1
The subject that afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Slater, told us, would be how to play chess.
“Chess is about checkmate, about trapping your opponent’s king,” he said from the front of the classroom. “It isn’t about taking pieces. Only mediocre players try to win by taking pieces.”
He handed around chess sets and had us pair off. My opponent was Peggy, a fifteen-year-old girl who was even taller than most girls her age. I was a ten-year-old squirt.
During our opening moves, she placed her pieces in the way of mine. The only way I could advance was to get rid of them. I weighed Mr. Slater’s disdain for taking pieces against my desire to win. Then, one by one, I took several pawns and a bishop.
Peggy glared at me. “That isn’t how you’re supposed to play chess.”
Mr. Slater surely overheard, but thankfully he didn’t come over.
It was no small matter when he got angry. His eyes narrowed into intense irises and his Yorkshire vowels turned harsher. When berating the whole class, he’d stand in a spot diagonally across the room from my desk. I’d stare at his face, shadowed against the light coming in from the window behind him, and hope the path of destruction didn’t track my way.
2
A brief context: During my childhood in England, partially sighted children were taught in separate schools. We couldn’t go to regular schools, but we were also unsuitable fodder for residential institutions for blind children. In Sheffield, where my family and I lived at the time, there weren’t many of us. In one class were perhaps a dozen children up to around the age of ten, and in the other were a roughly equal number of older children. Hence ten-year-old me competing with fifteen-year-old Peggy. She can’t have been happy about it, let alone being beaten by me, let alone my use of condemned tactics. She clearly felt betrayed and was openly upset.
Other than my very first teacher, who inspired her young children, Mr. Slater was by far the best I’d ever had. I took his words seriously. I hadn’t liked disregarding his caution and hadn’t wanted to take Peggy’s pieces, but they occupied places on the board that made it impossible for mine to advance. If I’d had more skill, could I have found those spaces? Because I can’t recreate that long-ago game, I’ll never know.
My vivid memory of that afternoon and Peggy’s distress suggests it was my first time facing a moral dilemma. I don’t mean the first time I’d done something wrong when the right thing to do was obvious. Here, it wasn’t.
The dilemma was different from, say, lying. Lying involves a much clearer moral issue. Almost the first thing we learn as children is that lying is bad. But even lying isn’t always indefensible. Is it better to praise a host’s meal than tell him it’s the worst thing you’d ever eaten?
Perhaps this is why the phrase “moral compass” has come into common use. A compass needle points to magnetic north, a location that fluctuates over time. Unlike “true north,” it isn’t perceived as a fixed point.
Looking back, Mr. Slater was mistaken to discourage taking the opponent’s pieces. Yes, checkmate is the goal. But getting to checkmate requires reducing the opponent’s defenses, and taking pieces is a legitimate tactic.
Each childhood memory is a marker for when something significant was learned. In that chess game, for the first time I made a choice that wasn’t about right and wrong, but about which option was least wrong.
The line that you wrote “for moral compasses to do their job right, we must take care to define our terms accurately” has really resonated. How do you win the game when others play by different rules; how do you engage when the standard of behaviour varies; how do you feel empowered when everything else feels like a different world where once established codes of conduct or morality were quite clear cut? The dilemma you pose is a topical one but widening the metaphor to life, losing the game can make you feel weak, whereas winning in a less than honourable way is no victory at all and thus in that light, the old adage of “fight fire with fire” is a bad move. I guess in defining our terms – I read this as being true to your own values. Is this what you meant?
Thank you, Louise, for your perceptive comment. If you’d stopped at your “fight fire with fire” analogy, I would have said yes, that’s what I’m saying. As you suggest, we find ourselves in an impossible predicament if our own values aren’t universal. There are two defects in any claim that lies are justified on the grounds that others lie. First, lying is wrong, and second, the claim that someone else does it isn’t moral justification. We need to return the prevailing view to where (1) it’s wrong to lie and (2) it’s wrong to behave badly just because others do. So yes, be true to ourselves, but it isn’t enough. We must resist the immoral methods that certain public figures use to achieve their ends. Something is very wrong here in America when Donald Trump can tell literally thousands of documented lies but around forty percent of voters still support him. Even if he were an advocate for democracy, it would be unacceptable. Foundations of immorality crumble away and reveal that the best-laid plans aren’t well laid after all.