committed by a sane individual, I believe many of us would readily agree that the punishment exacted on Victoria was overly harsh and definitely not proportionate to her crime.
Perhaps it would tempt some people to think that if Victoria abused her victim, she herself deserves to be abused. But wait, if you think about it, our prisons and rehabilitation homes incarcerate a range of offenders from rapists to larcenists to arsonists, yet they receive the same punishment of jail sentence. We do not justify raping rapists as punishment just because they did the same. This is a question about violating the fundamental rights of human beings, which is discussed below in point 3.
*It was not explicitly shown how long Victoria had been punished or how long more she has to endure, but the ominous crossed-out dates on the calendar gave us a vague sense of the duration — too long.
2. People were deriving pleasure from Victoria’s pain.
To be completely honest, I was extremely disturbed by the end credits scene showing Justice Park actors gleefully giving a safety briefing and asking visitors to “enjoy themselves”. It was additionally shocking to see whole families flocking in and treating the experience like a typical fun day out with their loved ones.
When I first watched the episode, I felt upset but could not exactly put a finger on it. After watching it a second time, I realised how I felt was inversely proportional to what was shown on the screen, that is, I felt more upset the happier they seemed. Then it finally occurred to me that the scene was particularly disturbing because one of the most basic human feelings of sympathy was clearly absent. None of the visitors or actors showed any semblance of guilt or pity, even when they were actively contributing to Victoria’s pain. It is one thing to lack compassion, and another thing altogether to derive joy from another’s suffering. No matter how much you hate a person (or another living thing), witnessing cruelty should never be an enjoyable activity. In deriving pleasure from another’s pain, the “White Bear” community collectively engaged in morally questionable behaviour.
3. Victoria’s human rights were not respected.
A murderer is still a human, and a human has basic rights. These rights include rights to life and liberty, and crucially, freedom from slavery and torture (United Nations on Human Rights). Further, according to Robert Nozick, proponent of Libertarianism, laying claim to certain hours of a person’s life is equivalent to forced labour, which in essence equates to slavery. (This view is also echoed by John Locke, who claimed that “every man has a property in his own person”, although he concedes that what counts as respecting life, liberty and property are ultimately for the state to decide.)
In the episode, Victoria was conveniently used by the park operators (presumably the justice arm of the government) to “work” as the main character of the show. Even though Victoria is a convicted felon subjected to the rule of the state, they had no right to use her in a way that does not indirectly benefit her. In our current society, prison inmates are often made to perform menial tasks such as cooking or cleaning bedsheets which either benefit themselves or the wider community. In subjecting Victoria to “work” without personal benefit, she is made a slave of the state. Furthermore, torture is always morally wrong, even if consent was given, because dignity is an inalienable intrinsic property in human beings. By treating Victoria as a lowly human being and exploiting her vulnerability, the state violated her basic human rights and failed to respect the intrinsic dignity of human beings.
Perhaps in this future world of “White Bear”, the death penalty has been abolished and torture has become the standard punishment for murderers. Although we may argue that Victoria could have been aware of the punishment before she committed the crime, it does not discount the fact that something feels fundamentally wrong about torture as opposed to the death penalty. Both violate human rights, but torture differs in the degree of human dignity being violated, and is often said to be worse than death. However, this issue of whether the right to human dignity is comparable to the right to life is still up for debate.
The Ethical Theory Behind White Bear Justice Park
While most of us may feel that there is something inherently immoral about operating a Justice Park, there is actually one ethical theory which adequately explains the moral justification behind this operation, and that theory is Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism.
Bentham’s Utilitarianism proclaims that the highest principle of morality is to maximise utility. His version of the ethical theory can be summed up with the slogan, “the greatest good for the greatest number”. To Bentham, the value of a pleasure or a pain should only be measured by its intensity and duration, and not by any qualitative measures. In doing so, Bentham adopts a nonjudgemental spirit in weighing people’s preferences and do not distinguish higher pleasures from lower pleasures.
We can clearly see Bentham’s philosophy at work here in the Justice Park. In weighing people’s preferences, the scale of utility tilts very favourably towards the ecstatic crowd watching Victoria suffer alone in silence. Since Bentham’s Utilitarianism says nothing about the moral worth of these (perverted) pleasures being enjoyed, this arrangement maximises utility and is therefore good for society in the long run.
This conclusion illustrates a fundamental problem with Bentham’s Utilitarianism as an ethical theory. Our instincts tell us that pleasures have moral worth and some pleasures are downright immoral. The theory also says nothing about torture, which is a gross violation of human rights and dignity. It is wrong to violate the rights of an individual for the sake of the happiness of the crowd. The moral issue becomes even more glaring if we set aside our intuition that Victoria deserves to be tortured because she is a murderer. What if Victoria was an innocent victim? By failing to recognise the moral problem with this act, Bentham’s Utilitarianism cannot be a complete ethical theory that accurately represents our conceptions of right and wrong.
Utilitarianism 2.0
In Utilitarianism (1861), John Stuart Mill builds onto Bentham’s theory by addressing concerns (explained above) brought forth by critics. He introduced a utility test to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures. Mill also tried to incorporate humanitarian concerns of individual rights into Bentham’s “cold” calculus of pleasures and pains. However, despite his best efforts, Mill was not able to save Utilitarianism without invoking a moral ideal of human dignity independent of utility. This suggests that the moral basis of utility may not be enough to explain the full scope of morality.
*This is an abridged version of Mill’s Utilitarianism (1861) that does no justice to his original writing. I am especially fond of his argument of pleasure being both a means to an end and the end itself. I encourage you to read his writing if you are interested in this ethical theory.
Concluding Note
Moral issues are complex and sometimes unresolvable. By forcing ourselves to think deeper about such problems, we learn to explain what we feel and negotiate our own definitions of right and wrong. I hope that with more constructive debates and discussions, we can slowly move towards building a moral society and achieve a better understanding of the human psyche.
This article is inspired by the teachings of lauded Harvard professor Michael Sandel in his free online course, Justice. I highly recommend anyone interested in moral and political philosophy to take this excellent course.
