Chapter 123 of Moby-Dick is one of the most interesting and complex chapters in an interesting and complex book. In this short passage, Starbuck, by now certain that he can’t convince Ahab to call off his quest for revenge, approaches Ahab’s cabin while he’s asleep and considers shooting him. After a protracted inner struggle, he ultimately relents and doesn’t shoot Ahab, allowing him to continue the quest for the white whale, which will eventually lead to the death of the entire crew, Starbuck included.
The immediate question that jumps into your mind when reading this passage is: Did Starbuck make the right choice? On a practical level, clearly not, but on a moral level? And yet I don’t think that’s the most interesting question to ask, or, really, the intended purpose of the passage. The heart of this scene is not the final decision but Starbuck’s Hamlet-esque monologue as he debates with himself whether or not to pull the lever.
The lever is of course from the Trolley Problem, that scenario beloved of introductory ethics students, where a runaway trolley is going to kill five people, but pulling a lever will divert it onto another track, where it will only kill one person. At the cabin door, Starbuck faces a very pure version of this scenario. Should he kill one person to save thirty? Or should he spare one life even at the cost of his own and the rest of the crew’s? And what justification can he make to himself either way?
In this moment, Starbuck is all of us. While most of us have never encountered a megalomaniacal whaler, living in the 21st century can feel like a constant parade of trolley problems. If you’re like me, odds are that at some point in the years 2016-2020, buying a gun, flying to Mar-A-Lago, and shooting Donald Trump in the face seemed not only morally allowable, but morally obligatory. There must be millions of people who felt that way, hundreds of whom probably had the skill and opportunity. And yet, clearly, none of us did. Why not? Perhaps Starbuck’s thought process can help us understand.
Here, in its entirety, is Starbuck’s monologue:
“He would have shot me once,” he murmured, “yes, there’s the very musket that he pointed at me;—that one with the studded stock; let me touch it—lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and powder in the pan;—that’s not good. Best spill it?—wait. I’ll cure myself of this. I’ll hold the musket boldly while I think.—I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and doom,—that’s fair for Moby Dick. It’s a fair wind that’s only fair for that accursed fish.—The very tube he pointed at me!—the very one; this one—I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.—Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?—Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this instant—put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there,—in there, he’s sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I can’t withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to; all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say’st the men have vow’d thy vow; say’st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!—But is there no other way? no lawful way?—Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest this old man’s living power from his own living hands? Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between me and law.—Aye, aye, ’tis so.—Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?—And would I be a murderer, then, if”—and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket’s end against the door.
“On this level, Ahab’s hammock swings within; his head this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.—Oh Mary! Mary!—boy! boy! boy!—But if I wake thee not to death, old man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck’s body this day week may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall I?—The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails are reefed and set; she heads her course.”
In these 600 words, Starbuck runs through every major point that gets made in discussions of the trolley problem. Let’s examine them one at a time.
Maybe It Isn’t Loaded
The first thing Starbuck does is check that the gun is loaded. When he discovers that it is, he says “That’s not good.” This may seem like an odd response–if he intends to kill Ahab, shouldn’t he be glad that the gun is loaded? But he’s unhappy because, if the gun weren’t loaded, the choice would be taken out of his hands. He even considers spilling the powder to remove the choice.
If you took Ethics 101, you’ve definitely heard endless variations on “maybe the gun isn’t loaded.” I can’t shoot the terrorist–I’m a terrible shot! I would probably kill the hostage instead! An immense sense of relief settles on you when you realize that some extenuating circumstance prevents you from pulling the trolley lever. Yes, all those people will die, but the important thing is that it wasn’t your fault. And the fact is that, for most of us in most circumstances, the gun isn’t loaded. I really would get arrested by the Secret Service long before I got anywhere near shooting Donald Trump. But this entire line of thought is a distraction–sometimes the gun is loaded, and those are the situations we care about.
People often become incredibly hostile when you try to push past these excuses; we are deeply invested in convincing ourselves that there is no circumstance wherein we’ll be forced to make this kind of moral choice. There’s an incredible moral cowardice to this line of thought–people would rather have more harm exist than have an opportunity to reduce harm if it requires a difficult moral choice. Starbuck, however, is no coward, and he doesn’t spill the powder.
He Would Do The Same To Me
Starbuck next recalls that Ahab pointed the exact same gun at him in an earlier scene and would have killed him without a second thought if Starbuck had attempted to call off the hunt. He also recounts Ahab’s suicidal recklessness in captaining the ship, which could (and does) lead to the deaths of the entire crew. If Ahab “would fain kill all his crew” (“fain,” by the way, is a fabulous archaism for “gladly,” and you should definitely try to use it in a sentence today), what’s so bad about killing him?
Many ethical discussions go off on this tangent–it’s a whole lot easier to pull the lever if you know the guy on the other track would absolutely smash a trolley into you. But it is a tangent nonetheless; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the ethics of the question at hand. Unless you believe in a strict “eye for an eye” system of justice, what the other guy would do to you has nothing to do with what you should do to him (besides which, Ahab didn’t shoot Starbuck–merely wanting to shoot Starbuck is hardly the same thing). And in any case, it all rests on the assumption that the other person is a moral exemplar who you should emulate, which Ahab clearly is not.
This argument, then, is not really an argument at all, but merely a self-justification that makes the choice feel easier. And yet these kinds of justifications play a large role in moral decision-making, and Starbuck returns to this line of thought repeatedly.
Take A Third Option
Could Starbuck just tie up Ahab and commandeer the ship? This is certainly the option readers wish Starbuck would do, and he briefly considers it before discarding the possibility. At this point in the monologue the cracks in Starbuck’s character begin to emerge. “I could not endure the sight; could not possibly fly his howlings,” he says. Starbuck’s Shakespearean tragic flaw is his inability to refuse Ahab’s commands, thereby forcing himself into a situation of kill or be killed.
In a break from most trolley problem discussions, Starbuck actually moves past this option fairly quickly. In the classroom, on the other hand, students become transportation engineers on the spot, contriving all kinds of ingenious Rube Goldberg machines that can somehow stop the trolley without diverting it onto either track. These conversations are fun (for the students, if not for Starbuck), and, like the “Is the gun loaded?” question, they occupy the vast majority of real-life dilemmas–outside of the classroom, there really is almost no situation where you can’t come up with some sort of a third option.
Still, though, the conversation keeps circling back around to the elephant in the room: What if there isn’t a third way?
Would It Really Be My Fault?
At its heart, the trolley problem is a question of fault. Do you have to actually kill someone with your own hands in order to be responsible for their death, or are you responsible if you could have prevented their death and don’t? If the latter, how far does that responsibility extend? If the former, can that responsibility be absolved if you were in a situation where you clearly had no other choice?
Every ethics discussion ends up centering on this question of fault. The difficulty of resolving it is the primary reason why the Trolley Problem has been argued over for half a century without a clear answer. There’s a strong individual aspect to how you respond to this question–some people very strongly feel that you bear responsibility for all situations you could affect, while others feel with equal adamance that you are not responsible until you get personally involved. Classrooms divide sharply down this faultline. Arguments from the other side can often feel like missives from an alien planet.
Starbuck, too, keeps circling back around to the question of fault. As he recounts Ahab’s reckless acts–smashing his navigational instruments, holding onto the chain of the lightning rod–the question hangs in the air: He could have died anyway. Aren’t I just…helping things along a little? “Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed,” he wonders, attempting to place himself into a space where he is simply an agent of the inevitable and not a human being making a voluntary choice.
Starbuck’s monologue doesn’t come to a decisive end. He simply surrenders and gives Ahab the message he originally came to deliver. Did he choose to spare Ahab’s life? Or did his ingrained sense of duty overcome his conscious decision-making? We don’t know. But we do know the result.
So what can we, the unwilling crew of this modern-day Pequod, learn from Starbuck’s struggle at the cabin door? We, too, are being involuntarily taken along on a journey that seems increasingly likely to end with everyone’s death; we, too, feel as though all rational methods of persuasion have been exhausted. When does grabbing the musket and taking matters into your own hands become the moral choice?
If Starbuck’s complex, winding monologue demonstrates anything, it’s that there is no clear ethical path through the Trolley Problem, even for people with a strong moral compass, especially not in real-life situations where there are inevitably further complications. We are all trying to navigate our way through these thorny moral issues and attempting to sort out what is the right choice in a situation where nothing feels like the right choice. At this moment, some of us, no doubt, are weighing whether the gun is loaded; others are thinking that the other side would do the same to us and wondering if that changes the calculus; still others are trying to judge when a situation becomes our personal moral responsibility.
In the end, perhaps we should be a little easier on both Starbuck and ourselves as we struggle with this dilemma. These are stormy seas, after all.