Ethics, Luck and Barrymore

I’m reading Simon Blackburn’s Very Short Introduction to Ethics. It’s all rather good, but one of the sections that has leaped out at me is one on luck:

Suppose two drivers go down the same road, each showing the same small degree of carelessness. One arrives safely; the other kills a small child who darts out in front. This difference of luck affects how we think of them, and even the penalties imposed by society and the law. Luck can do more to swing the way our lives go than virtue.

So here’s another puzzle.

There are two parties at two houses. At both houses a man drinks nine pints of beer, takes four or five ecstasy tablets and a line of cocaine. He then amuses himself in the pool while everyone else drifts indoors. He’s then found in the early hours of the morning drowned in the pool. Which householder is the one you hound from the country?

The answer is the gay one.

I was vaguely aware of the Lubbock death, so seeing Michael Barrymore made me uneasy, I became more uneasy when I started feeling sympathy for him. But I didn’t know what he actually did. Having read around a few stories on the net, I still don’t know what he did, but have found that it’s remarkably similar to Art Malik’s situation. Art Malik remains a successful actor, while Michael Barrymore’s career, the Sun reminds us, was ruined after “the body of Stuart Lubbock was found floating in Barrymore’s pool, suffering from ‘horrific sexual injuries’.”

Except, as Mark Simpson explains, it wasn’t floating, it was at the bottom of the pool. And the horrific sexual injuries revealed no sign of sexual contact. In fact the horrific injuries don’t seem to have occurred till Lubbock was out of the pool. When you add in that Stuart Lubbock was a habitual drug user, the façade of Michael Barrymore the gay predator falls apart.

I’m not sure that he’s nice, I’m certain he’s a disturbed, but then I think I would be if I’d been hounded by the press like that. He’s been foolish too, leaving the scene when Lubbock’s body was recovered from the pool. But despite the claims of some of the papers, he’s not a killer. I’m still uneasy, but now I’m uneasy about a press that can try a person and punish him as a pack with no accountability of their own.

It’s human to judge people. Big Brother will be inviting people to judge when eviction time comes. When people judge Barrymore they won’t just be judging the man, they’ll be passing judgement on his luck and his sexuality.