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Copyright William C. Kiefert. All Rights Reserved.
Chapter Two, Part Thirteen: The Failure of Either/Or Reasoning In Our Everyday Lives
There are families who are devastated today because their children have AIDS. They contracted this disease through blood transfusions. And these children are not alone. Many adults, too, now bear the effects of contaminated blood. Years ago the companies which processed and sold blood were aware of the presence of the hepatitis virus in their blood supply. But since it could take as long as thirty or forty years for hepatitis to kill its victims, the blood companies made the decision that the risk was not worth the cost of sterilizing the blood. Little did they know that in their blood supply was also the dreaded AIDS virus. Had the companies sterilized the blood, the AIDS virus would have been killed along with the hepatitis virus. But the blood companies decided that it would cut too deeply into their profits to do the procedure.
Those who were responsible for the decision of the blood companies reasoned in a typical way. They weighed their cost against their clients’ risk: they asked what was to their own benefit, versus what would be in their clients’ interest. Put in the mode of either/or logic, the decision in favor of their own benefit was virtually guaranteed from the outset.
A similar situation is occurring as you read these words. The tobacco industry is facing lawsuits from a number of states, which are suing to recover the cost of medical treatment for their citizens dying of cancer from smoking. The tobacco companies are fighting the states. Their reasoning is easy to understand: our interests versus their interests. We want to sell our cigarettes, but without having to take responsibility for the consequences of the effects of our product: cancer. That’s their problem, not ours.
To this date, the tobacco industry has never lost in court. But the tobacco companies pay six hundred million dollars every year to their lawyers! Just imagine if that money were spent to provide heath care for those dying of cigarette-related cancer! But that would require a different logic and different reasoning. It would require the companies to think in terms of both themselves and their customers, rather than either themselves or their customers. It would require a logic of love rather than a logic of conflict and confrontation. What is obviously the humane and ethical thing to do cannot even be a logical or rational option unless we change the logic by which we reason!
Take a moment to analyze this situation. Bankers, manufacturers, farmers and union leaders all reason in terms of either/or. The tobacco industry, for example, places its own customers in an adversarial role. Those who purchase the very product of the tobacco industry are considered the opponent! This is also the logic of other industries and businesses, such as insurance companies. How many of us have bought insurance and paid high premiums year after year, and then, when we needed to make a claim for damage, discovered that our insurance company treated us, its very own clients, as the enemy! It tried to pay as little as possible, to stall as long as possible, or even get out of paying altogether! This, of course, is natural and normal. It is just “good business”! But it is morally bankrupt and ethically wrong! Yet it goes on every day! It seems right and good because it is supported by sound reasoning–on the basis of an adversarial, either/or, confrontational logic! For our moral and spiritual health, we need to think differently. We need another logic, nonjudgmental logic!