Ethics in America - Episode 1

 A panel group from the 1980s debates the question of what each person owes, if anything, to a fellow person. The episode is "Do Unto Others."

I got hooked on late night PBS television in the late 90s and early 00s. Around that time, my local station decided to fill the dead hours - the really dead hours - with college courses. I forget if there was a name for it but you'd watch episodes on TV in the same way that you would normally attend a lecture and then presumably get assigned homework and then take a test. It was a way of geting college credit from home.

"Ethics in America" was one of my favorites, it's so deliciously watchable. It's so watchable that it seemed to be a "no brainer" that something like this could be a hit on television. "Ethics in America" or something like it, didn't deserve a 3 AM timeslot, put it on in primetime! It never happened but there are a few bizarre ways in which this premise bubbled up, leaked out and became a big hit anyway.

In some ways I think the trashy daytime talkshows filled that gap - almost every episode was examining the question of "what is right?" The conflicts between the people on stage were due to disagreements of ethics, philosophy, morality and then that wasn't enough so all the people in the audience got to argue likewise. Even Fred W. Friendly's monologue at the end of this program, summing everything up and putting it all into perspective, reminds one of Jerry Springer's "Final Thought" at the end of each show.

And there was no bigger TV show in the 90s than "Seinfeld." Eschewing "lessons" and "issues" it only concerned itself with comedy and comedy alone. And yet it was a "smart" show precisely because much of the conflict arose from different ethics and much of the episodes revolved around arguing (justifying) different sides. It's a spin on Seinfeld's (and Larry David's) Abbott and Costello influence: "[T]hey had a remarkable knack for presenting both sides of a silly argument and making both points of view seem perfectly logical."

JERRY: So what happened to you yesterday? We were supposed to go to the auto show, I waited for you, you never came.

ELAINE: I'm sorry, I got really busy. How long did you wait?

JERRY: Five minutes.

ELAINE: Five minutes? That's it?

JERRY: What's the difference? You never showed up.

ELAINE: I could've! I mean, last week we waited for that friend of Kramer's for like, forty minutes.

JERRY: Well, we barely knew the guy.

ELAINE: So, the longer you know someone, the shorter you wait for 'em.

JERRY: That's the way it works.

And it occurs to me now that much of the gap in ethical discussion on TV is filled, for most people, by cable news shows. That's not my thing but I suppose that's another outlet through which this desire is pacified just enough that we never get anything really substantive.

The spiritual successor to "Ethics in America" and the closest thing to the show I proposed was "Justice: What is the Right Thing to do?" and that provided clear evidence that I was way off because no one watched it.

You can watch the entire "Ethics in America" series online here. The best episodes are episodes 6 and 7 ("Under Orders, Under Fire" parts 1 and 2), by the way, but I embedded episode 1 simply because that's the only on on youtube.

The Best Show on TV That You're Not Watching (And Nor is Anyone Else)

In order to determine whether a car should include a certain safety feature, an auto company breaks the decision down in monetary terms. On one side is the cost, in dollar terms, of manufacturing, testing, assembling the safety feature and including it in the car. On the other is the dollar cost of the deaths that the safety feature would, otherwise, have prevented. By merely comparing the two dollar values, the company has decided which is the right thing to do: the dollar values summarize utility, the lesser cost is the greater good.

Is this right? Can everything be summed in dollar values? If so, what is the dollar value of a single life? $One million? $10 million? $3,409.55? If no, what criteria should be used to make such business decisions?

Such large questions are just a few of the questions raised within the space of a few minutes of the show "Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do?". The show's format is the following: film Michael Sandel's lectures at Harvard in which he surveys significant philosophies and then show them on TV. That's it.

There are no actors, there are no plot twists, there's no comedy or celebrity interviews, no special effects, flashy editing or catchy music. "Justice" merely presents the moral and logical arguments made by philosophers (particularly as they relate to the world today) and asks, "Do you agree?... Why?", often with surprising results. Such are the reasons why almost nobody is watching the show and such are the reasons why the show is so amazing. In short, it forces the viewer to learn, it forces the viewer to think, yet still leaves it up to the viewer to decide. In spirit, it reminds me of the series "Ethics in America" (also fantastic) though with more emphasis on formal philosophical history.

From the show's website: "Is torture ever justified? Would you steal a drug that your child needs to survive? Is it sometimes wrong to tell the truth? How much is one human life worth?"

You may be able to find "Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?" on your local PBS station.

You can buy the series on DVD here.

But you can watch the episodes online here.