Now it is certain: the five men who wanted to dive in a mini-submarine to the wreck of the Titanic are dead. The boat was probably not suitable for such depths, it imploded. The inmates were rich men who recklessly wanted to have an extravagant adventure. Since the disappearance of the submarine, the world press has reported extensively on the international rescue efforts with ships, airplanes and diving robots, the effort was enormous.
Shortly before, more than 500 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. It is unclear what was actually done to save her, this is still under investigation. The world press also took part, but much more quietly. There are so many refugees who are drowning in the Mediterranean, and officials are said to sometimes not react at all when they are pointed out about unseaworthy boats in which refugees are traveling and maybe capsizing.
500 versus 5, the media also report on that. Yesterday there was a comment by Andrian Kreye in the Süddeutsche. He addresses the different backgrounds – here people who have fled from social hardship, there a pleasure trip by people with a lot of money. But he resists media reports that see the death of the 500 as a greater tragedy than the death of the five:
“The rules of Western ethics forbid comparisons. The death of the underwater tourists [ist] as tragic for their families as the deaths of the refugees are for theirs. Any judgment would be an inhuman form of utilitarianism. Even if the moral in both stories is quite clear. The refugee catastrophe off Greece is the symbol of the heartless North, which is not willing to save the people who had to flee the South from crises such as war, climate or poverty, for which the North is often partly to blame. The core of the U-boat story, on the other hand, is the problem with all the billionaires who became so super-rich with new technologies. That usually only worked with a high degree of ruthlessness.”
I don’t want to get at the contradiction of his argument when he says that the comparison is impossible and then adds that the moral in both stories is very clear. There is also no need to discuss whether it makes a lot of sense to equip a “Western” ethic with validity claims. If ethical claims to validity are relativized as “Western”, then they have the character of historically accidental regional customs and practices. This is the liability of “some say so, some say so”.
Rather, I am concerned with whether or not Kreye is right to criticize utilitarianism on the subject of comparison. I suspect that Kreye had the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court on the Aviation Security Act in mind when he made his sentence. The ruling prohibits the shooting down of a plane that has been hijacked and is intended to be used as a terrorist weapon against a large crowd. It is about Kant’s ethics, which is reflected in Art. 1 of the Basic Law in the protection of human dignity: Human dignity is inviolable, no one may only be seen as a means, degraded to a mere object.
While this is not the basis of utilitarianism, utilitarianism does assume that all people are equal: “Everyone counts as one, no one more than one,” according to utilitarianism’s progenitor Jeremy Bentham. The utilitarians, with a view to social reform, wanted to draw attention to the fact that the worker counts as much as the nobleman, or nowadays the fugitive as much as the millionaire. The question of why so many more resources are used to save the 5 rich men than the many refugees in the Mediterranean is highly justified, whether one is utilitarian or not, it puts the finger in the bloody wound of our “western values” .
If the situation were such that only a fixed budget was available for a specific decision to save either the 5 or the 500, utilitarianism would ask which decision – 5 or 500 – could save more with the budget. This decision was not to be made here. It was not about an alternative use of limited funds, and the discussion of how much a rescue effort is “worthwhile” is pointless in this specific case. The mission to rescue the 5 is not to be criticized from this point of view, but the failure to rescue refugees certainly is.