Guilty until proven innocent

Two days ago Russia bombed a school in Ukraine Some weeks earlier they bombed a hospital where old people women and children were sheltering Some Russian finger fired the missiles that killed these people Someone else ordered him to do it At the top of it all a wretched man called Putin knows that simple people living ordinary lives are being slaughtered at his behestDo you ever wonder if any of them feels a twinge of conscience as they do the deedsRussia is not the worldrsquos first brutal country The USA is right up there with them raining napalm down on helpless Vietnamese villagers destroying lives and livelihoods in Iraq in the name of a democracy their own country is rapidly losing What do those soldiers feel Guilt Anger A wrenching feeling that no one should be asked to do this to another human beingDoes a rapist feel remorse when he is caught One of Nirbhayarsquos rapists staunchly defended his actions saying that any girl who stayed out that late was asking for it He believed that he was upholding some foggy moral standard by raping herYou could cast your net wider and ask whether shoplifters regret their kleptomaniac impulses Do whalers feel the burden of wiping out an entire species Do farmers who burn their crops and pollute entire states with a thick heavy smog agree that they are killing the planet that is home to themOf course they donrsquot and you donrsquot have to be an activist or an ecologist to guess that Environmentally damaging actions fall in the beguiling category of things that do not lsquofeelrsquo wrong Sawing down a sequoia does not seem like a killing harpooning a whale seems like a legitimate foodseeking enterprise in a cold land without agriculture but hallelujah such fertile fishing waters And how could your ageing mother feel moved by the information that her refrigerator might contain a coolant which when it is liberated at the end of the fridgersquos life will eventually deplete ozone in the upper atmosphere and thus increase the incidence of skin cancer in a place called New South Wales AustraliaWersquore all in this grey zone from time to time when we do something that we are told is harmful or even brutal and yetmdashit doesnrsquot feel wrong Herersquos why therersquos a simple calculation that we all do very well no matter how much we declare that every person matters Itrsquos called the greatest good of the greatest numberHuman suffering is usually treated as cumulative even by environmentalists One personrsquos pain is considered to be less than 10 peoplersquos pain and the crusader must seek out those issues where she sees the greatest harm befalling the greatest number Crusaders are rather good at such costbenefit analyses Few activists would even blink if asked to choose between spending several years saving one individual or the same time saving a whole tribeFor most people It doesnrsquot make sense to fight for small things even if you know that small things add up to big thingsPeople consider only their own gain because the harm they cause seems trivial Imagine you were a cattle herder in Africarsquos Sahel region suddenly faced by the opportunity to buy 10 cows in a community where wealth is measured in heads of cattle But the land has been overgrazed only bracken remains More cows means even less grass But your logic tells you that you gain greatly by buying the cattleThe effect on the remaining herders is merely that each of their cows would have just a little less to eat The gains are large and all yours but the losses seem small because they are divided over all the herdersBut if each herdsman bought 10 cows using this same logic the land would be barren in one season The cattle would starve and the humans would pay a heavier price It would piously be called a humanitarian crisisI often wonder how safe planes are but I already know itrsquos a foolish question No one would believe an aircraft manufacturer who claim his planes were accidentproof no matter what hersquod spent on RampD However you might find him more credible if he said hersquod greatly reduced the chances of fatal accidents on his planeWhat you donrsquot question and the aircraft manufacturer doesnrsquot say is the horrible assumption that a certain number of people are surely going to die in that plane The manufacturer has done an internal calculation about lsquoacceptable lossesrsquomdashthe number of human lives whose death in his plane he is willing to have on his conscienceIrsquom neither an environmentalist nor an aviation expert But people are saying and doing things that kill people and explaining them in reasonable words If we donrsquot question their answers wersquore letting killers walk freeHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper