Ethical Question

When I was in college, I heard a story that illustrated just how tenacious and potentially maladaptive our sacred cow of monogamy can be.

I’m not sure if the following story is true, but it is something that could have happened and was presented in a class as an ethical exercise: “What would you do in this instance”.

During World War II, as well as imprisoning various categories of people in concentration camps, the Nazis also held many people from the countries they conquered in forced labor camps. The conditions in such work camps were better than in the concentration camps, but just barely. Many people died in such camps from overwork, combined with insufficient nutrition, rest, and shelter.

There was one such camp in Poland for women where the death toll was alarmingly high. The only way a woman could leave this camp alive, save liberation by Allied forces, was to be pregnant.

At this camp, one of the guards, a middle-aged man, was distressed by what he witnessed. Knowing there was nothing he could do on a large level, he decided to do what he could on a small level, which was to get as many of these women pregnant as possible. He was a married man and discussed this plan with his wife, who agreed that desperate times called for desperate measures.

His plan was successful, and many women survived that probably would not have otherwise.

Though I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was amazed that when asked what they would do if they’d been that guard, many said that he’d done wrong and that he should have remained faithful to his wife, no matter what. They believed that remaining true to the ideal of monogamy was more important than saving several lives, which just goes to show how inflexible and irrational our societal sacred cows can be.

What would YOU have done if you’d been the guard?