Westmorland Alone

‘Course you should,’ said the wingnut-eared policeman.

‘Indeed. It seems like the obvious answer. Though alas in this case, as so often, there are complicating factors.’

‘Which are?’ asked the senior policeman.

‘Well, in this instance of course there is the complicating factor of causing harm to another individual or group of individuals.’

‘The people on the train,’ explained Miriam, who always liked to get in a word or two during Morley’s musings. She was not someone, under any circumstances, ever to be outdone or outshone. Her father in full flow was always a challenge to her.

‘Precisely,’ said Morley. ‘In which case, in the case of competing wrongs, as it were, our friend here can only have done wrong. The real question is therefore how wrong was the wrong?’

‘What?’ said George Wilson, the signalman, raising his voice. ‘What are you saying? I didn’t do wrong. I did what any signalman would have done. Eric, you tell him.’

Eric the stationmaster remained silent; he might just as well have been blacking the grate in the waiting room.

The crowd in the bar began to quieten.

‘Yes, yes of course you did,’ said Morley calmly. ‘You did what any of us might have done. If you had chosen not to change the points, all the children on the line might well have died. How many were there?’

‘Four or five.’

‘Which would have been a terrible tragedy. But how many people were on the train?’

‘We’re waiting for the full head count,’ said the senior policeman. He looked towards Eric the stationmaster.

‘We think it’ll probably be about five hundred,’ he said, from under his LMS cap.

‘So five hundred lives might possibly have been lost because of our friend’s decision,’ continued Morley.

‘But they weren’t!’ protested the signalman.

‘Thank goodness, no, though as it is …’ Morley looked sympathetically at me. ‘The loss of one child is of course a terrible tragedy.’

‘And many more injured,’ said the senior policeman. ‘The fireman seriously.’

‘Yes. But you can perhaps see that theoretically at least, from the purely utilitarian point of view, it might have been better for our friend here to have chosen not to change the points, possibly killing only four or five children rather than five hundred men, women and children.’

‘Father!’ said Miriam. ‘That is really a quite monstrous suggestion.’

‘But logically sound,’ said Morley.

‘You’re saying it was a lose-lose situation?’ asked the senior policeman.

‘Precisely so,’ said Morley. ‘Which is what makes it truly a dilemma: if it weren’t a dilemma it wouldn’t be such a—’

‘Dilemma,’ said Miriam.

‘Yes. Arguably, to participate at all in such an enterprise is wrong, because the moral wrongs are already in place, established and unavoidable, meaning that you, sir’ – he turned again to the signalman and spoke to him directly – ‘had no meaningful choice at all, but were, rather, condemned to doing ill, whatever your decision and whatever the circumstances.’

In Morley’s reckoning these were doubtless intended as words of comfort, but to any normal human being of course they were a terrible insult.

George Wilson the signalman was furious. ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ he said, getting up from the table.

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