Death Note, Power and Humility

Humility is one antidote to unethical engineering.

I've been watching Death Note. Not the shitty Netflix movie, but the original anime, which is very thought-provoking. I was going to write a post about the effects of The Market on work and human suffering, and whether or not capitalism was ethical, but writing this blog post allows me to rationalize watching TV as "research".

The story of Death Note focuses on a young genius, Light Yagami, who comes into possession of a notebook that can kill anyone whose name is written in it, as long as the killer also has the victim's face. Very quickly Light adopts the alter ego, Kira, and begins killing any criminal he can, literally writing for hours at a time. His intent is to act as a god that scrubs the earth of all those who do not belong, and to usher in a new world. Kira gains an international following, and also the attention of a mysterious super detective batman figure, L, who labels him a serial killer.

I won't go on much more about the plot but I do want to discuss important ethical themes in Death Note:

• Light believes he can do no wrong, and in his pursuits to establish a reputation as Kira ends up killing many people whose only crime was to attempt to catch him. He often resorts to killing people for convenience if it means he can stay alive to kill another day as Kira, and he sees nothing wrong with that. All of his actions are justified in his mind.
• The power to kill anyone is the true evil. One of the characters says this early on, regarding the ability as a curse, though Light never sees it that way.
• Ethics and Law are conflated. Besides killing those who try to discover and capture him, Light only kills those who have broken the law or who have managed to evade conviction.

Epistemological humility is the recognition of the limited reliability, extent, and certainty of the things that we think and know. If we do not recognize that we are not perfect, then we can justify any ethical action we take. People are capable of thinking "If I think this is wrong, then it must be wrong. If I think this is right, then it must be right." not considering the possibility that they may be incorrect.

Conflating ethics and lawfulness is one condition that allows this thinking to persist. When ethical understanding is reduced to lawfulness, there is a large vacuum that we fill with our own personal ethics without reflecting on them. Law provides an ethical framework that does not need to be reflected upon in order to see ethical consequences.  You break it, I can assume you are bad. Though this conflation is not the only condition for the lack of humility. If conflating laws and ethics were the only issue, Light would not kill anyone because killing is illegal. 

Of course, another condition for lack of humility is the presence of power. The power to universally enforce one's own personal ethics (with a Death Note), makes a reflection on ethics difficult. Who will check you? Who will prompt you to reflect? 

Combine the lack of humility with the power to enforce, and you have someone who can justify whatever harmful actions they may take, and any thoughtful discussion or consideration of ethics goes out the window. Of course, this is exaggerated in the anime; power is not just held by those who can instantly kill people, but I think the idea holds true for more realistic situations as well.

For instance, I am considering a mock press conference that we held as part of our Engineering Ethics class. I role-played as Tom Jacobus, head of the Washington Aqueduct (WAD) during the DC lead crisis. I was able to avoid all responsibility for my role in the crisis and the role of WAD by just claiming to have been doing my job, nothing more, nothing less. I didn't do anything illegal, did I? Therefore, I must not have been doing anything wrong. My personal ethics, which involved making as much money for myself and WAD as I could, were allowed to flourish in an environment that taught me that ethics = being punished if I broke the law, and then only if I was caught. I didn't break the law, so my actions were justified. Combine that with the power that I held as head of WAD, and I was complicit in the DC lead-in-water crisis that harmed so many people.

Humility is an antidote. Carl Jung said "Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people". Complex ethical thinking and decisionmaking have been shown to be related to self-authorship and reflective judgment. Humility can be developed through reflection on one's own decisions and character. If we want engineers to be ethical decision makers we must prompt them to look beyond the law to see their own imperfections, and to see the bad and not just the good results of engineering (and not just bad or good as defined by law). We must challenge the image of engineers as perfect, or at least morally exempt, manipulators of the physical realm.