Can someone please explain the movie “Mulholland Dr.” to me?

Earlier this week I was having a conversation with someone who holds similar religious convictions as I do. We were talking about a specific controversial issue where our religion has a firm stance, and we discovered that, although we both agree with the religion’s stance, we had differing beliefs of how the government should legislate in accordance with this issue. She said, “Well I believe it’s wrong, but I don’t believe the government should make laws based on religious beliefs.” I agreed, as I have always believed that laws should not be created based on religion, especially in a nation like ours which espouses religious freedom. Instead, I believed that this action should be illegal based on objective moral grounds.

It soon occurred to me that I could not really explain the intuitive ethical theory which led me to this conclusion. This bothered me. So for the next two days I had a problem to solve: what was the foundation for my intuitive ethical beliefs? And more importantly, how could I justify what beliefs I thought should be written into law? After a great deal of thought, I came up with an ethical theory. It isn’t perfect, but I’m going to give explaining it a shot. But don’t expect much. After all, I’m only trying to answer one of the greatest questions in ethical philosophy in less than 2,000 words.

As always I should begin by explaining exactly the problem I intend to solve. The question is this: What should be the basis of laws that govern our actions? Should there be a law against murdering? If so, why? Should there be a law against marital infidelity? If not, why not?

First, I need to figure out what exactly it is that laws should be there to protect. After much internal deliberation, I came up with two things: life and liberty. I think that these two sacred possessions are rather uncontroversial. But let me justify them anyway.

Everyone probably agrees in the importance of life. If you don’t then you would kill yourself, right? Otherwise, you prefer to remain living. This means you don’t want someone to deprive you of life. Pity my “Easy Button” from Staples is upstairs because now would be a great time to put it to use. (“That was easy!”)

Liberty is also pretty easy to justify. One might consider the absence of liberty incarceration or slavery. Of course, there are different shades of liberty, but liberty on a whole is pretty important. Some people might even say that, without liberty, life is barely worth living.

One may argue that there are other things that the government should protect as well. I, however, am something of a minimalist when it comes to government. So for me, protecting our life and liberty are enough. I think that at the very least, these two things are accepted by most people too. Some people believe that the government should do more, but almost no one believes that these two things don’t serve as a minimum threshold of what the government should do. It is not my intention here to argue that the government shouldn’t do more, just that the government should do this. (As an aside, I do believe that the government should not do much more for adults, but that argument will be reserved for another day.)

So I think the question now becomes one of degree. It’s clear that life and liberty should both be protected, but what happens when they are at odds? Let’s say there’s a situation where one of the two must be deprived. Which is more important?

I found this question very difficult to answer. As I remarked before, many would argue that, without liberty, life would seem pretty empty. Yet, without life, you wouldn’t even have an opportunity to have any liberty, so it seems kind of fundamental. How can we decide between these two utterly essential things?

I wish to offer a suggestion of how to do so: consider time. I know; I know: what does time have to do with it? Perhaps time is not the best term. What I mean to say is permanence. In a situation where someone deprives you of either life or liberty, where does permanence come into play?

Let’s take liberty first. Let’s say you have to go to jail for a few years. Your liberty is taken away for that time, but when your term is up, you are free again. Your liberty was not permanently taken. Another example: let’s say you are sold into slavery against your will. This slavery is supposed to be for life; thus, it is supposed to be permanent. But is it really, necessarily? What if you escaped? Or what if the government made a law prohibiting slavery and your master was forced to set you free? Or what if it was already illegal and the police were to arrest he who was keeping you slave to set you free? My point in explaining such possibilities is to show that, even in a situation where liberty seems to have permanence, it does not necessarily, at least by definition.

It is not a part of the nature of liberty to necessarily be permanent. While I admit that there may be times when it truly is, you never know. It is always possible to have a hope that one day you will again be free. If there wasn’t, then I’m not sure what the point of continuing to live would be. Yet, we see people with life sentences in jail continue to live each day, and prefer that to the death penalty. We saw the slaves in the 1800s continue to live, rather than kill themselves. It must be hope that drives them, because they know that it’s possible that they regain liberty one day. And for anyone who was a slave in the United States in 1865, this hope became a reality.

So liberty does not necessarily exhibit permanence. What about life? If you die, that’s that. Sure, you may believe in afterlife of some kind, or multiple lives. But your life here on earth being who you are will be over. This is perhaps permanence defined. When you die, you die. Unless you’re Neo in the Matrix, you ain’t coming back. By definition depriving someone of life is necessarily permanent.

We can conclude that deprivation of liberty does not necessarily exhibit permanence while deprivation of life necessarily does. This conclusion led me to decide that life must be more valuable than liberty. When you’ve lost life, it can never be gotten back, but when you lose liberty, there is a chance that it can. As a result, life should be put ahead of liberty in the hierarchy of importance in what the government ought to protect.

Now we’re getting somewhere. So let’s consider that situation where we must decide between life and liberty. For example: let’s say that you are being held as a slave. Is it okay to kill your master? I would say no. The harm you are doing by murdering him is even greater than the harm he is doing by keeping you a slave. Your action of murdering him would exhibit permanence while he may one day decide (or be forced) to set you free. Now that’s not to say that you couldn’t run away, tie him up so that you could escape, or endless other schemes to gain freedom: just that you couldn’t kill him in order to escape.

But now let’s consider some more nuanced possibilities. What about potential? Let’s say that you were being held as a slave in a very desolate part of a country where people really only visit a few times per year to bring supplies to your master. Let’s say that you intend to escape, so you figure out a plan to knock him out, and tie him up. You know full well that there probably won’t be anyone to find him and untie him for 3 months or so. By then, it is extremely like, though not completely certain, that he will be dead. Is it okay to tie him up? Again, I think one must conclude that it is not, because this action potentially deprives someone of life. And while he may be depriving you of liberty, again, the permanence of likely depriving someone of life is more significant than the potential lack of permanence of depriving someone of liberty.

I know what you’re thinking: But what about a situation where you don’t intend to cause death but it happens. Like if you intend to knock him out for a few minutes just long enough to escape. So you hit him over the head with a bottle, but he falls and punctures his head, and ends up dying by accident? In that situation there was only a vague potential that he would die, because it was a fluke accident. So should we say that it isn’t okay that you do so in order to regain your liberty?

Here I would say that it is okay. And the reason why is because, as a reasonable person, one cannot expect death to result from this action. I believe that this is the standard: If a reasonable person would not expect to deprive someone of life as a result of an action, then it is allowable in order to regain one’s liberty.

So let’s generalize. In any given situation, if there is a conflict between liberty and life, then life always wins out. The only situation where liberty can win over potentially depriving someone of life is a situation wherein no reasonable person could expect life to be deprived as a result of the action taken in order to preserve his/her liberty. Thus, so long as you are acting in a way where no one would think that your action would be depriving someone of life, you can do whatever it takes to insure your liberty.

That’s the gist of my theory. I kind of like it. Of course, it’s very new, so I have to continue to test it out in terms of plausibility and consider lots of potential examples, but so far so good. What I particularly like about it is that it does not seem to allow for laws to be made which would result in indirect harm. It is also completely free from any religious bias. And I think it has some very interesting outcomes in certain situations. Give it some thought, and let me know what you think.

A few months back, I had the dubious opportunity to attend a seminar on harassment. I say dubious because I can’t imagine many people for whom such a seminar was more irrelevant: I would sooner die than harass anyone be it based on race, sex, sexual orientation, etc. After going through 3 ½ years in Community Development at Cornell, I think it’s safe to say that I have had my fill of diversity training. I could literally teach such seminars. But, alas, I had to attend.

But because I am a positive person, I try to make the best out of every situation, so I listened very closely with the vague hope that I might learn something. And I did, kind of. I learned about a fascinating aspect in the theory of harassment/discrimination prevention called “Protected Categories”.

The concept of a protected category is actually quite simple. A protected category is one in which, if you are a part of such category, people are not allowed to harass or discriminate against you as a result. For example, gender is a protected category. So no matter what gender you are, people cannot harass you for being some specific gender. Another protected group is race. Again, no matter what race you are, people are not allowed to harass you as a result. Other protected categories include religion, national origin, disabilities, age, and sexual orientation. So no one can hold the fact that I’m a white American catholic 20-something straight male against me. And thank God.

As is the case whenever I learn about something new: this got me thinking. Who comes up with these protected categories? Is there some aspect that they all have in common, or are they just arbitrary thought up? The reason I believe such a question is so relevant has to do with the validity of such a distinction. If protected categories are arbitrary, then one would probably suspect that there isn’t much validity in the idea that they are the only categories that should be held sacred, or even that they necessarily should.

So what might the criteria be for a protected category? The intuitive first response that came to mind was that perhaps they were things about oneself that could not be changed, under normal circumstance. In other words, people shouldn’t harass you for being white because you can’t help being white. Yet, I realized quickly that this must not be true. After all, you don’t HAVE to be Episcopalian. You could just convert and become a Buddhist or Scientologist. And I’m sure some would argue that sexual orientation is also a choice, and not something that one cannot help. I, personally, do not hold this view, but I’m sure some would argue for it.

Moreover, there are a number of other categories that could be made sacred if it were about things you can’t change. How about height, weight, or hair color? Maybe if weight were a protected category then that would prevent making fun of the fat guy in the office, or telling blond jokes if hair color were protected. Even if you argue that hair color can be changed and you can lose weight, surely height is immutable. How about the guy with the Napoleon complex? Can we harass him for being 4’11”? In theory, we can, since height is not protected.

So clearly a characteristic that one exhibits which cannot be easily changed must not be the main criterion for what it is to be a protected category. And I’ve given it a great deal of thought and, for the life of me, I can’t come up with any other umbrella to put all of the protected categories under. As a result, I must conclude that the protected categories herein defined are arbitrary, and probably result from a group of taboo categories that people have complained about over the years after being harassed and/or discriminated in connection with.

In my opinion that just doesn’t cut it. But please understand: I am not saying that the protected categories should not be protected. On the contrary: I do not think that protected categories should be limited to those listed above. Instead, I would argue that protected categories should include every category one might be able to imagine. Let me explain.

A great example of this happened through real world experience not too long ago. I was helping my younger brother with his resume. He’s graduating from college and needs to get a job. In his “activities” section, he put that he plays the banjo, because he does. I had him take it off. He protested. I replied: “Listen: I know you like the banjo, an I know that you aren’t some guy who lives in the mountains of West Virginia with seven teeth waiting to sodomize unsuspecting tourists who get lost on a canoe trip down the river. But that’s the connotation for people who play banjo, so leave it off, because I highly doubt that playing the banjo could help you get an interview, but if anything, it might hurt you for the reasons I described.”

But what if musical instrument proficiency was a protected category? Then, suddenly, it wouldn’t matter if you played the banjo, jazz flute, alto clarinet, euphonium, or even the harpsichord: a potential employer wouldn’t be able to discriminate against you just because you play some instrument that they find distasteful. And why should they? After all, aren’t all stereotypes harmful? I mean, I’ve personally never met a stereotype I’ve liked. So why limit these protected categories?

One more example: Imagine that you hire someone who has a hobby that you find really revolting. Maybe they hunt, and that bugs you. Maybe they are a swinger and go to Las Vegas once a month for sex parties, and that creeps you out. Or maybe they like to write and keep an online blog, and you think that’s a waste of time. Whatever the hobby, if it bugs you enough, you might hold it against them and either harass or discriminate against them as a result. But why should you? If this hobby is something that s/he finds important, or if it’s something that they are passionate about, why should you disrespect them to the degree to believe that they should not engage in something they love? After all, you wouldn’t like it if they discriminated against you because you play water polo, would you?

I think this makes a lot of sense. I think that the idea of protected categories is harmful as a result, because I think it defines when harassment and discrimination are harmful. In reality, harassment and discrimination are always harmful, no matter what the basis may be. Why not just have a policy not to harass people in general? Wouldn’t that just be easier anyway? I mean who sits in a room and decides what specific things are bad reasons to harass or discriminate against someone? I think, once again, this proves a point we’ve known all along: The simplest answer to a problem is usually the best one: Forget about protected categories – just don’t discriminate against or harass people. It’s really that simple!

Let me begin with an apology: I am sorry for not writing anything new to post online in nearly 3 months. But I assure you that there were good reasons. First, and foremost, as you can see, I have a spanking new website for all of my writing. And the great part is that it is truly all of my writing, including that contained in my easyjournal, myspace blog, and published freelance work. It was a truly arduous process to post all of this writing onto the website, because I had to do so manually, and it literally took like 2 months to complete. But now it’s done, and the writing is up, including comments. The website still needs some tweaking, which I hope my web designer will be able to figure out, but in any case, I now consider it to be in working order, so enjoy!

The second reason I haven’t posted anything in so long is that I am still working on my writing, but in another form: I’m working on something more substantial. And in order to do so, I have been trying to do some reading to prepare myself for writing in a realm somewhat unfamiliar to me. It is too early for me to say much more about that project at this time, as it is still very much a work-in-progress. But someone recently made me realize that it might be okay to write an essay or two here and there and still use the majority of my time for the new project. And in that spirit, I hope you enjoy my first entry in quite some time!