Urbane Sprawl

A train is barreling down the tracks at full speed, having lost control of its breaks. It will crash, killing all aboard, unless you, an onlooker, decide to push a nearby fat man onto the tracks. Defying physics, and perhaps political correctness, the fat man will stop the train in its path: only he will die, and the passengers will survive. Do you push him?

How about this: you are a pregnant movie star. The public demands the details of your baby’s delivery, naming, and appearance. They’ll hound you like hyenas till they have his or her image, which they’ll auction to the highest-bidding glossy. Do you beat them to punch, performing the auction yourself and donating the proceeds to charity, perhaps commodifying your child (thrusting them into, rather than protecting them from, the piranha-like public) but perhaps making some sort of good come out of the insatiable appetite for famous flesh?

The July 28 Slate cover story analyzed the optimal sales strategies of celebrities looking to sell snapshots of their infants, delving into the economics of celebrity baby photo deals. But what about the ethics of these deals?

There is an unexplored tension beneath the surface of the press about Shiloh and Suri, Knox and Vivienne: the ethical quandary of selling baby photos, even when giving the proceeds to charity.

The conundrum is reminiscent of most introductory ethics class thought experiments about pushing a fat man in front of a train to save the passengers on board. On the one hand is the Kantian view that some things — like selling photos of your child or pushing a man in front of a train — are simply wrong in themselves, and should not be done no matter the upside. On the other is the utilitarian view that what matters is the net good done by an action — saving a trainload of people with the loss of just one man, saving African children with the loss of just one child’s privacy.

Views about celebrity baby photo deals line up along these lines:

The utilitarian side gets support from the Freakanomics blog on the New York Times website, which called the Jolie-Pitts’ approach to Shiloh’s photos a “creative application in incentives” in their “distributing the pictures themselves and donating the proceeds to charity, thereby thwarting the paparazzi free market and potentially setting a new model for future celebrity photo ops.”

On the Kantian side, there are the reports from the Syndney Morning Herald that Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban said, after the July birth of their baby Sunday Rose, “They don’t think it’s appropriate to make deals. They are still deciding how they feel about [it] — if and when they will release a photo at all.”

And, Gawker compiled a list in praise of the “Sort of Heroes” who “wouldn’t sell pictures of their kids”:

Babies! Famous people have been having them! And then they also sell photographs of the babies because, in some twisted Dina Lohanian world of logic, selling the photos of the babies somehow mitigates the other paparazzi attention the little squirming things would inevitably receive. It’s a highwire act of faux inferential reasoning, but it seems to be popular.

What stands out most, though, is the lack of certainty in the voices that — like students taking sides in Ethics 101 — frame their points of view with qualifications like “still deciding” and “sort of.” Is selling celebrity baby photos and giving the money to charity a praiseworthy way to turn paparazzi photolust into a moral good? Or is it an unethical commodification of one’s baby, inexcusable no matter the good ends that come out of it? The answer’s as muddy as the question of pushing the fat man in front of the train.

Meanwhile, these questions offer a clear path to punching up Ethics 101: instead of asking students to place themselves in the bodies of bystanders to a runaway train, let’s ask them to imagine themselves in the bodies of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.