No ducking the big ethical dilemmas

Now is a time of ethical debate. Matters that matter abound: pollution, climate change, overpopulation, mass extinctions, Trump. So it came as no surprise last week when I opened an email and found it consisted of a single compelling question.

‘‘Joe’’ it began. Who could miss the urgency in that monosyllable? Here was a man – it had to be a man, hadn’t it? – who didn’t mean to beat about the bush. Rather he would march straight through the bush, careless of danger, towards the ethical meat of the matter. Pricked, attent, I read on.

Joe, would you rather fight a duck the size of a horse or a hundred horses the size of ducks. My first thought was the same as yours – the missing question mark. To neglect punctuation is to start down the Slope of Turpitude that ends in the Valley of Perdition.

But for once I chose to overlook the lapse because I thought I heard behind the words the honest scream of one whose flesh is punctured by both horns of a dilemma.

I typed the man’s question into a search engine and found it had been asked before. A United States senator had posed it, verbatim, to a nominee for the United States Supreme Court. The nominee’s response – and I promise I’m not making this up – was ‘‘I am lost for words’’. Yet he was still appointed to the Supreme Court. Well, I am not lost for words.

A horse-sized duck might seem a daunting foe, but the beast is an impossibility. Not only would it never fly, but its two little legs would crumple under its monstrous mass and its internal organs would implode. There would be no need to fight it. The duck would die before your eyes.

And a hundred duck-sized horses would also pose no threat. Horses may have teeth the size of shoe horns but they are designed for nibbling and grinding grass, not gripping and tearing flesh. As the horselets milled around your ankles you could simply pick them up one by one and snap their necks.

But such literal conclusions are so obvious that even a Supreme Court justice could have arrived at them. There had to be more to the question. And there was. It was a matter of ethics.

Consider ducks and horses. Neither looks to fight. Both are peaceably vegetarian. Accordingly, we have exploited them for millennia.

We shoot ducks for sport. We sleep under duvets of duck down. We cook duck a l’orange. In how many restaurants are there ducks hanging by the neck, shorn of their feathers, their dignity and their life? What have ducks done to deserve any of this?

And as for horses, we’ve enslaved them. We’ve made them do work they didn’t want to do, carry us to places they didn’t want to go and into battles they didn’t want to fight. We’ve beaten, harnessed, mutilated, raced and broken them and given them only the food they could have foraged for themselves.

In short, both ducks and horses are representative of the natural world we’ve raped since we began. And now we’ve taken to fiddling with genes, toying with what we barely understand. Were we to produce violent mutant ducks or horses, we could blame no-one but ourselves.

The question, then, was a good and telling one. And my conclusion is that the correct ethical response for any human being attacked by a horsesized duck or duck-sized horses would be to acknowledge guilt, lie down and offer no resistance.