The Moral Puzzle of Sinbad the Sailor
Mercy, intention, and freedom of choice
In the Thousand and One Nights, there is the story of Sinbad the Sailor, an ambitious traveler and trader who never learns his lesson. He goes on seven voyages, and each trip, without fail, meets disaster. The ship goes off course, or wrecks, throwing Sinbad and all of his companions into life-threatening danger. Usually Sinbad is the only survivor, and he always manages to make it back home before deciding, after a while, to embark on another voyage.
In the fourth voyage, Sinbad and a few of his crewmates survive being shipwrecked on an island only to discover it is inhabited by cannibals that subdue their victims by feeding them a madness-inducing drug. Sinbad alone escapes, and is eventually rescued by a group of sailors from a faraway kingdom who are gathering peppers on the island. They take him to their kingdom, where he establishes a new life; he becomes a merchant, gets married, and earns the favor of the king.
Then, Sinbad learns that this kingdom has a terrible custom: when a married man or woman dies, they are thrown into an underground cavern along with their surviving spouse—who brings seven loaves of bread, but eventually dies of starvation in the cave—so that husband and wife remain together in death and beyond.
Unfortunately enough for Sinbad, his wife becomes ill and dies shortly after he learns of the custom. He refuses to go into the cavern with his dead wife, but the people of the kingdom force him in. In the cave, among uncountable corpses and skeletons, he rations his bread to survive as long as possible, but eventually he runs out, and the starvation begins taking him over.
Then, just as Sinbad is on the edge of death, a woman is lowered into the cavern along with her dead husband and seven new loaves of bread. Sinbad picks up a shinbone from the floor of the cavern and strikes her in the head, killing her. So he is able to survive a bit longer, with excruciating rationing of the freshly dead woman’s bread, until another person is lowered into the cave, and he can kill them and take their bread, and so on. This goes on for quite a while.
Here’s the puzzle: is it good or bad for Sinbad to kill the people dropped into the cave?
Certainly, what he is doing is terrible. But is it also actually good? He is killing people, and stealing their bread, but these people will die no matter what—there is barely enough bread to keep Sinbad alive, so there is no hope of keeping an additional person alive in the cave. If he didn’t kill them, their deaths would be much worse. I would certainly prefer a sudden shinbone to the back of the head to prolonged starvation in a dark cave full of dead bodies. Isn’t Sinbad doling out mercy to the other victims of the cave? Isn’t he reducing their suffering? Isn’t he in fact causing himself more suffering to be able to exact mercy, and in that way acting incredibly selflessly? It could be a quite good thing that he is doing—resigning himself to a life of permanent starvation in a horrifying cave full of dead bodies, in which his only stimulation is enacting violence against other humans beings, in order to spare them one of the worst deaths imaginable.
That’s not the whole picture, though. Sinbad isn’t acting with selfless intentions. He is killing the other people in the cave because he wants to survive, and he needs their bread for that. Is that the difference between good and bad, though? His intentions? Even though he has selfish motivations, he is in fact reducing suffering of others at the cost of his own suffering. If he allowed himself to die, wouldn’t that be selfish, too? He would be ending his own suffering, and in doing so subjecting future cave dwellers to that same suffering.
If you wanted to try to quantify the suffering, you could say that it’s probably the same total amount of suffering whether Sinbad dies of starvation (and so does everyone else), or Sinbad alone suffers starvation and everyone else dies quickly, and so Sinbad’s actions are basically morally neutral—in other words, utilitarianism is indifferent to Sinbad’s actions. This just seems to miss something important, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t it matter that he is taking other people’s lives into his hands? Shouldn’t it matter that he is acting selfishly? Shouldn’t it matter that he himself is experiencing a much longer period of suffering than the other victims of the cavern?
There’s another variable here, which is the freedom of choice. Sinbad is free to choose whether to kill and survive, or allow himself to die. The newcomers are not. They are subject to his will. Is that the difference? If Sinbad simply offered each person a choice—whether to receive the shinbone or deliver it to Sinbad—would that make Sinbad good? It seems better, at least.
But if Sinbad gives the newcomer the option to kill instead of being killed, he doesn’t know that mercy will continue to be exacted. The newcomer might not have the fortitude to take up the mantle of mercy, which—remember—requires living in perpetual starvation in order to be able to kill every new living person who enters the cave. Assuming the mercy is valuable, maybe it is best for Sinbad to retain authority on the fates of the people of the cavern, because he knows he can handle the job. Furthermore, if the freedom of choice is indeed important, and so he offers the mantle to another caveperson, he can’t be sure that his successor will be willing to give the choice to their potential shinbone-receivers; the successor, or some successor down the line, might fear death too much, and refuse to release the freedom of choice.
So: Sinbad could give each person who enters the cave the choice of the shinbone—delivery or deliverance—but with the choice of life contingent on their promise to continue to execute mercy and freedom. Sinbad should do his best to convey what it takes to bear the mantle of mercy, and only offer it to someone who promises that not only do they have what it takes, but also that they will continue to offer the same choice with the same recursive condition to all entrants they meet. If he finds such a person, he should trust their word and welcome the shinbone to his own head.
This is the (convoluted) solution to the puzzle that best satisfies my intuitions, but that’s not really the point, is it?
To me it seems obvious that after like the second or third person Sinbad kills for bread, he would/should just start eating the protein as well as the bread. To be clear, I mean cannibalism. At that point he has made the clear choice to survive at all costs, and he would survive better with protein. He's killing them either way. To me, the question of morality seems beside the point without first addressing Sinbad's (perhaps unconscious) choice to sacrifice his own primary goal of maximum survival in order to maintain a cannibalism taboo. To me, preserving that taboo is ONLY logical if it serves as a balm for his guilt over the killings, which implies that the act was immoral by Sinbad's own standards.