10/12/2012 Ethics and Historiography: A Semilocal Application

by Nathan Turowsky

Today we will investigate the difference between utilitarian hedonism and deontological systems of morals, in the context of the question ‘Are there some things that can be done to a small group that are so awful that it is better to let a larger group live in very poor conditions, and if so, why?’

Around the turn of the twentieth century there were concerns that the city of Boston and its environs were soon to run out of potable water, a problem both for still-obvious reasons and for, at that time, cholera-related ones. Obviously this was a problem that needed to be fixed, and to this end the options were to conduct an extensive overhaul of the area’s water mains and sewer systems (which were filled with leaks, redundancies, and dead ends) and cut back on consumption—which would have caused Boston’s and by extension New England’s and the North Atlantic’s economy to suffer—or to build a reservoir somewhere where fewer people lived. Eventually in the 1920s it was decided that the Swift River Valley, an area in Western Massachusetts that was home to four incorporated towns and about twenty-five hundred fulltime residents as well as travelers on the at that time marginally important train line between Athol and Springfield, ought to be dammed at its outlets to create a reservoir which would essentially replace the eastern end of Hampshire County on the Massachusetts map.

The project did not go smoothly, and involved, as any such project would have to, dispossessing those twenty-five hundred people, destroying four communities (the psychological trauma that this inflicted on the former inhabitants of Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, and Dana has not been the subject of much formal study but looms large in Western Massachusetts culture), moving about eight thousand graves, and indirectly wrecking the rural economies of much of the surrounding area. The Quabbin Reservoir took about seven years to fill, after which it began to provide most of Boston’s water, assuaging the crisis for the foreseeable future, especially as the city’s population began to contract starting in the 1950s.

Opinions on the creation of the Quabbin tend to divide sharply along two lines: Whether or not one is aware of the circumstances behind it, and whether one is from Eastern or Western Massachusetts. The justification for the project was and is at its core utilitarian: It is more good for half a million people to have access to safe drinking water, without the economic costs of spending time doing an overhaul of the distribution system, than it is bad for a few thousands of people to be relocated to different parts of rural Western Massachusetts. The opposition to the project, insofar as it was not entirely emotive and based on the preferences of those who lived in the Swift River Valley to continue to do so, was and is at its core deontological: It is wrong to forcibly relocate inconvenient populations, indeed it has since 1949 been against the Geneva Conventions, and if the Quabbin were being constructed nowadays with the state government behaving the same as it did then the Massachusetts General Court would in fact be guilty of a crime against humanity. There is no easy answer here. Orders of magnitude more people were helped by the project than were harmed by it, and whether one would rather be forced to move away from one’s home against one’s will or be unable to find clean drinking water is obviously subjective since these are both horrible things to wish on anyone.

What to do? What do we value, and what do we believe? If you were a Massachusetts resident in the 1920s or 1930s, what would you have done? Can the importance of the Swift River Valley in Western Massachusetts culture and the exercise of remembrance (there was a conscious decision on the part of the people at the Swfit River Valley Historical Society to continually recreate an eternal 1938 rather than evoke a kinetic timespan) even, possibly, redeem the destruction, making it the source of a deontological good relating to memory as well as a utilitarian good relating to bodily health? Might the very fact of the valley’s destruction have in some sense made it eternal? Let’s use the fate of Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, and Dana to explore how we feel about larger issues of the needs of the many, the fundamental rights of the no-matter-how-many, civic responsibility, and civic and cultural memory.

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At the meeting we discussed the topic as intended. Nathan gave us the historical background and basic questions; Nathan's visiting mother Lisa explained what eminent domain is and the controversy over what constitutes 'just compensation'. There was an extensive large group discussion and a somewhat shorter than usual small group discussion, and the club was split about evenly on the subject of whether or not the Commonwealth was theoretically justified (most agreed that it was not justified in behaving as it actually did). After the meeting, we had dinner at Worcester and then went to Orchard Hill to straightway partially disperse and/or do nothing in particular in the Grayson lounge.