Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

“A what?”

“It’s a breast cancer.”

“I’m a man.”

“Men can get breast cancer, too. It’s not that common, because you guys have so little breast tissue, but it happens. Says here they cut it out under a local anesthetic.”

“No, no; that’s got to be somebody else—somebody with a similar name. Besides, I was a student at the University of Manitoba then; I wouldn’t have been in Calgary.”

“Well, what do you think you were here for in January?”

“I was attacked with a knife.”

“Jesus, really? What’d you do back then? Tell someone you’d voted Liberal?”

“Something like that.”

“There’s no record of your being treated here for anything of that nature.”

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Um, okay. Thanks, Sandy.”

“Jim, what’s this—”

“I gotta go. Talk to you later.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I sagged back into my chair, my breath coming in short, rapid gasps.

“All right,” I said, looking out at the sea of faces. “Is morality subjective or objective? Anyone?”

“Subjective,” called out Boris, without bothering to raise his hand first.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it varies from person to person.”

“And,” called out Nina, “from culture to culture.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Some people are pro-choice; others are pro-life. Some believe you should always lend a helping hand; others think you make people weak by keeping them from having to struggle for themselves. Right?”

Nods.

“But Sam Harris—who knows who he is?”

“A famous atheist,” said Kyle.

“Yes, true; his best-known book is The End of Faith. But he also wrote one called The Moral Landscape, in which he argues that if you define moral acts as those that promote the flourishing of conscious beings, then there is such a thing as objective morality. Consider this: imagine a world in which every single person is suffering as much as possible; everyone is in as much physical and emotional pain as the human body and mind are capable of experiencing—something like being in hell or, I dunno, Pittsburgh.”

Laughter.

“Now, says Harris, what if we could dial it down a notch? What if we could take the physical pain from a ten out of ten to a nine out of ten, even for one individual? Wouldn’t that be objectively the right thing to do? Is there any conceivable counterargument, any possible moral view, in which not decreasing the pain would be the right thing to do? Yes, yes, we can contrive scenarios in which it’s a zero-sum game—I turn down your pain, but somebody else’s pain therefore has to go up. But that’s not the situation Harris proposed. He said every person is suffering the maximum amount possible; there’s no way lessening one person’s pain could increase somebody else’s. So, given those circumstances, isn’t turning down even one person’s pain clearly objectively the moral thing to do? And turning down two people’s pain would be even better, right? And if you could turn down everyone’s pain, even a little bit, that would be a moral imperative, no?”

Boris was unconvinced. “Yeah, but who’s to say what the maximum suffering a human can endure is?”

“Have you seen The Phantom Menace?”

Some of the students laughed again, but Boris just frowned. “If it can be a little less, it can be a little more.”

“Not if experiencing pain involves neurons,” I replied. “If every pain-registering neuron is firing simultaneously, you’re maxed out. A human brain is a finite object.”

“Some more finite than others,” said Nina, looking pointedly at Boris.

“Anyway,” I said, “we’ll talk more about moral relativism later. What I really want to get at today is utilitarianism—and utilitarianism is striving for the exact opposite of Sam Harris’s thought-experiment hell. Utilitarianism is a terrible name. It sounds so cold and calculating. But really, it’s a warm, even loving, philosophy. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were its first major proponents, and they said, simply, that all action should be geared toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. The happier people are, the better. The more people who are happy, the better.”

I looked at Boris, who was frowning again. “Comrade,” I said, “you look unhappy.”

Nina and a few others laughed.

“It just all seems so self-serving,” Boris said.

“Ah, but it isn’t,” I replied. “Bentham and Mill are both clear on that point. Under utilitarianism, you are to be neutral when weighing your own happiness against somebody else’s. True, it’s not a self-sacrificing philosophy—you don’t have to give up your own happiness for the sake of another person’s. But if doing something will cause your happiness to be diminished a little and someone else’s happiness to be increased a lot, there’s no question: you have to do it. You can’t put your needs in front of those of other people.”

“Let me know how that works out for you,” Boris said.

When I’d first gone away to university, I’d left lots of stuff at my parents’ house in Calgary; Heather had done the same. But when our dad died, Calgary housing prices had been going through the roof, and Mom wished to downsize. I’d gone back and disposed of things I didn’t want and moved the things I did to Winnipeg in a U-Haul. And, as with most people’s collections of junk they thought was worth saving, I hadn’t looked at it since although I periodically added more boxes to the midden—doing my part to give future archeology grad students something to work on.

I drove to the storage unit I rented and began to rummage around. Most of my crap was in identical corrugated-cardboard boxes I’d bought from a moving-supply company, but some of it was in bankers’ boxes, and some old clothing—doubtless out of style although I’d be the last person to be able to actually confirm that—was in bright-orange garbage bags. I’d lived in Winnipeg during my dark time, but I figured that there should have been get-well cards from when I’d been in hospital in Calgary, and copies of police reports related to the stabbing. But I couldn’t find anything like that.

The two heaviest known substances are neutronium and cartons of books. I shifted several boxes around, getting more of an upper-body workout than I was used to. Eventually, I came across one labeled “Textbks 2000-01” in black Magic Marker. I placed it on the storage unit’s floor and used a box cutter to slit open the strapping tape.

Inside were the usual you-could-kill-a-man-with-them texts with titles such as Social Psychology, Statistics for the Humanities, and Freud and Jung in Perspective, but there were also a few science-fiction paperbacks. Ah, that half-year English elective I’d taken. There were copies of Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which were titles I recognized, at least, although didn’t recall having read, and others I didn’t know at all. I picked up one with a beautiful cover painting of a steamboat in a green lagoon: Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson. As had been my habit in those pre-ebook days, I’d used the sales receipt as a bookmark. I opened the novel to the indicated page, to see if the prose sparked any memories, but—

The receipt was from the McNally Robinson at Polo Park. That branch didn’t exist anymore, but the date—