On Not Killing Everyone

SPOILERS FOR MARVEL'S ETERNALS!

They're trying to save the world.

Of course, that's particularly new to the realm of superhero fiction, but what's (relatively) unique is what they're saving the world from: the birth of a god (or, more accurately, a "Celestial"). Apparently, in this Marvel universe, a Celestial named Arishem planted a "Celestial Seed" into the Earth (possibly having created the Earth first) so that the Earth could serve as a womb/cocoon/egg for the planted Celestial (named Tiamat) until it was ready to emerge. When the Eternals learn of Tiamat's pending emergence, some of them try to figure out how to stop the emergence, because the emergence of Tiamat would result in the destruction of the planet. Yet, Tiamat's emergence would also result in the birth of a Celestial, who would, following the pattern, go on to create more worlds and more life (which would then probably also end with the births of Celestials). Some of the Eternals argue that they shouldn't interfere with Tiamat's emergence, Earth's destruction, and the creation of other worlds. It's the classic Trolley Problem, but with entire worlds on the line, instead of individual people, and the many worlds for which the one world would be sacrificed haven't been created yet.

It's a surprisingly interesting moral question to grapple with (or gloss over, in the case of the film itself). Should one person (or world) be allowed to die so that others could live? On the surface, it's simple moral mathematics. Two lives (let alone many) are better than one. Then again, we're talking about the future. A bird in the hand is worth two (or many?) in the bush. It's also worth noting that we know nothing of the nature of Marvel's Tiamat (at least, not based on the knowledge that I picked up in the film). Perhaps Tiamat would create countless utopian worlds and not destroy them. Or perhaps they would destroy and/or terrorize worlds that already exist. Tiamat's nature is an important, but unknown factor in whatever moral equation we may try to calculate.

Yet, of course, morality is never so simple as punching the numbers. It's one thing to say that two lives carry more moral weight than one, but it's another thing entirely to be willing to kill one innocent person in order to save two others. I don't know if I could do it. It may or may not be the right thing to do, but I don't know if I'd have it in me to do it. I blogged about this years ago, talking about the gypsies in The Hunchback of Notre Dame needing to quiet an infant Quasimodo in order to avoid capture by torturers. I didn't know how I'd handle such a situation then, and I don't know now. I believe, on paper, that killing one person to save multiple others is, at least in a Utilitarian sense, the right thing to do, but I don't know if I could, in practice, bring myself to do it.

But Utilitarianism isn't the only moral code to consider. There's another, highly weighted moral rule with few exceptions: Thou Shalt Not Kill. That seems fairly clear to me. Yet, couldn't it be argued that to not save a life you could have saved is a sin of omission? Is it worse to murder one person or to fail to save two? I don't know. As before, I think that only God can judge cases such as these, and so I ultimately leave all judgment up to Him.

I don't know whether the Eternals were right to try to save the world, and I don't know if it's good that they succeeded. I'm mostly just glad that I'm not the one who has to judge difficult moral cases like these.