Braintrust

Braintrust

Trial by ordeal seemed to me, as I learned about it in school, ridiculously unfair. How could it have endured as an institution in Europe for hundreds of years? The central idea was simple: with God’s intervention, innocence would plainly reveal itself, as the accused thief sank to the bottom of the pond, or the accused adulterer remained unburned by the red hot poker placed in his hand. Only the guilty would drown or burn. (For witches, the ordeal was less “forgiving”: if the accused witch drowned she was presumed innocent; if she bobbed to the surface, she was guilty, whereupon she was hauled off to a waiting fire.) With time on our hands, my friend and I concocted a plan. She would falsely accuse me of stealing her purse, and then I would lay my hand on the stove and see whether it burned. We fully expected it would burn, and it did. So if the test was that obvious, how could people have trusted to trial by ordeal as a system of justice?

From the medieval clerics, the answer would have been that our test was frivolous, and that God would not deign to intervene with a miracle for the benefit of kids fooling around. That answer seemed to us a bit cooked up. What is the evidence God ever intervened on behalf of the wrongly accused? A further difficulty concerned nonbelievers, such as those not yet reached by missionaries, or . . . maybe me? Still, this answer alerted us to the matter of metaphysical (or as we said then, “otherworldly”) beliefs in moral practices, along with the realization that what seemed to us obvious about fairness in determining guilt might not be obvious after all.

My history teacher tried to put the medieval practice in context, aiming to soften slightly our sense of superiority over our medieval ancestors: in trial by ordeal, the guilty were more likely to confess, since they believed God would not intervene on their behalf, whereas the innocent, convinced that God would help out, were prepared to go to trial. So the system might work pretty well for getting confessions from the guilty, even if it did poorly for protecting the innocent. This answer alerted us to the presence of pragmatics in moral practices, which struck us as a little less lofty than we had been led to expect. How hideously unfair if you were innocent and did go to trial. I could visualize myself, bound by ropes, drowning in a river after being accused of witchcraft by my piano teacher.

So what is it to be fair? How do we know what to count as fair? Why do we regard trial by ordeal as wrong? Thus opens the door into the vast tangled forest of questions about right and wrong, good and evil, virtues and vices.

Copyright © 2011 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.