Act Utilitarianism

 Act Utilitarianism – The justice of the individual act does not matter, what matters is that the consequence be for the greater good. 

http://gonzalolira.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-i-learned-at-dartmouth.html

In the Fall of 1991, shortly after the Clarence Thomas nomination and the Anita Hill hearings, the Class of ‘95 matriculated at Dartmouth College.

One of the freshmen—or “first years”, as they were beginning to be known—was accused by another first year of sexual assault and harassment. In the hot-house political environment at the time—product of the Thomas/Hill hearings, which revolved around workplace sexual harassment—these were serious allegations.

The young woman making the claim against the freshman said that he had visited her in her dorm-room around lunchtime one day during Orientation Week, and had “forcibly tried to kiss” her. She had rebuffed him, told him he was being “selfish”, after which he had left, without further incident.

This was the sexual assault allegation.

The young woman also claimed that the freshman had then started to harass her via electronic mail, in the days and weeks after. She claimed he had sent her “obscene messages”, which she had purged from her e-mail account, as she hadn’t wanted any of that “filth” on her computer.
This was the sexual harassment allegation.

The young woman said she wanted to “protect” the Dartmouth campus—and the other women at Dartmouth College—from the danger that the freshman represented. This was why she was reporting this incident three weeks after it allegedly took place.

The accused freshman, being unsophisticated, went through the disciplinary channels of Dartmouth College without contacting attorneys or even his parents. He was confident that the allegations would be shown to be lies—because he knew they were lies.

More to the point, he could prove that they were lies.

The young woman claimed she had thrown away the obscene e-mail messages he had sent her. But the computer science department at Kiewit Hall—in charge of the e-mail servers—said that that wouldn’t be a problem. This was 1991—few people had e-mail, and fewer still realized e-mails can never really be thrown away.

The techs at Kiewit duly looked through all of the e-mails the freshman had sent—as well as all of the e-mails the first year woman had received: None were obscene. In fact, there was only one e-mail between them: From when the first year woman had taught the freshman how to use the Dartmouth e-mail system. The only word on the message was “test”.

As to the sexual assault allegation: The freshman produced witnesses—ironically all of them women—who confirmed that he could not have possibly been in the first year woman’s dorm room around lunchtime—when she claimed—because the freshman had been with them.
Nothing salacious in these encounters: One of these women the freshman had been with was a senior in charge of hiring for a dining hall job he was applying for. Another was a sophomore from down the hall in his dorm, with whom he had talked about earthquakes (she was from California) and how to use the campus computer network. Three other women also placed him in innocuous situations during the entire day of the alleged assault.

As the freshman produced unbiased witnesses who could absolutely confirm he had been elsewhere at the time of the alleged assault, the first year woman kept changing her story—until she claimed that the assault had happened after 8 o’clock at night: A time for which the freshman could not produce a witness for where he had been. (He claimed he had been at an Orientation Week event at Warner Bentley Theater—ironically, where a sexual harassment and assault awareness skit was being play-acted by seniors up on stage.)

However, the freshman was confident that it didn’t matter that he couldn’t produce witnesses who remembered him attending the performance at Bentley Theater: The first year woman had changed her version of the events so many times—and had been shown to be outright lying about the nonexistent obscene e-mails—that the freshman assumed that all the charges would be dismissed, when the disciplinary committee met.

The disciplinary committee, known as the COS, the Committee On Standards, was made up mostly of students—juniors and seniors, divided roughly equally between men and women—plus a smattering of faculty, and chaired by the Dean of the College.

When the entire set of circumstances was aired out, even the chair of the COS was openly skeptical about the first year woman’s story.

Nevertheless, the accused freshman was suspended for an entire academic year.
There was no evidence he had committed any crime or transgression—only the first year woman’s word. There was ample evidence that the first year woman was lying—she had lied about the e-mail messages, and the blatant changes in her story showed that she was lying about the alleged assault.

As the freshman said at the time: “Everything I said that could be proved true turned out to be true—and everything she said that could be proved to be a lie turned out to be a lie.”

Though she had made demonstrably false allegations, the first year woman was allowed to continue her stay at Dartmouth, without hinderance or prejudice.

The freshman had to leave Dartmouth. But since there were still four weeks left until the end of the academic term, the Committee On Standards allowed him to stay on campus until after exams were done.

So much for being a “danger” to the other women on campus.

He didn’t have family in the U.S.—or practically any money: He had spent all he had earned before arriving in Hanover on tuition, books and supplies. He didn’t even have a car—and even if he had had one, he had no place to go to.

But somehow, he talked his way into a job in Washington, D.C., where he moved to for a year, working as an office drone at a law firm. It was a scary time for him—he lived literally hand to mouth, during that year.

He returned to Dartmouth, after his suspension was over. It was not pleasant. He was actively ostracized, and on occasion, openly cat-called terrible names by some of his classmates. All sorts of insane rumors swirled around him—but fighting rumors is like fighting the tide: Impossible, not to mention pointlessly self-defeating.

He couldn’t leave Dartmouth—no school anywhere near as prestigious would accept him as a transfer student. Not even lower tiered schools would take him—he applied, and was rejected, even though he had the grades and the test scores.

So he sucked it up: He kept himself to himself—watched a hell of a lot of TV—took extra coursework to make up the time lost to the suspension, and managed to graduate with honors alongside the rest of his class, the Class of ‘95.

At the graduation ceremony, he shook Bill Clinton’s hand.
He never returned to Dartmouth College after that.
That’s a true story. It’s a story, of course, that happened to me.

Good Advice

 In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent: “Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Anecdote ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"When I was 15 I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them."