A Hungry Morality

The Dinner, by Herman Koch, is a good read. There are some translation issues, but the pacing, the character development, and writing style holds through such difficulties. It is a book that is not subtle in its political/philosophical leanings.

If I were to recommend a movie to watch after reading The Dinner, I would suggest the 1982 cult classic Eating Raoul. 

It is a perfect combination. Both have moments of culinary delight and wrestle with similar moral questions. Eating Raoul offers an absurd look at similar questions of morality as The Dinner.

A question and quandary poised in The Dinner and in Eating Raoul is around the value of human life. I’m going to try to illuminate the question without giving away salient aspects of the plot. A strength in Koch’s book is the way in which he peppers the pages with hints of the story, adding layer upon layer, instead of offering it all in one course. The reader is compelled to continue through the pages in order to learn all of what has happened. Let the reader know that the story is not actually about a meal but instead what takes place before, during, and after.

It is a moral tale similar to Eating Raoul where the characters have to weigh the value of a human life against their own lives and struggles. The main characters in Eating Raoul are looking to start a restaurant. The main characters in The Dinner want to protect their children as well as their own ambitions. The lives that we are to consider are 1980s Hollywood swingers for Raoul and the dregs of society for The Dinner. Both works ask the question if such people have the same value when compared to people in your family, people you know and are invested in. Regrettably, only Raoul has a fantastic hot tub scene.

There are some ethicist who take an idealist approach and would argue that a life is a life and that one human life does not have any more or less value than any other life. They would argue that the sleazy swinger or corrupt lock-smith or drunken homeless individual has the same value as the politician’s child or the child of a middle-class family or a childless couple trying to get by in the world. This is an argument that is based on the notion that all people are born with worth and that worth must be protected and cherished. All life is sacred.

Both Eating Raoul and The Dinner challenge such a notion. In both we find a look at the potential worth rather than the actual worth of an individual when considering value. The life of someone who has made a series of bad decisions should not be held in the same light as one who has not yet had opportunities. In other words, the potential life of a child of a middle-class couple is worth more than the actual life of a homeless alcoholic.

Yet how do we decide who has more potential value? How do we decide if someone might have a greater value to society in the future? The middle-class child might end up the homeless alcoholic, or might end up curing cancer. The homeless alcoholic might sober up and become an agent of policy change, or might stay homeless and continue to be a drain on the resources of society. Who gets to decide which life has more value currently or potentially?

I do not like to deal with moral absolutes. In most cases ambiguity offers room for creativity and flexibility. When dealing with questions of ethics I believe that we need to have the morally gray in order to consider differing situations and contexts (with some guideposts and direction). A great cause of the strain in the abortion/choice debate is around moral absolutes (those against abortion with no equivocation) and moral flexibility (those who advocate a freedom of choice because of differing situations). Yet there are times when I wonder if a moral absolute would keep us honest. In the United States we have capital punishment – we practice the idea that some lives no longer have potential worth. If we advocate the equal value of human life then we would have to reconsider the practice of capital punishment. We would also have to consider the question of war, because in such an act we are again saying that some lives are indeed worth more than others. As someone who aspires to pacifism such moral absolutes seem valuable. Yet others, like a prohibition on drugs, seem to close options for people who may need them. Consider cancer patients, AIDS patients, and others who look to marijuana for ease of their suffering.

There is not an easy answer. Even when we consider the notion of human life there is not an easy answer. As a Christian I would like to turn to the absolutes. Faith allows for the idealistic and I aspire to live in such idealism. Yet as a Christian who tries to live in the world today I recognize that such ideals are not always possible. I would like to say that all human life has value and that we should never be in the position to decide if one is worth more than another. Yet reality will push me and I know I will have to contribute in one way or another with a decision that does place some over others. It is good to know that I can always turn to the 1980s classic Eating Raoul or Herman Koch’s more recent book The Dinner for some examples as to how to wrestle with such moral quandaries. Yum!