Is Right and Wrong Always Black and White? | Juan Enriquez | TEDxBeaconStreet

Translator: Amanda Chu Reviewer: Peter van de Ven I think what I'd like to do today is to talk about a subject which isn't futurist. It's past and present and future, and that's ethics. And most ethics lectures are incredibly boring because most ethics lectures basically tell you there's a right way of doing things and there's a wrong way of doing things and things are black-and-white.

And that's not where ethics is interesting. And that's not the kinds of things that we're wrestling with every day in technology and life sciences and some of the other questions. And to do that, you really have to look at history.

So if you look at history and you look at this wonderful building, which is in Charleston, South Carolina, it's a wonderful building, but there's also a history of this building because this is what they used to sell on the steps of this building. [To be sold, a cargo of NEGROES. ] And they didn't hide this.

So, this is one of the old postcards, and the title to this whole postcard on the bottom is "The old slave market. " So they used to send postcards to their friends, saying this is where we sold human beings. And we look at this today and we say, "How in the world did we allow this?

Did we permit it? Didn't we question it? Didn't we realize right from wrong?

And how is that feasible? Why didn't people understand right from wrong? " When you ask that question, then you've got to ask yourself, Where do you learn ethics?

So I guess you learn ethics from the holy book, you can learn it from mama, you can learn it from the preacher, you can learn it from the teacher, you can learn it from a lawyer, you can learn it from the doctor, you can learn it from the government, and a host of other people. So if those are the people who are teaching you right from wrong, what were they teaching? How was it possible that they were selling human beings on the steps of that building?

Well, let's start with the holy book. Here's a couple of passages from one of the holy books. [Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling - Ephesians 6:5] Aren't those a little sobering?

[Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect] And then how about Mama? Well, some mamas were telling their kids this was okay; in fact, they were writing the book that countered Uncle Tom's Cabin. [The Black Gauntlet] And this is one of the passages from that book.

[God has placed a mark on the negro, as distinctive as that on Cain . . .

] So at home, kids were learning stuff that reinforced that behavior. How about the teacher? How about the preacher?

So this was what happened when you went to schools on Sunday, and this was what they were preaching. And by the way, you can, even today, go back to South Carolina, to Furman Chapel on Furman University, where he preached. How about the university president?

Well surely, this man looks smarter because this was an oxford-educated chemist who came to the US as an abolitionist, but once he got into this environment, this abolitionist, all of a sudden, started writing pamphlets that look like this. [Outlined his belief that slave labor was an economic necessity and that the white race was superior. ] So he was taught as an adult that abolition was the wrong thing in this environment.

The university library named after him in 1976. How about the doctor? [Doctor J.

Marion Sims, Founder of Gynecology] This is one of the founders of gynecology, one of the greatest doctors practicing in the United States. [No need for surgical anesthesia for blacks or Irish …] White women needed anesthesia; others didn't. He also experimented on slaves.

If you'd like to see his statue, you can go see it in South Carolina. But oh, by the way, the next time you walk through or jog through Central Park, his statue's there as well. This is not just a southern phenomenon.

Constitution was pretty clear on what a human being is and what rights a human being has. The Washington Bar didn't quite understand that. How about the presidents?

After Madison left the presidency, he went on to become head of a league to try and send all Africans back home. [American Colonization Society To Repatriate blacks] Garfield wasn't particularly pleasant. [I have a strong feeling of repugnance .

. . the negro being made our .

. . equal.

] And even Truman had some pretty strong opinions on the subject. [I'm strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia. ] So as you're looking at the general environment, this does not justify, allow, permit slavery in any way, shape, or form.

But if you were a kid and you went to school or church or university, or to see your doctor or to see anybody else, how in the world did you learn right from wrong? How did some people realize and risk jail and risk ostracism and risk torture to stand up to a society where everybody, almost everybody, was telling you this is okay? Because after all, we named a city after a slave owner.

That leads to a question: How much smarter are we now? I mean, now it's so clear in retrospect - okay, there's just no question - but are we smarter on all these subjects today, or are we too doing things that might outrage your kids? And if so, what kinds of things might we be doing today that would lead our kids to be outraged?

One topic might be how we end life. You are only allowed to choose the time that you die in 1 out of 10 US states. And why is that an important topic?

Well, because about 1/3 of the elderly suffer unnecessary pain in the last 24 hours, 2/3 suffer pain in the last month, and patients typically spend eight days on a ventilator. And how about the people who teach us about these things or the people who know about such things? Well, it turns out that about 88% of doctors do not want the procedures they perform on their patients done on themselves, and they put in very explicit orders: if I get to this stage, do not do it to me - in 90% of doctors.

We wouldn't dare treat our dogs the way we treat some of our elderly. Let's just prolong your pain a little longer. Cancer.

We think current cancer treatments are reasonable, are okay; our kids, our great-grandkids, hopefully are going to look at us and say, "Hey, just explain this again to me, grandpa. So when somebody got cancer, what you used to do with them is first you'd put radiation into their bodies, then you'd hack off some of their body parts, and then you'd poison them with chemo. And why didn't you just use leeches?

" We are going to seem so savage in our medical treatments to our grandkids just in the same way as we think people who bled people or used leeches or used mercury are savage. How about 1% owning 48% of the dollars in the world? Is that really reasonable to have the equivalent of two Titanic lifeboats - 80 people - own more than 50% of the world?

Is that something our grandkids are going say? - "Hey, that was just fine. No need to worry about that one"?

Or how about the way we treat our closest cousins, creatures that share 99. 6% of our DNA? Because in some places, we're still eating those creatures, and in many places, we're still experimenting on them.

We keep them as pets, we keep them in the zoos, and we perform medical experiments on them that many people would say, "You shouldn't have treated any human being that way. " Automobiles is a non-obvious one, because there aren't that many options for automobiles today, but there will be soon. And when you compare automobile deaths from traffic accidents to military conflicts, it turns out that we had about 127 deaths in the United States in 2012 and about 33,561 deaths form automobiles.

Globally, it looks like that. So the ratio of cars to wars in terms of deaths in the US is about 260 to one. When you get autonomous cars, when cars are not emitting 1/3 of all pollutants in CO2, our grandkids may look at us and say, "What were you thinking in those big SUV commutes with a single person?

" And lastly, perhaps nukes. We take nukes for granted. But believe me - one nuke can really ruin your whole day.

(Laughter) And we somehow think it's okay for groups of people to have enough power to destroy this entire world and to go out and wipe out civilizations. So before we get too arrogant about what people were doing and how people were acting and what they did or didn't do - which is not to denigrate the heroism of those who oppose a system - we also have to think through we may be living in a system where ethics isn't black-and-white always, sometimes it's a little gray, and we can have a gut feeling in our hearts that this is just wrong and a lot of people around you can be telling you this is right. Now you've got to figure out what you're going to do with those things.

How you're going to pose those things when Mama and the teacher and the preacher and the school and the government and the laws and the media are telling you that's okay? Or it's not something you really need to fight or discuss? And as you do this, there's a certain amount of just fury at what people did in the past, and there should be some just fury of what people are doing in the present.

Well, that should also be tempered with a little bit of humility and a little bit of balance. And what scares me today, and the reason why I gave this talk, is because it's getting so damn hard on a campus to utter the wrong single word or sentence. And it's so hard when you talk to somebody of a different religion and it's so hard when you talk to somebody of a different politics, to find a middle ground where in addition to your own outrage, there's a little bit of humility - people make mistakes on ethics, people make mistakes on words, people make mistakes when they talk, they sometimes make mistakes when they act.

And we need to create a little bit of a safer space to understand that we, too, can be fallible, as we rail against the past and all the mistakes that all the people in the past made, which doesn't justify them. I'm not standing here and saying it was okay to do this stuff. I don't want to not celebrate the heroes who stood up against this stuff, but I do want to create a safe space on campuses and in politics and in business and in our daily lives so that people who make mistakes aren't crucified, so people who take positions that are unpopular can take them and we can listen.

Thank you.