{"id":333,"date":"2015-10-23T23:30:24","date_gmt":"2015-10-24T03:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=333"},"modified":"2015-10-24T02:11:43","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T06:11:43","slug":"the-red-box-of-ethical-conundrums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/?p=333","title":{"rendered":"The Red Box of Ethical Conundrums"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the detective story as a playground for exploring the philosophical question of double effect<\/a>.\u00a0 This week I thought I would discuss an excellent example in this category \u2013 The Red Box<\/em> by Rex Stout.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Unfortunately there is no easy way to discuss the ethical dilemma without spoiling the story so beware.<\/p>\n

At the center of the story is the Frost family and the vast Frost fortune.\u00a0 The Frost family consists of two major branches.\u00a0 On one side is Llewellyn Frost, a shallow young man who produces flop plays on Broadway and his father Dudley, who is a babbling, blowhard.\u00a0 Neither has much more than their bluster to their name.\u00a0 On the other side is Helen Frost, Dudley\u2019s niece and the heiress to Dudley\u2019s brother\u2019s immense fortune, and her mother, Calida Frost, Dudley\u2019s sister-in-law.<\/p>\n

Caught in the orbit of the Frosts are a wide variety of people, the two keys being Boyden McNair and Perren Gebert.\u00a0 McNair is a successful designer of women\u2019s clothing and he own a fashionable boutique in lower Manhattan where Helen works as a fashion model.\u00a0 Perren Gebert is a useless dandy who is an old friend of Calida Frost and a would-be suitor for Helen.\u00a0 Unlike McNair, Gebert has no visible means of support.<\/p>\n

The story starts with Llewellyn Frost bullying the famous literary detective Nero Wolfe<\/a> into investigating the death of Molly Lauck, a fashion model in McNair\u2019s boutique.\u00a0 About a week earlier, between runway calls, Molly, Helen, and a third girl by the name of Thelma Mitchell, snuck away to a deserted spot to rest.\u00a0 Molly produces a box of candy that she \u2018swiped\u2019 for them to have a snack. \u00a0One poisoned Jordan almond later and Molly is no more.\u00a0 Llewellyn\u2019s aim is for Wolfe to find Molly\u2019s killer as a way of pulling Helen away from her job at Boden McNair\u2019s shop thus opening a door for Llewellyn to rid himself of a McNair as a perceived rival for Helen\u2019s affection.\u00a0 It seems that Llewellyn is so smitten with his cousin that he has researched whether it would be licit for them to marry.<\/p>\n

As Wolfe investigates he finds that the box of poisoned candy was intended for Boyden McNair.\u00a0 McNair, recognizing his peril begins to put his affairs in order and even goes so far as to name Wolfe in his will as the executor of his estate.\u00a0 Shortly afterwards, Boyden McNair visits Wolfe\u2019s office to explain the situation and to ask Wolfe to consent to the arrangement.\u00a0 \u00a0Boyden hints that the danger to him is rooted long ago in the past around the time of the birth of his daughter Glenna, who was born a month before Helen Frost.\u00a0 McNair explains how his wife died during childbirth and how Glenna was lost to him a few months later.\u00a0 He goes on to tell Wolfe that should he die all the proof Wolfe needs can be found in his red box.\u00a0 Unfortunately, just before McNair reveals where the box is hidden he also dies from poison, this time expertly put into a bottle of aspirin that he carried around.<\/p>\n

With no other obvious recourse, Wolfe sets his agents to the task of finding McNair\u2019s red box.\u00a0 The New York police are also eager to find the box as are the Frosts.\u00a0 Indeed, everyone is so anxious to see what truth lies in the red box, that the box itself begins to take on a life of its own.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Perren Gebbert begins to push hard for the hand of Helen in marriage.\u00a0 He even goes so far as to try to find the red box for himself, which is quite remarkable considering his layabout status.\u00a0 He is rewarded for his effort by becoming the third victim of the poisoner.<\/p>\n

With three deaths on hand and no red box, Wolfe resorts to a clever plan.\u00a0 Realizing that the red box has now become an incredibly powerful psychological symbol, he pays an artisan to manufacture a faux red box.\u00a0 He then gathers the suspects and begins to reveal the truth all the while with the counterfeit red box in plain view.<\/p>\n

The truth he reveals is this.\u00a0 The real Helen frost died those many years ago.\u00a0 Being penniless and a recent widow, Boyden McNair agrees to allow Calida Frost to raise Glenna as Helen.\u00a0 Calida is the one who suggests this arrangement because secretly she sees it as a way of keeping control of the vast Frost fortune \u2013 a fortune that she was disinherited from due to her marital infidelity years earlier.\u00a0 Gebbert, who was witness to the switch, offered his silence in return for a monthly stipend from Calida.\u00a0 Having identified the motive for the murders, Wolfe has revealed Calida as the culprit and convincingly hoodwinked the gathering into believing that all of this is supported by the evidence he found in the red box.<\/p>\n

However, Wolfe really has no tangible evidence as he has never been able to locate the red box.\u00a0 To keep hi gambit alive, he hands the red box to Calida.\u00a0 Upon opening it, she finds a bottle of oil of the bitter almond, a potent poison.\u00a0 Believing herself to be trapped, she quickly swallows the poison and kills herself.<\/p>\n

And here we have the ethical conundrum of double effect:\u00a0 was Wolfe justified into cornering Calida Frost into committing suicide?<\/p>\n

While there is no easy answer to this question, I would argue that he was.\u00a0 To support this, let\u2019s look that the four conditions that must be met for the application of double effect, starting with the easiest and progressing to the hardest.<\/p>\n

The agent must intend good.<\/u><\/strong>\u00a0 This point is the easiest and most supported of the four.\u00a0 Wolfe gained in no way, neither financially, personally, nor professionally by the death of Calida Frost. She posed no threat to him physically.\u00a0 Using the fake red box as a prop actually resulted in less growth in his professional reputation than would have occurred if all concerned knew that he had deduced the story merely by the scattered bits of clues that had emerged since Molly Lauck\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

The end must be an immediate consequence and not a means to some other end.<\/u><\/strong> \u00a0This point is also fairly easy to support.\u00a0 The end was putting an end to the reign of terror brought on by a murdered.\u00a0 That end was achieved by the death of the murderer as an immediate consequence of presenting the poison to Calida Frost.<\/p>\n

The good must outweigh the bad.<\/u><\/strong>\u00a0 This point is a bit trickier to affirm in Wolfe\u2019s favor.\u00a0 Clearly taking a murderer off the street, in particular, one so cunning and sneaky as to have killed three people by poison, is a good thing.\u00a0 And considering that the period in which this story was set also had mandatory capital punishment, it seems that this should be straightforward.\u00a0 But the people of the city of New York was the only proper authority to administering this type of justice.\u00a0 By circumventing their proper role and becoming, in essence, a vigilante, Wolfe has visited some bad on the justice as a whole.\u00a0 Nonetheless, I believe that the good outweighs the bad in this case.<\/p>\n

The action must be good or at least morally neutral.<\/u><\/strong>\u00a0 Here is the most difficult point to justify. Is offering poison to anyone with the intention of them drinking and thereby dying ever a good thing.\u00a0 This point clearly dovetails with the one listed just above but it differs in a subtle way.\u00a0 In the question about the good outweighing the bad, the central notion was the good and bad done to society.\u00a0 Here the central question seems to be the intrinsic question about the violence Wolfe may have done to his own soul.\u00a0 It was a hard choice and while I understand why Wolfe made the choice he did, I still have a hard time becoming comfortable with this way of stopping a killer.\u00a0 Nonetheless, I think when all things are considered, Wolfe\u2019s actions were supportable by the doctrine of double effect \u2013 I just don\u2019t think I could have done it were I in his shoes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the detective story as a playground for exploring the philosophical question of double effect.\u00a0 This week I thought I would discuss an… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}