Before I begin, I will again point out that I did not make
this up
This story is of course based
on an actual incident that happened in Iceland in 1314.
My answer, from most to least culpable:
Lover
Wilfully gives the wife a death sentence. (I'm assuming
he knew that if she couldn't go by boat, she would have
to go over the bridge and meet the troll.)
Wife
Knew there was a chance that she would have to
cross the bridge on the way back. (Her culpability
depends on the extent to which she believed her
husband might really have taken her with him.)
I'd assign a much lower culpability to the next three.
Boatman
Just doing his job. (His culpability depends somewhat on
whether he was an independent businessman -- in which case
I'm inclined to increase it a little -- or just an employee
of Reykjavik Ferries.)
Husband
I'm assuming he didn't suspect his wife had a lover on the
other side of the river.
Troll
I'm assuming the troll is just a monster that eats people,
in which case I wouldn't judge it by human standards
of morality.
Most culpable to least culpable: 1. Boatman. The boatman surely knows there is a troll under the bridge, as it is clearly in fact a significant source of his revenue. He knows for a fact that his actions will result in her death, and he persists in them due to avarice - in spite of the fact there is no clear reason they are necessary. It is this action alone which causes the woman's death. 2 or 3. Woman. If the woman can be called responsible for her actions, she is #2. If she is as impulse-driven as the story reports, #3. This depends on whether her decision to cross the river without the money for a return trip was willful or impulse-driven. In any event, her refusal to tell the husband the reason for his remaining at home makes her at least more culpable than him. 3 or 2. Lover. If the wife is willful, then the lover is less directly culpable. If she is not, he is more directly culpable. The decision not to furnish her with money is cruel, but it does leave her with the unpleasant but non-fatal option of remaining with him. If she is willful, she is basically responsible for deciding to cross the bridge and perishing; if she is not, then he initiates a process which will certainly end in her death, which puts him higher. 4. Husband. He has a business trip to go on, and in the absence of a compelling reason to remain (which his wife refuses to give him), he has to go on it. That she one or both of chose to engage in a lie of omission and chose to irresponsibly see her lover is not his fault. 5. Troll. The troll is hungry, and we are its food.
In order: 1. Troll (It's hard for me not to assign ultimate culpability to whoever actually kills someone. I'm given no evidence the troll kills for any particularly moral reason, and as I'm asked to judge by human standards, I will do so. I believe the question is slightly loaded by an inclusion of a fantasy creature, whose motivations we're unable to discern. I've heard versions of the tale which star a lion or an angry hermit in this role... each of which is no less loaded.)
2. Lover. (Assuming that he knows of the troll, a big assumption to make as the story never mentions the wife telling him about it, he condemns the wife, someone who he purports to love, for reasons of person greed.)
3. Boatman (Assuming that he knows of the troll, again a big assumption to make, he condemns the woman to her death because of the greed necessary to keep a capitalistic system of society stable.)
4. Wife (Though fully knowledgeable about the troll, she condemns herself because of the madness of conflicted love for her lover and husband. Not an especially honorable motivation, as immoral as she's acted, but one moreso than greed or killing for the sake of killing.)
5. Husband (I'm almost willing to judge him innocent, assuming he's actually going to town on business. He may have good reasons for wanting the wife to stay at home, and having been provided no satisfactory reason by the wife (when one was available, but denied to him by the wife) nor any reason to think his wife would cross the bridge (again available, but denied to him by the wife), the only thing he's culpable of is assuming his wife won't cheat on him.)
I didn't like the movie Crash, as it seemed the entire message of the movie is "People suck."
Anyway, here are my answers:
1. Lover - He is the most aware of the situation, most aware of the risk involved, and most falls under the "People who suck" category. He knew the wife came across to see him, he knew the wife had no money to cross again, he knew the wife couldn't reasonably stay with him, and there is no compelling reason for him to withhold the money from the woman he supposedly loves. Even hookers can ask for cabfare home. You might even be able to blame him for building his house on the wrong side of the river.
2. Wife - Regardless of whether her decision to visit the lover was a choice or impulse, she wasn't ensorcelled or otherwise compelled to visit the lover against her will. She may have thought she had a number of "outs" to avoid the troll, but it was her choice to cross on the ferry with no money and ultimately her choice to chance the bridge.
3. Boatman - While he does reject the wife over money like the lover, he is far less aware of the situation of the wife and more reasonable in his motives for rejecting the wife. If he let anyone cross for free just to avoid the troll, he'd never make any money to sustain himself.
4. Husband - The only reason he has any culpability at all is because there's no reason given for him not to let his wife come to town with him. Even given that, he is totally unaware of the situation and has no reason to think that by leaving his wife at home, he is putting her at risk.
5. Troll - The story states that the troll kills everyone who crosses the bridge. Unless the troll is of adult human intelligence AND has a plentiful alternate source of food, the troll is an amoral participant in the incident. Blaming the troll is like blaming the river. Or blaming human evolution for not giving us wings/gills/teleportation in order to cross the river some other way.
Given a situation of a man who lives under a bridge, and kills everyone who passes, I think one of two things. A. He's crazy, or B. He really likes killing. Without more information, it's impossible to discern. Just because the troll is a troll doesn't absolve him from blame in this regard.
I'm always terrible at these types of games, I always end up wanting more information. I'd say the troll is the most culpable and the husband is the least, but the rest of the rankings depend on circumstance. Was the boatman a rich monopolist who could afford to give a free ride to someone in need or did he need every ride to be a paid one to maintain his boat? Did the lover deny the wife's request for money because he was just a greedy bastard, or could he really not afford it? Did the wife decide to make the trip on her own or did the lover persuade her to come over?
Troll - He killed her, and even with any larger context that's been omitted such as "An evil warlock will blow up an entire troll elementary school unless this guy sits under the bridge and kills anyone who crosses," his actions are the direct cause of her death. This is assuming he's a sentient being; if he's just the equivalent of a field dotted with hidden tar pits or something then culpability falls squarely on:
Wife - If you're going to be cheating on the man you're married to, it's your own damn responsibility to at least plan ahead. What were you thinking?!
Lover and Boatman, more or less equally - This depends entirely on how much money is involved, but the story as told here seems to indicate a rather large sum. If she shows up, gets her thing on, and then says "Hey by the way I need ten thousand dollars right now", it's hard to criticize the lover for responding that he didn't sign on for this and he can't afford to give up most of his personal assets to fix this dumb woman's mistake. Similarly, the boatman may rely on that income to keep his boat service running, and he has no responsibility to ferry someone around who can't pay; that's capitalism for you. But if it's clear to either of them that refusal will unquestionably lead to the death of our thick-witted protagonist, and if they know they can temporarily take the financial hit, it may be ethically responsible for them to try to work out some sort of deal with her.
Husband - He had no idea what was going on and thus has nothing to do with this.
Oh yeah, reading some of these replies, I totally forgot she also has the option of just not crossing the bridge. I'd rank the ethical pressure on the lover and boatman even lower then, down just above the husband.
Clearly, the immediate reason that the woman is dead is that a) WOMAN was on the brige and b) There was a TROLL on the bridge, which killed her
so the primary reason for her death is 1. TROLL Following the same type of reasoning, we have 2. WOMAN 3. BOATMAN 4. LOVER 5. HUSBAND
But this is clearly unsatisfactory.
At every stage in the whole process, WOMAN knows what risks lie ahead. At every stage in the process, she takes riskier and riskier decisions.
1. WOMAN 2. TROLL (given all that the woman has done so far, the troll's decision to kill determines the final outcome - as long as it's able to make a decision) 3-4. LOVER/BOATMAN - this depends upon their ability to actually make a decision 5. HUSBAND
My answers: Troll, the actual unprovoked murderer ("I have to protect the chastity of the bridge" is not really a defense for murder, although it would make an excellent episode of Law and Order.) Wife, because she was taking a big risk by not having enough money for two ferry trips and going anyway, Lover, because he was either manipulating the Wife into staying longer, witholding just to be mean or greedy, or trying to arrange a fight between her and her husband. He probably didn't intend for her to go get killed by the Troll. Boatman, because while he was just doing his job, he COULD have saved her from death. However, the wife could also have walked away. Husband, who couldn't have known about any of these extenuating circumstance and might have had a good reason for not bringing the wife along.
I asked my brother, and he said he'd keep my answers but put the husband before the boatman and the lover because he was probably responsible for creating the situation that drove the wife to a lover. I just thought that was interesting enough to warrant mentioning.
The troll gets highest culpability, at least if he's a sentient being. This is obvious; I don't regard cross-species predation as moral among sentient beings.
After that, the wife. If everything else had happened the exact same way and she just hadn't crossed the bridge, then the husband would have discovered her affair and her deception would have been out in the open, which, morally, I would consider the best possible outcome. Cheating being exposed or not cheating at all are both morally preferable to cheating and continuing to hide it -- all the wife's actions here are trying to achieve a morally evil goal, which is to lie and hide things from her husband. The lover's refusal to give her money to cross the bridge may be evil too, depending on the motive, but it could lead to a morally positive result -- her affair being discovered -- so it's both less directly responsible for her death *and* morally preferable.
Same but moreso for the boatman. If the boatman knows why she doesn't wanna cross the bridge, he has no moral obligation to help her perpetrate a lie. If he doesn't, he has no moral obligation to give up his own income for a random stranger. He cannot be held accountable for her choosing a suicidal and *wrong* action over a prudent and *right* one (waiting on this side of the bridge and letting her husband find out about the affair).
I really don't see how even the most wild moral speculation could put the husband at fault here, unless we decide that she's been driven to adultery by the husband's cruel and abusive ways.
The nature of the Troll makes this question confusing, to me. Basically it comes down to deciding whether the "Troll" character stands in for a murderous sophont (such as a serial killer) or a natural hazard (such as a dangerous ford or disrepaired bridge). Or perhaps better yet, the Troll Bridge can be seen to represent a contemporary ghetto (to outsiders) or "murder alley" type of area, where just entering it risks death because of its inhabitants, but is confusing depending on how people identify the Troll. Which is probably the point of the Thought Experiment - Does a murderous animal count as a murderer? If we throw a baby to the wolves, should we then blame the wolves for devouring her?
Basically, i think this question asks whether we think "Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity" should be a valid statement. ;)
When I really got thinking way too deeply about this moral ranking, I started to think that all the characters are just like some people have argued that the troll is: at the mercy of causal events and forces beyond their control. I'm not talking about any sort of divine theism, but rather that the descision they made was the only one they could have made given their lives up to that point, even if it was a harmful choice. We humans like to think that we are somehow fundamentally different from the rest of life, and in near-complete control over our actions. Everything I know from physics, biology and psychology leads me to believe that is technically not true. I think we are more acutely aware of our actions than most if not all other species, and that influences how we respond, but even that is just a highly complex form of cause and effect.
That said, I do think that culpability is a useful notion, as it causes people to be more aware of their actions, and sometimes moves life toward a more happy experience than it previously was. So here's my ranking.
1)TROLL - I kept debating between first and last. It(?) is certainly the most at fault in terms of direct causality, but even if you assume it is very cognitively similar to a human, it still is clearly an insane being, and probably is the least capable of pulling itself out of such a destructive habit pattern. The troll should be stopped, and it did something horribly wrong. Even though I put it here, I think putting the highest blame on the troll wouldn't really be a useful thing to do, depending on the troll's motivations. Still, I chose first because it's not totally clear that it doesn't have some more conscious and selfish motivations
2)WIFE - I sort of feel bad putting her this high, because I can empathize the most with her. Still, I would have to say that she is technically the second most culpable. Her actions, which she was aware were potentially harmless, put her in the position she is in, and there were several points at which she might have removed herself from the situation.
3)LOVER - He is the biggest "asshole" in all of this: not only is he doing something that I assume he knows is potentially harmful to others by having an affair with a married woman, but he seems not to even feel any compassion for the wife, whom you would think he would love.
4)BOATMAN - Though I know the boatman can't be expected to let everyone just cross for free lest he starve, given that the woman explained that she was desperate, it wouldn't hurt him to show some compassion and let the woman cross. I suppose from his point of view she could be lying, but I think it's still best to give people the benefit of the doubt. He is a close second to the lover in the "asshole" category.
5)HUSBAND - As he seems to be nearly ignorant of what is going on, I would say he has little reason to be blamed. I wouldn't say he is totally blameless though, as he might have cherished his wife's company more and kept her closer to him, and then he not only might have saved her from death but, going further back, might have prevented her from taking another lover in the first place.
It's telling that for all of these characters (except the Wife) we are provided with no motives for why they behave as they do. Why does the Troll eat people? Why does the Boatman refuse to carry the Wife over the water? Why does the Lover refuse to give the Wife any money? Why does the Husband refuse to take his spouse with him when she clearly wishes to go? (She can't provide him with a cogent reason why he should, but that in and of itself doesn't explain his actions.)
The reason that this is telling is that ethical decision-making, both as formally practiced by philosophers and informally practiced by regular people, depends on motive when assessing cases like this. For instance: a man is in an accident which incapacitates him and leaves him unconscious, indefinitely, and the doctors cannot say when he will recover. His wife chooses to take him off life support, and he dies. Did she do the right thing? The answer to this question turns on her motive: was she callously hoping he would die so she could inherit his wealth and become free to marry again, or did she believe that living this way robbed him of dignity and she was trying to do right by him, or was she acting on a previously-expressed wish of her husband that he not be permitted to live on life support? Motive is key to assessing the behaviour of any moral agent.
So the order in which we place the characters depends upon the motives that we, the readers, choose to ascribe to them. Whether the Troll comes first or last depends on whether we ascribe to him free will or instinct. The Boatman comes off better or worse depending on whether we see him refusal to give the woman charity deriving from avarice, or from justice, a determination that depends upon what alternatives to crossing the river are beside his boat and the troll-infested bridge. The Lover seems blameworthy, but perhaps he chose not to give the Wife any money because he wanted their relationship to be one freely chosen on both sides, without any chains of dependence? (I've heard the story told with the Lover saying precisely this, in an effort to make it easier to approve of his conduct.) And even the Husband can be found to be blameworthy depending upon his motive. Perhaps he knows of his wife's situation, but refuses to take her with him (and hence out of temptation) because he plans a tryst with his own lover. Or perhaps he hopes her passion will lead her into harm's way, and acts as he does in hopes of the very outcome that occurs.
All of which is to say, I would be very hesitant to assign guilt in this episode without knowing more. I was struck by the earlier response, where someone presented her desire to know more about the circumstances of the story as a fault or weakness in her moral judgment. Quite the contrary, I say: rushing to judgment without having all of the facts in the case is the troubling attitude. The idea that moral judgment can, or should, be made in the abstract, without knowing the circumstances in which the agent acts, is a pernicious one.
Troll: I don't buy the "we shouldn't blame it because it's only an animal" bit. If a dog kills someone, we shoot it. You can argue that it's shot as a matter of practicality, not as a matter of blame, but if so, I'd quesiton your conception of blame. If blame doesn't correlate with practical decisions, there's no point to it.
Lover, Boatman: I'd put them almost tied, because they both knowingly sent a woman to her doom. Also, they pretty much function as a unit in the story; this is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine the lover saying "Why don't you just ask the boatman to row you across for free? I'm sure he'd let you," and the boatman saying "Why don't you just go back to your lover and ask him for money? He wouldn't refuse you", and both being perfectly convinced that they were talking sense and that the woman only died because of her defeatist attitude. The lover scores higher because his personal connection to the woman gives him a greater obligation toward her.
Woman: She's hardly without sin here, but infidelity, deceit, and serial stupidity are not in the same league as being an accessory to murder. Plus, she did at least try to avoid the whole situation! Everyone is weak sometimes, and it's actually pretty laudable of her to recognize her weakness and take action to try to avoid temptation. Although it would be even more laudable, and more effective, if she had had the courage to tell her husband the truth.
Husband: It's hard to see how to blame him in the story as Adam tells it. His only crime is not listening to his wife when she was, in fact, deceiving him.
If we're crediting each of the people here with free will, then I would count the wife and troll tied at position number one, the husband at number five, and a tie between the remaining characters at position three.
Since the troll can be ranked, it must have culpability, and therefore must be responsible for its actions. I freely stipulate that I don't know much about trolls, having met none: they may be like wild animals, forces of nature, or deterministic automatons a la B.F. Skinner. But for the sake of the exercise, I'm assuming it's morally/mentally/what-have-you no different than the other four characters. Thus, it chose to murder an inncent stranger.
The wife deliberately put herself into harm's way. The troll "kills everyone who tries to cross," and she must be aware of it, or why pay the boatman for the ride over? She had numerous opportunites to avoid the fate:
- she chooses to lie by omission to the husband - she chooses to continue to see the lover - she chooses to go over the river without enough money for a return - she chooses not to stay on the other side -- this is the most crucial point: why not wait for the husband to take a ferry over and then either lie (she's proven herself willing to lie to him before to save herself embarassment, even if it's a lie by omission and not a direct falsehood) or, better, confess everything and make a clean break? There's a third option, to stay with the lover and abandon or divorce the poor husband, but the sort of lover who'd send his paramour to certain death rather than front her a few bucks for fare seems like a pretty lousy prospect. Better than death? Maybe.
Basically, the wife's final choice is to take a risk that she might prevail where everyone else has died... simply to avoid the repercussions of her own adultery. Either she's suicidal, incompetent, or incredibly selfish: would the husband -- who presumably loves her, if she's "trying to be faithful" -- rather hear that he's a cuckold or a widower?
The lover and the boatman both come off as cads, but in the end it's a question of their responsibility to bail out another person who has made very risky and irresponsible choices. I wonder if they've been through this before with her, and if the frustration of dealing with a a person who's impulsive and short-sighted to the point of catastrophe has made them callous. But there's nothing in the text to indicate this. The lover is a little more culpable than the boatman: we can rationalize that the boatman doesn't know her that well (although it sounds like she's crossed the river more than once), whereas the lover must know her and have had past dealings with her. Is the lover aware of her duplicity towards her husband?
Finally, there's the husband, who can only be held accountable if he had omniscient foresight. Asking him to act on information he doesn't have is unfair, and it's possible that if the wife had come clean he would have been sympathetic.
Adam: I'm curious to know what your answers would be on this game, and I think I'm not alone. Post them!
1. Troll. Because, frankly, my dear, without the troll in the situation, there is no murder. You can hypothesize all you like about a mythical creature's degree of self-control and free will, but I'll bet you that if the grief-stricken husband is going to take up his blunderbuss and seek vengeance on "the one who killed my wife", he's gonna be hunting trolls.
2. Wife. Obviously, if you remove the wife from the story, there is no murder either, but she's mostly up here due to that tremendously high house of cards she built trying to get her way, and should have known that any part of the plan failing would result in the whole plan failing. "Unable to resist temptation" is a dubious defense for her initial action. David Berkowitz felt he was just following orders, too. Even returning from the other side of the river with no safe options was a (foolish) choice she opted to make; she could potentially have made up a story about needing to flee the house from a criminal and only having enough money on her to pay for a one-way ticket. The husband may not have bought it when he came looking for her, but--assuming he isn't the abusive type--at least she wouldn't be dead. The name of that river wouldn't be the Rubicon, would it?
3. Lover. Not giving her the money for a return trip was a pretty rotten move, it's true, but he ain't the one who started this fine mess, Stanley. To use my "removal" exercise from above, if we take the lover out of the story and replace him with, say, a magic tree with delicious fruit that she felt compelled to go pick in her husband's absence, I think things follow a similar course of events easily. His refusal to loan her the money is the only thing to raise his level of blame. He is uncaring, perhaps (or perhaps just broke, or idealistic about the boatman's generosity--the beauty of the exercise is that we can get different motives just by supplying different personalities to the characters), but is not a murderer, nor an accomplice of a murderer, even if we paint as nasty a picture as we can of his character. Mind you, if he was a truly gallant lover, he would walk WITH her to the bridge and volunteer himself for the troll's jaws in the hopes that she could run across in time.
4. Husband. I only rank him slightly above the boatman because he is married to the wife (duh), and thus has an emotional investment in her safety, and at any rate presumably knows her better than any of the other players in this story. There may be any number of good reasons he decides to leave her alone (his business appointment requires a private meeting), or any number of bad reasons (he's off on an affair of his own), but since no ulterior motive on his part is apparantly prudent to this story, else it would be mentioned, I will assume he is performing his stated goal (business meeting) with integrity and honesty, which is more than I can say for her. And surely he doesn't know about her secret life. Take the husband out of the story and it seems to me things proceed identically; he has no effect one way or another on the danger in which she finds herself, unless we start writing some liberally rule-changing back story.
5. Boatman. Even if the wife pours her entire heart out when she "explains", he is guilty of nothing more than a missed opportunity for altruism; sad, maybe, but not enough to put him on trial for murder. I hate defending the businessman on neutrality grounds, but facts is facts, and the fact is that he has a business to run and can call it as he sees it on a per-customer basis. Maybe he can't afford to give out a free ride; maybe he's just an asshole. But having the right to refuse business doesn't make him negligent, somehow. He seems to illustrate that old favorite cliché of mine: "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part". Cruel? Maybe. True? In this case, yes.
Cool exercise. Is there, in the conventional playing of the game, some standard set of analogues between the characters in the story and an ethical outlook, or family archetype, or something? Or is it more of a narrative/ethical Rorschach test?
And, most importantly, what are your answers, O quizmaster?
I don't see how "If you remove the troll, there is no murder" makes it the most culpable. If you remove ANY character from the story, there is no murder.
Yes, if you remove the troll, there's no murder for the obvious reason. And the boatman goes broke.
If you remove the wife, also no murder for the obvious reason.
If you remove the lover, there's no murder because there's no compulsion for the wife to cross the river. I don't see how replacing the lover with a magic tree holds in your "removal" exercise, since you're just replacing the lover with something that acts exactly like the lover. The only difference is that the lover is unwilling to give the wife money, and the tree would be unable.
If you remove the husband, there's no murder because the wife isn't married and doesn't have to re-cross the river to get back to anyone. She wouldn't even be required to live on the opposite side of the river as the lover.
If you remove the boatman, there's no murder because the wife could never get across the river in the first place and therefore never have a tryst with the lover.
I know I'm posting a lot of responses to people, but I'm just seeing how people defend their viewpoints. I'm not an actual jerk, honest!
The person who wrote the story is the guilty one, since he or she created these people just to force them to commit these tragic acts, without giving them any way out of their situation. The characters show no signs of their own free will, so it's hard to find them morally culpable.
Count me in the camp that's confused about what moral standards we hold trolls by. So, my ordering is as follows:
(troll) woman lover husband boatman (troll)
- If the troll can be held to moral standards, then it is the most culpable, as it is the actual murderer.
- The woman is clearly a rational being. She does several of things which are morally suspect in this story: she lies to her husband (by omission, but clearly on purposes to decieve), and she cheats on him. These may make her a less pleasent person, but they don't make her culpable for her own death. What *does* make her culpable, is the fact that she chose certain death over facing the consequences of her action. She knew she was going to be killed if she crossed the bridge, and she knew she wouldn't need to if she stayed, and crossed anyway.
- The lover is not a very well-developed character. We don't know why he didn't give her money - maybe he couldn't, maybe he wanted to have her stay with him, maybe he was just being mean. As far as I can see, he shoulders a non-insignificant part of the blame here, but less so than the woman. At the very least, he should have acted to stop her crossing on the bridge.
- The husband - the gap between the culpability of the husband and the lover is very large. I just don't consider him totally inculpable because of the characters in the story, he's the only one who, by getting married to her, made a commitment to the woman. His obliviousness to her cheating on him, and her death, are in some tiny way measures of the failure of this commitment.
- The boatman, in my opinion, isn't really culpable at all. He's only "guilty" of refusing to commit an act of charity, but the whole point of charity is that it's never an obligation. Yes, he was partly responsible for the fact that she didn't have a safe way to cross the river, but she knew she wouldn't have one when she left, yet she chose to leave anyway. I can't see how the boatman is to blame.
- And finally, if the troll is an animal, or a mindless killing machine, or anything else that doesn't need conform to human morality, then it's not at all culpable, by definition.
In any kind of moral situation, the best way to figure out what to do is to ask oneself "what would Jesus do?"
Now, imagine Jesus in the wife's position. What would he do? Well, clearly, he'd just walk on the water and be home safe before his husband came back. The fact that the woman didn't do so is clearly an indication that she's a sinner, and thus ultimately culpable.
1. The Woman. Without any additional information, she has to be the most culpable. She KNOWS her actions will result in her own death. The troll kills EVERYBODY. There's not even any doubt. Not only is she impulsive, she's arrogant and selfish. Perhaps she needs some Haldol, but she's still to blame.
2. The Lover. He willingly enters into a relationship with an impulsive, arrogant, and selfish woman, likely for his own similar needs. He most likely knows it is an affair. Moreover, he knows in all likelihood that she's going to attempt to cross the bridge where the troll kills EVERYBODY. Legally, he's not culpable, but he's just as miserable a human being as she is.
3. The Boatman. I support his capitalistic tendencies, but the least he could have done was attempt to persuade the woman not to cross the bridge. The boatman must know that the troll kills EVERYBODY, otherwise he wouldn't have set up shop when a perfectly good bridge was available.
4. The Husband. He's married to an impulsive, arrogant, and selfish woman, and if he doesn't know this, he's either never home, blind, or simply power hungry. While he can't be faulted for her death, he can be faulted for marrying her, or not getting her help.
5. The Troll. As defined by the story, the troll kills EVERYBODY. He remains under the same bridge. He is obviously impervious to humans, as with that foreknowledge of his brutality, humans would have offed him by now if they could (apparently, only goats are capable). But the troll is obviously limited to the extent of his killing. Instead of actively searching out humans to destroy, he only kills those who cross the bridge. He's very predictable, and incapable of being anything else than a killing machine. After he's established this pattern, any humans stupid enough to allow themselves to be killed by it probably don't deserve to live anyway. As I see it, the troll represents natural selection. No culpability there.
Ockham's Razor: using a minimal moral equivalence of guilt, the troll has killed. You can stop there. Still, everybody knows the murderous nature of trolls. Forget culpability; you can't have bridge-dwelling trolls devouring citizens during their daily commutes. As a taxpayer and public safety professional I find it wrong on a number of levels. The true guilty party is this laissez-faire hypothetical municipality. By which I mean the citizens who have failed to require of their leaders that said leaders hire a monster hunter to clear out the troll infestation. Therefore the correct response is everyone mentioned in the story EXCEPT the troll.
Troll. Really, I havn't heard of any trolls that aren't sapient beings, so he is as guilty as any cruel and/or hungry human person would be upon killing a person.
Woman. Adultery aside, she unreasonably expects from everybody,
Lying by omission to her husband (who might have helped her if he knew the truth)
Setting out unprepared to pay the boatman, (who would have helped her if she had the money)
Failing to take into account the lover's inability or unwillingness to help (this is not a first-time encounter, presumably she already has some knowledge of his character/finances)
Finally, taking her chances with the troll rather than face the possibility of being found out (surely there are other things on that side of the river she could tell her husband she was doing?) This last, taken by itself, almost looks like suicide anyway.
Lover. For inciting her across the river in the first place. (But this weakly, as apparently she came uninvited.)
Husband. For leaving her behind when she asked to go with him. (And this weakly as well, as he didn't know what was at stake.)
I don't know if I can hold the boatman accountable. He took a river crossing that was 'certain death' and made it into 'ferry fee or certain death'. Whether he charges just enough to get by, or he allows monopolistic greed to get the better of him, the other option is still 'certain death,' and he has no obligation to be charitable to her unless he thinks that her staying on that side is a fate literally worse than death. (Really, I doubt he has an obligation to carry anyone across. Four bits says he has a "we have the right to refuse service to anyone" sign posted somewhere aboard.)
Of course if it was the other way around, and the boatman, say, invited the troll to haunt a newly-built bridge that was taking away all his business, then clearly he's a bastard and the whole thing is his fault.
Troll: No excuses for killing people. As far as I know, he's entirely capable of *not* eating people. I'm not saying he should go vegetarian, but he can at least set down some ground rules for himself. If he's failed to even do that, then he's culpable for disregarding morality. Wife: Not only is has her dishonesty to her husband and her witless lack of planning gotten her into this situation, but she willingly walked up to a troll who she knew would kill her. Nobody else made her do that. Lover: Holds some culpability for being a partner in the dishonest relationship this woman had with her husband (and if he didn't know she was married, he could've looked a little further into it before he slept with her). It's not so great of him not to give her the money, either, but an already immoral relationship isn't made much worse by him being a jerk. Husband: Aside from being a capitalist, also holds some culpability for failing to recognize and deal with his wife's unfaithfulness. Not as bad as adulterer because the husband didn't *knowingly* participate in a dishonest relationship. Also, the adulterer may also have been a capitalist. Boatman: Capitalist; therefore, somewhat culpable, but he didn't really do anything else wrong.
- Wife. Although she's the most sympathetic character in the story, she made easily avoidable choices that lead directly to her death. She chose to see her lover. She chose to get on the boat without enough fare to get back. She chose to cross the bridge even though she knew it meant certain death. -Troll. Normally, I believe in direct responsibility: serial killers are directly responsible for their crimes, abusive parents of serial killers aren't, and all that. But I find I have to make an exception for the troll because he kills EVERY time someone crosses the bridge. Whether or not he's sentient, whatever is going on in his head, he is, for all intents and purposes, more a force of nature than a living being. To expect him to decide not to kill is like expecting him to decide to stop breathing, or to expect the river to stop flowing.
I rank everyone else below the wife and the troll because I assume that no one apart from the troll and the wife acted with the knowledge that their actions would lead to the wife's death.
-Husband. He should listen to his wife a bit more, yes? -Lover. He probably should have given the wife money, of course. But if he were to give the wife money that would've been exceptional - the fact that he didn't, and expected the wife to either stay or come up with the money herself, is unfortunate but not surprising. -Boatman. He probably should've given the wife a free ride - but if he had, that would have been especially exceptional. He is a businessman, after all.
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December 5 2005, 09:30:09 UTC 6 years ago
December 5 2005, 10:43:05 UTC 6 years ago
This story is of course based on an actual incident that happened in Iceland in 1314.
My answer, from most to least culpable:
Wilfully gives the wife a death sentence. (I'm assuming he knew that if she couldn't go by boat, she would have to go over the bridge and meet the troll.)
Knew there was a chance that she would have to cross the bridge on the way back. (Her culpability depends on the extent to which she believed her husband might really have taken her with him.)
I'd assign a much lower culpability to the next three.
Just doing his job. (His culpability depends somewhat on whether he was an independent businessman -- in which case I'm inclined to increase it a little -- or just an employee of Reykjavik Ferries.)
I'm assuming he didn't suspect his wife had a lover on the other side of the river.
I'm assuming the troll is just a monster that eats people, in which case I wouldn't judge it by human standards of morality.
Anonymous
December 5 2005, 12:24:36 UTC 6 years ago
1. Boatman. The boatman surely knows there is a troll under the bridge, as it is clearly in fact a significant source of his revenue. He knows for a fact that his actions will result in her death, and he persists in them due to avarice - in spite of the fact there is no clear reason they are necessary. It is this action alone which causes the woman's death.
2 or 3. Woman. If the woman can be called responsible for her actions, she is #2. If she is as impulse-driven as the story reports, #3. This depends on whether her decision to cross the river without the money for a return trip was willful or impulse-driven. In any event, her refusal to tell the husband the reason for his remaining at home makes her at least more culpable than him.
3 or 2. Lover. If the wife is willful, then the lover is less directly culpable. If she is not, he is more directly culpable. The decision not to furnish her with money is cruel, but it does leave her with the unpleasant but non-fatal option of remaining with him. If she is willful, she is basically responsible for deciding to cross the bridge and perishing; if she is not, then he initiates a process which will certainly end in her death, which puts him higher.
4. Husband.
He has a business trip to go on, and in the absence of a compelling reason to remain (which his wife refuses to give him), he has to go on it. That she one or both of chose to engage in a lie of omission and chose to irresponsibly see her lover is not his fault.
5. Troll.
The troll is hungry, and we are its food.
6 years ago
December 5 2005, 15:39:58 UTC 6 years ago
Anonymous
December 5 2005, 18:27:55 UTC 6 years ago
1. Troll (It's hard for me not to assign ultimate culpability to whoever actually kills someone. I'm given no evidence the troll kills for any particularly moral reason, and as I'm asked to judge by human standards, I will do so. I believe the question is slightly loaded by an inclusion of a fantasy creature, whose motivations we're unable to discern. I've heard versions of the tale which star a lion or an angry hermit in this role... each of which is no less loaded.)
2. Lover. (Assuming that he knows of the troll, a big assumption to make as the story never mentions the wife telling him about it, he condemns the wife, someone who he purports to love, for reasons of person greed.)
3. Boatman (Assuming that he knows of the troll, again a big assumption to make, he condemns the woman to her death because of the greed necessary to keep a capitalistic system of society stable.)
4. Wife (Though fully knowledgeable about the troll, she condemns herself because of the madness of conflicted love for her lover and husband. Not an especially honorable motivation, as immoral as she's acted, but one moreso than greed or killing for the sake of killing.)
5. Husband (I'm almost willing to judge him innocent, assuming he's actually going to town on business. He may have good reasons for wanting the wife to stay at home, and having been provided no satisfactory reason by the wife (when one was available, but denied to him by the wife) nor any reason to think his wife would cross the bridge (again available, but denied to him by the wife), the only thing he's culpable of is assuming his wife won't cheat on him.)
December 5 2005, 19:09:52 UTC 6 years ago
Anyway, here are my answers:
1. Lover - He is the most aware of the situation, most aware of the risk involved, and most falls under the "People who suck" category. He knew the wife came across to see him, he knew the wife had no money to cross again, he knew the wife couldn't reasonably stay with him, and there is no compelling reason for him to withhold the money from the woman he supposedly loves. Even hookers can ask for cabfare home. You might even be able to blame him for building his house on the wrong side of the river.
2. Wife - Regardless of whether her decision to visit the lover was a choice or impulse, she wasn't ensorcelled or otherwise compelled to visit the lover against her will. She may have thought she had a number of "outs" to avoid the troll, but it was her choice to cross on the ferry with no money and ultimately her choice to chance the bridge.
3. Boatman - While he does reject the wife over money like the lover, he is far less aware of the situation of the wife and more reasonable in his motives for rejecting the wife. If he let anyone cross for free just to avoid the troll, he'd never make any money to sustain himself.
4. Husband - The only reason he has any culpability at all is because there's no reason given for him not to let his wife come to town with him. Even given that, he is totally unaware of the situation and has no reason to think that by leaving his wife at home, he is putting her at risk.
5. Troll - The story states that the troll kills everyone who crosses the bridge. Unless the troll is of adult human intelligence AND has a plentiful alternate source of food, the troll is an amoral participant in the incident. Blaming the troll is like blaming the river. Or blaming human evolution for not giving us wings/gills/teleportation in order to cross the river some other way.
Anonymous
December 5 2005, 19:58:08 UTC 6 years ago
6 years ago
6 years ago
December 5 2005, 20:57:49 UTC 6 years ago
December 5 2005, 21:33:11 UTC 6 years ago
Troll - He killed her, and even with any larger context that's been omitted such as "An evil warlock will blow up an entire troll elementary school unless this guy sits under the bridge and kills anyone who crosses," his actions are the direct cause of her death. This is assuming he's a sentient being; if he's just the equivalent of a field dotted with hidden tar pits or something then culpability falls squarely on:
Wife - If you're going to be cheating on the man you're married to, it's your own damn responsibility to at least plan ahead. What were you thinking?!
Lover and Boatman, more or less equally - This depends entirely on how much money is involved, but the story as told here seems to indicate a rather large sum. If she shows up, gets her thing on, and then says "Hey by the way I need ten thousand dollars right now", it's hard to criticize the lover for responding that he didn't sign on for this and he can't afford to give up most of his personal assets to fix this dumb woman's mistake. Similarly, the boatman may rely on that income to keep his boat service running, and he has no responsibility to ferry someone around who can't pay; that's capitalism for you. But if it's clear to either of them that refusal will unquestionably lead to the death of our thick-witted protagonist, and if they know they can temporarily take the financial hit, it may be ethically responsible for them to try to work out some sort of deal with her.
Husband - He had no idea what was going on and thus has nothing to do with this.
December 5 2005, 23:32:12 UTC 6 years ago
December 5 2005, 21:37:09 UTC 6 years ago
Clearly, the immediate reason that the woman is dead is that
a) WOMAN was on the brige and b) There was a TROLL on the bridge, which killed her
so the primary reason for her death is
1. TROLL
Following the same type of reasoning, we have
2. WOMAN
3. BOATMAN
4. LOVER
5. HUSBAND
But this is clearly unsatisfactory.
At every stage in the whole process, WOMAN knows what risks lie ahead. At every stage in the process, she takes riskier and riskier decisions.
1. WOMAN
2. TROLL (given all that the woman has done so far, the troll's decision to kill determines the final outcome - as long as it's able to make a decision)
3-4. LOVER/BOATMAN - this depends upon their ability to actually make a decision
5. HUSBAND
December 5 2005, 22:07:54 UTC 6 years ago
Wife, because she was taking a big risk by not having enough money for two ferry trips and going anyway,
Lover, because he was either manipulating the Wife into staying longer, witholding just to be mean or greedy, or trying to arrange a fight between her and her husband. He probably didn't intend for her to go get killed by the Troll.
Boatman, because while he was just doing his job, he COULD have saved her from death. However, the wife could also have walked away.
Husband, who couldn't have known about any of these extenuating circumstance and might have had a good reason for not bringing the wife along.
I asked my brother, and he said he'd keep my answers but put the husband before the boatman and the lover because he was probably responsible for creating the situation that drove the wife to a lover. I just thought that was interesting enough to warrant mentioning.
December 5 2005, 22:38:35 UTC 6 years ago
After that, the wife. If everything else had happened the exact same way and she just hadn't crossed the bridge, then the husband would have discovered her affair and her deception would have been out in the open, which, morally, I would consider the best possible outcome. Cheating being exposed or not cheating at all are both morally preferable to cheating and continuing to hide it -- all the wife's actions here are trying to achieve a morally evil goal, which is to lie and hide things from her husband. The lover's refusal to give her money to cross the bridge may be evil too, depending on the motive, but it could lead to a morally positive result -- her affair being discovered -- so it's both less directly responsible for her death *and* morally preferable.
Same but moreso for the boatman. If the boatman knows why she doesn't wanna cross the bridge, he has no moral obligation to help her perpetrate a lie. If he doesn't, he has no moral obligation to give up his own income for a random stranger. He cannot be held accountable for her choosing a suicidal and *wrong* action over a prudent and *right* one (waiting on this side of the bridge and letting her husband find out about the affair).
I really don't see how even the most wild moral speculation could put the husband at fault here, unless we decide that she's been driven to adultery by the husband's cruel and abusive ways.
December 5 2005, 23:53:10 UTC 6 years ago
Or perhaps better yet, the Troll Bridge can be seen to represent a contemporary ghetto (to outsiders) or "murder alley" type of area, where just entering it risks death because of its inhabitants, but is confusing depending on how people identify the Troll. Which is probably the point of the Thought Experiment - Does a murderous animal count as a murderer? If we throw a baby to the wolves, should we then blame the wolves for devouring her?
Basically, i think this question asks whether we think "Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity" should be a valid statement. ;)
December 6 2005, 00:12:43 UTC 6 years ago
That said, I do think that culpability is a useful notion, as it causes people to be more aware of their actions, and sometimes moves life toward a more happy experience than it previously was. So here's my ranking.
1)TROLL - I kept debating between first and last. It(?) is certainly the most at fault in terms of direct causality, but even if you assume it is very cognitively similar to a human, it still is clearly an insane being, and probably is the least capable of pulling itself out of such a destructive habit pattern. The troll should be stopped, and it did something horribly wrong. Even though I put it here, I think putting the highest blame on the troll wouldn't really be a useful thing to do, depending on the troll's motivations. Still, I chose first because it's not totally clear that it doesn't have some more conscious and selfish motivations
2)WIFE - I sort of feel bad putting her this high, because I can empathize the most with her. Still, I would have to say that she is technically the second most culpable. Her actions, which she was aware were potentially harmless, put her in the position she is in, and there were several points at which she might have removed herself from the situation.
3)LOVER - He is the biggest "asshole" in all of this: not only is he doing something that I assume he knows is potentially harmful to others by having an affair with a married woman, but he seems not to even feel any compassion for the wife, whom you would think he would love.
4)BOATMAN - Though I know the boatman can't be expected to let everyone just cross for free lest he starve, given that the woman explained that she was desperate, it wouldn't hurt him to show some compassion and let the woman cross. I suppose from his point of view she could be lying, but I think it's still best to give people the benefit of the doubt. He is a close second to the lover in the "asshole" category.
5)HUSBAND - As he seems to be nearly ignorant of what is going on, I would say he has little reason to be blamed. I wouldn't say he is totally blameless though, as he might have cherished his wife's company more and kept her closer to him, and then he not only might have saved her from death but, going further back, might have prevented her from taking another lover in the first place.
December 6 2005, 03:55:39 UTC 6 years ago
Anonymous
December 6 2005, 05:24:48 UTC 6 years ago
It's telling that for all of these characters (except the Wife) we are provided with no motives for why they behave as they do. Why does the Troll eat people? Why does the Boatman refuse to carry the Wife over the water? Why does the Lover refuse to give the Wife any money? Why does the Husband refuse to take his spouse with him when she clearly wishes to go? (She can't provide him with a cogent reason why he should, but that in and of itself doesn't explain his actions.)
The reason that this is telling is that ethical decision-making, both as formally practiced by philosophers and informally practiced by regular people, depends on motive when assessing cases like this. For instance: a man is in an accident which incapacitates him and leaves him unconscious, indefinitely, and the doctors cannot say when he will recover. His wife chooses to take him off life support, and he dies. Did she do the right thing? The answer to this question turns on her motive: was she callously hoping he would die so she could inherit his wealth and become free to marry again, or did she believe that living this way robbed him of dignity and she was trying to do right by him, or was she acting on a previously-expressed wish of her husband that he not be permitted to live on life support? Motive is key to assessing the behaviour of any moral agent.
So the order in which we place the characters depends upon the motives that we, the readers, choose to ascribe to them. Whether the Troll comes first or last depends on whether we ascribe to him free will or instinct. The Boatman comes off better or worse depending on whether we see him refusal to give the woman charity deriving from avarice, or from justice, a determination that depends upon what alternatives to crossing the river are beside his boat and the troll-infested bridge. The Lover seems blameworthy, but perhaps he chose not to give the Wife any money because he wanted their relationship to be one freely chosen on both sides, without any chains of dependence? (I've heard the story told with the Lover saying precisely this, in an effort to make it easier to approve of his conduct.) And even the Husband can be found to be blameworthy depending upon his motive. Perhaps he knows of his wife's situation, but refuses to take her with him (and hence out of temptation) because he plans a tryst with his own lover. Or perhaps he hopes her passion will lead her into harm's way, and acts as he does in hopes of the very outcome that occurs.
All of which is to say, I would be very hesitant to assign guilt in this episode without knowing more. I was struck by the earlier response, where someone presented her desire to know more about the circumstances of the story as a fault or weakness in her moral judgment. Quite the contrary, I say: rushing to judgment without having all of the facts in the case is the troubling attitude. The idea that moral judgment can, or should, be made in the abstract, without knowing the circumstances in which the agent acts, is a pernicious one.
December 6 2005, 08:55:49 UTC 6 years ago
6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
December 6 2005, 16:01:40 UTC 6 years ago
Anonymous
December 6 2005, 16:20:14 UTC 6 years ago
Lover, Boatman: I'd put them almost tied, because they both knowingly sent a woman to her doom. Also, they pretty much function as a unit in the story; this is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine the lover saying "Why don't you just ask the boatman to row you across for free? I'm sure he'd let you," and the boatman saying "Why don't you just go back to your lover and ask him for money? He wouldn't refuse you", and both being perfectly convinced that they were talking sense and that the woman only died because of her defeatist attitude. The lover scores higher because his personal connection to the woman gives him a greater obligation toward her.
Woman: She's hardly without sin here, but infidelity, deceit, and serial stupidity are not in the same league as being an accessory to murder. Plus, she did at least try to avoid the whole situation! Everyone is weak sometimes, and it's actually pretty laudable of her to recognize her weakness and take action to try to avoid temptation. Although it would be even more laudable, and more effective, if she had had the courage to tell her husband the truth.
Husband: It's hard to see how to blame him in the story as Adam tells it. His only crime is not listening to his wife when she was, in fact, deceiving him.
December 6 2005, 23:12:21 UTC 6 years ago
Since the troll can be ranked, it must have culpability, and therefore must be responsible for its actions. I freely stipulate that I don't know much about trolls, having met none: they may be like wild animals, forces of nature, or deterministic automatons a la B.F. Skinner. But for the sake of the exercise, I'm assuming it's morally/mentally/what-have-you no different than the other four characters. Thus, it chose to murder an inncent stranger.
The wife deliberately put herself into harm's way. The troll "kills everyone who tries to cross," and she must be aware of it, or why pay the boatman for the ride over? She had numerous opportunites to avoid the fate:
- she chooses to lie by omission to the husband
- she chooses to continue to see the lover
- she chooses to go over the river without enough money for a return
- she chooses not to stay on the other side -- this is the most crucial point: why not wait for the husband to take a ferry over and then either lie (she's proven herself willing to lie to him before to save herself embarassment, even if it's a lie by omission and not a direct falsehood) or, better, confess everything and make a clean break? There's a third option, to stay with the lover and abandon or divorce the poor husband, but the sort of lover who'd send his paramour to certain death rather than front her a few bucks for fare seems like a pretty lousy prospect. Better than death? Maybe.
Basically, the wife's final choice is to take a risk that she might prevail where everyone else has died... simply to avoid the repercussions of her own adultery. Either she's suicidal, incompetent, or incredibly selfish: would the husband -- who presumably loves her, if she's "trying to be faithful" -- rather hear that he's a cuckold or a widower?
The lover and the boatman both come off as cads, but in the end it's a question of their responsibility to bail out another person who has made very risky and irresponsible choices. I wonder if they've been through this before with her, and if the frustration of dealing with a a person who's impulsive and short-sighted to the point of catastrophe has made them callous. But there's nothing in the text to indicate this. The lover is a little more culpable than the boatman: we can rationalize that the boatman doesn't know her that well (although it sounds like she's crossed the river more than once), whereas the lover must know her and have had past dealings with her. Is the lover aware of her duplicity towards her husband?
Finally, there's the husband, who can only be held accountable if he had omniscient foresight. Asking him to act on information he doesn't have is unfair, and it's possible that if the wife had come clean he would have been sympathetic.
Adam: I'm curious to know what your answers would be on this game, and I think I'm not alone. Post them!
December 7 2005, 05:30:23 UTC 6 years ago
Watch my crotchety old values fly...
1. Troll. Because, frankly, my dear, without the troll in the situation, there is no murder. You can hypothesize all you like about a mythical creature's degree of self-control and free will, but I'll bet you that if the grief-stricken husband is going to take up his blunderbuss and seek vengeance on "the one who killed my wife", he's gonna be hunting trolls.2. Wife. Obviously, if you remove the wife from the story, there is no murder either, but she's mostly up here due to that tremendously high house of cards she built trying to get her way, and should have known that any part of the plan failing would result in the whole plan failing. "Unable to resist temptation" is a dubious defense for her initial action. David Berkowitz felt he was just following orders, too. Even returning from the other side of the river with no safe options was a (foolish) choice she opted to make; she could potentially have made up a story about needing to flee the house from a criminal and only having enough money on her to pay for a one-way ticket. The husband may not have bought it when he came looking for her, but--assuming he isn't the abusive type--at least she wouldn't be dead. The name of that river wouldn't be the Rubicon, would it?
3. Lover. Not giving her the money for a return trip was a pretty rotten move, it's true, but he ain't the one who started this fine mess, Stanley. To use my "removal" exercise from above, if we take the lover out of the story and replace him with, say, a magic tree with delicious fruit that she felt compelled to go pick in her husband's absence, I think things follow a similar course of events easily. His refusal to loan her the money is the only thing to raise his level of blame. He is uncaring, perhaps (or perhaps just broke, or idealistic about the boatman's generosity--the beauty of the exercise is that we can get different motives just by supplying different personalities to the characters), but is not a murderer, nor an accomplice of a murderer, even if we paint as nasty a picture as we can of his character. Mind you, if he was a truly gallant lover, he would walk WITH her to the bridge and volunteer himself for the troll's jaws in the hopes that she could run across in time.
4. Husband. I only rank him slightly above the boatman because he is married to the wife (duh), and thus has an emotional investment in her safety, and at any rate presumably knows her better than any of the other players in this story. There may be any number of good reasons he decides to leave her alone (his business appointment requires a private meeting), or any number of bad reasons (he's off on an affair of his own), but since no ulterior motive on his part is apparantly prudent to this story, else it would be mentioned, I will assume he is performing his stated goal (business meeting) with integrity and honesty, which is more than I can say for her. And surely he doesn't know about her secret life. Take the husband out of the story and it seems to me things proceed identically; he has no effect one way or another on the danger in which she finds herself, unless we start writing some liberally rule-changing back story.
5. Boatman. Even if the wife pours her entire heart out when she "explains", he is guilty of nothing more than a missed opportunity for altruism; sad, maybe, but not enough to put him on trial for murder. I hate defending the businessman on neutrality grounds, but facts is facts, and the fact is that he has a business to run and can call it as he sees it on a per-customer basis. Maybe he can't afford to give out a free ride; maybe he's just an asshole. But having the right to refuse business doesn't make him negligent, somehow. He seems to illustrate that old favorite cliché of mine: "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part". Cruel? Maybe. True? In this case, yes.
Cool exercise. Is there, in the conventional playing of the game, some standard set of analogues between the characters in the story and an ethical outlook, or family archetype, or something? Or is it more of a narrative/ethical Rorschach test?
And, most importantly, what are your answers, O quizmaster?
December 7 2005, 14:52:51 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Watch my crotchety old values fly...
I don't see how "If you remove the troll, there is no murder" makes it the most culpable. If you remove ANY character from the story, there is no murder.Yes, if you remove the troll, there's no murder for the obvious reason. And the boatman goes broke.
If you remove the wife, also no murder for the obvious reason.
If you remove the lover, there's no murder because there's no compulsion for the wife to cross the river. I don't see how replacing the lover with a magic tree holds in your "removal" exercise, since you're just replacing the lover with something that acts exactly like the lover. The only difference is that the lover is unwilling to give the wife money, and the tree would be unable.
If you remove the husband, there's no murder because the wife isn't married and doesn't have to re-cross the river to get back to anyone. She wouldn't even be required to live on the opposite side of the river as the lover.
If you remove the boatman, there's no murder because the wife could never get across the river in the first place and therefore never have a tryst with the lover.
I know I'm posting a lot of responses to people, but I'm just seeing how people defend their viewpoints. I'm not an actual jerk, honest!
Anonymous
6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
6 years ago
6 years ago
Anonymous
December 7 2005, 22:47:22 UTC 6 years ago
Damn that troll.
Troll, Lover, Boatman, Wife, Huband.Corresponding vices in order of decreasing horribleness: Sadism, Frigidity, Greed, Promiscuity, Insensitivity.
Let's have another! This shit's addictive.
Anonymous
December 7 2005, 23:27:14 UTC 6 years ago
Whodunit
The person who wrote the story is the guilty one, since he or she created these people just to force them to commit these tragic acts, without giving them any way out of their situation. The characters show no signs of their own free will, so it's hard to find them morally culpable.Anonymous
December 8 2005, 16:07:51 UTC 6 years ago
(troll)
woman
lover
husband
boatman
(troll)
- If the troll can be held to moral standards, then it is the most culpable, as it is the actual murderer.
- The woman is clearly a rational being. She does several of things which are morally suspect in this story: she lies to her husband (by omission, but clearly on purposes to decieve), and she cheats on him. These may make her a less pleasent person, but they don't make her culpable for her own death. What *does* make her culpable, is the fact that she chose certain death over facing the consequences of her action. She knew she was going to be killed if she crossed the bridge, and she knew she wouldn't need to if she stayed, and crossed anyway.
- The lover is not a very well-developed character. We don't know why he didn't give her money - maybe he couldn't, maybe he wanted to have her stay with him, maybe he was just being mean. As far as I can see, he shoulders a non-insignificant part of the blame here, but less so than the woman. At the very least, he should have acted to stop her crossing on the bridge.
- The husband - the gap between the culpability of the husband and the lover is very large. I just don't consider him totally inculpable because of the characters in the story, he's the only one who, by getting married to her, made a commitment to the woman. His obliviousness to her cheating on him, and her death, are in some tiny way measures of the failure of this commitment.
- The boatman, in my opinion, isn't really culpable at all. He's only "guilty" of refusing to commit an act of charity, but the whole point of charity is that it's never an obligation. Yes, he was partly responsible for the fact that she didn't have a safe way to cross the river, but she knew she wouldn't have one when she left, yet she chose to leave anyway. I can't see how the boatman is to blame.
- And finally, if the troll is an animal, or a mindless killing machine, or anything else that doesn't need conform to human morality, then it's not at all culpable, by definition.
Anonymous
December 8 2005, 16:15:17 UTC 6 years ago
Now, imagine Jesus in the wife's position. What would he do? Well, clearly, he'd just walk on the water and be home safe before his husband came back. The fact that the woman didn't do so is clearly an indication that she's a sinner, and thus ultimately culpable.
December 9 2005, 00:32:51 UTC 6 years ago
2. The Lover. He willingly enters into a relationship with an impulsive, arrogant, and selfish woman, likely for his own similar needs. He most likely knows it is an affair. Moreover, he knows in all likelihood that she's going to attempt to cross the bridge where the troll kills EVERYBODY. Legally, he's not culpable, but he's just as miserable a human being as she is.
3. The Boatman. I support his capitalistic tendencies, but the least he could have done was attempt to persuade the woman not to cross the bridge. The boatman must know that the troll kills EVERYBODY, otherwise he wouldn't have set up shop when a perfectly good bridge was available.
4. The Husband. He's married to an impulsive, arrogant, and selfish woman, and if he doesn't know this, he's either never home, blind, or simply power hungry. While he can't be faulted for her death, he can be faulted for marrying her, or not getting her help.
5. The Troll. As defined by the story, the troll kills EVERYBODY. He remains under the same bridge. He is obviously impervious to humans, as with that foreknowledge of his brutality, humans would have offed him by now if they could (apparently, only goats are capable). But the troll is obviously limited to the extent of his killing. Instead of actively searching out humans to destroy, he only kills those who cross the bridge. He's very predictable, and incapable of being anything else than a killing machine. After he's established this pattern, any humans stupid enough to allow themselves to be killed by it probably don't deserve to live anyway. As I see it, the troll represents natural selection. No culpability there.
December 9 2005, 00:51:53 UTC 6 years ago
December 10 2005, 19:05:54 UTC 6 years ago
- Troll. Really, I havn't heard of any trolls that aren't sapient beings, so he is as guilty as any cruel and/or hungry human person would be upon killing a person.
- Woman. Adultery aside, she unreasonably expects from everybody,
- Lying by omission to her husband (who might have helped her if he knew the truth)
- Setting out unprepared to pay the boatman, (who would have helped her if she had the money)
- Failing to take into account the lover's inability or unwillingness to help (this is not a first-time encounter, presumably she already has some knowledge of his character/finances)
- Finally, taking her chances with the troll rather than face the possibility of being found out (surely there are other things on that side of the river she could tell her husband she was doing?) This last, taken by itself, almost looks like suicide anyway.
- Lover. For inciting her across the river in the first place. (But this weakly, as apparently she came uninvited.)
- Husband. For leaving her behind when she asked to go with him. (And this weakly as well, as he didn't know what was at stake.)
I don't know if I can hold the boatman accountable. He took a river crossing that was 'certain death' and made it into 'ferry fee or certain death'. Whether he charges just enough to get by, or he allows monopolistic greed to get the better of him, the other option is still 'certain death,' and he has no obligation to be charitable to her unless he thinks that her staying on that side is a fate literally worse than death. (Really, I doubt he has an obligation to carry anyone across. Four bits says he has a "we have the right to refuse service to anyone" sign posted somewhere aboard.)Of course if it was the other way around, and the boatman, say, invited the troll to haunt a newly-built bridge that was taking away all his business, then clearly he's a bastard and the whole thing is his fault.
Anonymous
December 11 2005, 02:44:22 UTC 6 years ago
Wife: Not only is has her dishonesty to her husband and her witless lack of planning gotten her into this situation, but she willingly walked up to a troll who she knew would kill her. Nobody else made her do that.
Lover: Holds some culpability for being a partner in the dishonest relationship this woman had with her husband (and if he didn't know she was married, he could've looked a little further into it before he slept with her). It's not so great of him not to give her the money, either, but an already immoral relationship isn't made much worse by him being a jerk.
Husband: Aside from being a capitalist, also holds some culpability for failing to recognize and deal with his wife's unfaithfulness. Not as bad as adulterer because the husband didn't *knowingly* participate in a dishonest relationship. Also, the adulterer may also have been a capitalist.
Boatman: Capitalist; therefore, somewhat culpable, but he didn't really do anything else wrong.
Anonymous
December 14 2005, 09:15:20 UTC 6 years ago
- Wife. Although she's the most sympathetic character in the story, she made easily avoidable choices that lead directly to her death. She chose to see her lover. She chose to get on the boat without enough fare to get back. She chose to cross the bridge even though she knew it meant certain death.
-Troll. Normally, I believe in direct responsibility: serial killers are directly responsible for their crimes, abusive parents of serial killers aren't, and all that. But I find I have to make an exception for the troll because he kills EVERY time someone crosses the bridge. Whether or not he's sentient, whatever is going on in his head, he is, for all intents and purposes, more a force of nature than a living being. To expect him to decide not to kill is like expecting him to decide to stop breathing, or to expect the river to stop flowing.
I rank everyone else below the wife and the troll because I assume that no one apart from the troll and the wife acted with the knowledge that their actions would lead to the wife's death.
-Husband. He should listen to his wife a bit more, yes?
-Lover. He probably should have given the wife money, of course. But if he were to give the wife money that would've been exceptional - the fact that he didn't, and expected the wife to either stay or come up with the money herself, is unfortunate but not surprising.
-Boatman. He probably should've given the wife a free ride - but if he had, that would have been especially exceptional. He is a businessman, after all.
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