Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are going to continue our discussion on consequentialism by looking at another moral conundrum. This episode is probably going to be pretty short because I think by this point my position on this specific conundrum should be pretty easy to assess. Nevertheless, I thought it was an important conundrum to deal with since it is kind of my main go to conundrum when I talk about consequentialism and the conundrum that kind of initially got me thinking about this particular ethic. So this is the conundrum of the MASH baby and I'll just give you a quick recap in case you forget.

So in the TV series MASH, there were these Americans stationed in South Korea and they were fighting in the Korean War and they they were on a bus with a bunch of South Korean civilians. And they're traveling, but they realize that there is a, like, North Korean patrol or something in the area, and they quickly get off the side of the road, stop the bus, everybody's quiet, and they're hiding and hoping that the North Koreans don't find them. And the North Koreans have a reputation that isn't very good and of course you know if you get caught by them, probably gonna get killed or at least put in a situation where it's not gonna be pleasant. You're eventually going to die. While they are on the bus, a baby starts to cry and one of the American soldiers tells the mother to shut that baby up.

And the mother of course cannot reason with her child, so the only way she can shut the baby up is to smother it, essentially. And, of course, everybody is happy that they're saved, but at the same time, the soldier deals with this overwhelming guilt at essentially asking the mother to kill her child. Even though he wouldn't have said that he wanted the child dead, he knew that that probably was what needed to happen for people to get saved, and that's what he essentially encouraged the mother to do indirectly. The question is then, if you're on a bus with 50 people and your baby starts to cry or somebody else's baby, make it make it easier, distance yourself from it, Is it moral if the only way you can save your lives is by smothering a child or your child to save 50 people? Does that warrant that action?

Does that justify your action? Does that not only make your action okay but does that make it good because you're saving 50 people? And that to me was a conundrum. I know to some Christians that won't be a conundrum and that's great, I'm glad it's not, but there are plenty of Christians to whom it is a conundrum and I asked a lot of people and I only ever had one person tell me that the answer was clearly not to kill the baby. Most people said, I can't really judge somebody for doing that because I, you know, I understand it and I I don't.

It's not ideal but it's probably not bad. And there were some Christians who said, Yeah, yeah, you you have to, it's hard but that's what has to be done to save the most lives. Only one person told me it's the wrong thing to do. Of course, by this point, you know that my answer to this is that this is not at all a conundrum. It seems very clear that to kill the child in order to save lives, even if it's to save a billion lives.

To kill the child is not the right thing to do, and God would does not leave that in our hands to murder somebody order to get ourselves out of a situation. If God sees fit to save us, that's his prerogative, but it's not my prerogative to take upon the means of murder in order to save lives. We addressed this in the last episode where we took a look at the double effect and what is and is not a double effect. And I would say that this is like killing, know, having a Nazi put a gun to your head telling you to kill some Jews. You don't do it even if if you have to to save your life or the life of your family.

That's just not what you do. You can't, as a Christian, kill Jews, help the Nazis in their genocide in order to save your life or your family's life. Even if it's inevitable that after your family's killed, the Germans are going to take to slaughter the Jews. You can't do that yourself as a Christian, that's just not moral. When the means for your survival is the taking of a human life, that's a problem.

That's pretty much it for that conundrum. We've already laid quite a bit of the groundwork for this and it is pretty clearly in line with a lot of the other conundrums. So since that was so fast, let me use this time as an opportunity to recap just a few of the other concepts that we mentioned in season one in the nonviolence section as well as throughout this episode. That is first, for our witness, it's important that we have we have integrity. And integrity means that we do the right thing even when it's hard, even when we don't like the results.

And so to to allow 50 people on the on the bus to die because we refuse to do wrong, that's that's integrity. It doesn't get us anywhere. And not only that, but it actually leads us into into hardship. But that's what integrity is, it's doing the right thing regardless of the results. The results do not determine the morality of a situation.

But secondly, I do want to reemphasize that, and for those of you who haven't listened to the Nonviolence series, you may not really be aware of this, but there are a lot of times that we judge in the ends by the immediate ends, the ends that occur right away versus really thinking about the long term effects that God is able to bring about through a particular action. So I'll give you a few examples. You think of Jim Elliot and his group, Nate Saint and the other guys who were killed by the, I believe, the Alka Indians down in South America somewhere. And they chose not to shoot at their attackers. And you could say, well, that was stupid because they died.

They could have probably killed one of the Alka Indians and that would have scared them off and they would have been able to get away safely. Maybe that's true, but then what would have happened to the gospel? But it ended up that through the laying down of their lives, God was able to make inroads into the Alka Indian community and bring them to a saving knowledge of of Jesus Christ. Martin Luther King Junior was able to have, I would argue, probably a greater impact because of his nonviolence than if he would have been violent and ended up going to prison and and and having kind of his movement questioned and accused. And then my two favorite examples were in Nazi Germany, Bulgaria and Denmark, who collectively saved about 99% of the Jewish population in their countries through non violence, through actions that seemed, you know, how how are these actions going to stop a superpower like Germany?

But when you have priests choosing to lay down on the tracks in front of trains and people who are refusing to help the Germans at cost of their life, that has a pretty big impact. And in Denmark in particular, not only did they save a huge percentage of the Jewish population through non violence, but that was one of the areas where the Germans saw their officers and soldier the most kind of defect because the soldiers would see the resolve of the people of Denmark. They'd see their resolve and they'd see their character and their refusal to back down, even though they had no chance of of overpowering Germany. And people, Germans, Nazi soldiers were converted to the other viewpoints to be coming against the Nazis and helping to save the Jews. It's just so impossible for us to say what any particular outcome will ultimately be.

If you are in the MASH scenario that we're talking about and you say, well if I do this 50 lives are going to be lost. Well first of all you don't know that for sure. Okay, we can play the numbers game and say 99.9% certainty we're going to be found out and killed. Okay. So that that is true.

That that's a possibility. But you need to leave room for God's sovereignty. There's that point 1% chance God can act in that and he may say, hey look, because your refusal to engage in evil, I'm gonna protect you. That's possible. Not likely.

But even if you are found out and killed, you don't know that what that is going to do. There could be somebody in the North Korean army who sees the massacre of civilians and whose heart has changed and and who ends up defecting because of that and ends up shortening the war by months or years by by defecting and giving information. There could be an uproar in the international community who sees the slaughtering of civilians on this bus, which include American medical staff who are non combatants, and they could say that that could bring more people into the war. Who knows what in the world could happen through your actions? And that's exactly the point.

And you can refer back to the Lesser of Two Evils episode, episode number three in this season to hear just the problems of having this ethic of immediacy and this idea that we have to embrace evil to do what we perceive as the best good now. Because we're not omniscient. We don't know what our action is going to do. We might think an action is very powerful and it ends up being terrible and ineffective in the long run, which is when we get to the twenty sixteen election, one of the possibilities that people don't acknowledge is that, okay, maybe you win these four years, maybe even eight years, but what does that do to the heart of the nation? What does that do to the slippery slope of electing compromised candidates and and worsening the options you have available and retaliation from the other side?

What does that do in forty years? Okay. I know what you think it's gonna do in four or eight, but you don't know what's gonna happen in a month, let alone forty years from now as a result of your action. And that's why one reason why God doesn't have us determine the outcome by the ends because we don't know what the ends are going to be short term, let alone long term. That's why we always come back to that saying where it's obedience is better than sacrifice, faithfulness better effectiveness.

That's what we need to keep in mind here as we recap our ideas for this MASH conundrum, which for the Christian should really not be a conundrum at all. We'll keep that episode short. And that's all for now. So peace, because I'm a pacifist, and I say it, and I mean it.