The Story
Right, Wrong and Michael Vick
Week Two of the 2009 NFL season has come and gone, leaving Week Three just around the corner. This progression is no intuitive leap, but to anyone even slightly concerned with professional American football, Week Three has a certain distinction.
Michael Vick is officially back.
As of September 27th Michael Vick can play in NFL-sanctioned games. Whether you hate Vick with every fiber of your being or fit in with the “forgive and forget” camp, nothing you can do will change that.
Which is why I don’t particularly care what happens this Sunday.
Nevertheless, I find Michael Vick fascinating.
My initial reaction to the discovery of Vick’s off-field escapades was similar to most: horrified shock. While I understand that people do worse things in this world, I still saw Vick as somewhat soulless.
Out of morbid curiosity I watched Vick’s “60 Minutes” interview in August. I thought nothing could change my perception of a man capable of doing what he did, but the interview popped a strange thought into my mind. The more I watched Vick explain how he now realizes that killing dogs is bad and that people shouldn’t do it for fun, my feelings towards him suddenly became less hostile.
Vick is a mysterious person. He always carries the same detached air about him, and I can never tell what he’s thinking. But I saw one thing very clearly in his vacant gaze and his emptier verbal responses to questions about ethics and simple human decency.
Michael Vick does not believe that dog fighting is wrong.
How could he? Every response of his in regard to dog fighting is crafted, devoid of thought and feeling. Hearing about his actions makes a lot of people sick to their stomachs, but Vick could recall performing them with a stone solid face. In Vick’s mind, killing a dog for pure pleasure creates no moral dissonance; it just isn’t wrong.
With this realization, the Michael Vick story suddenly jumped to a new level for me. Vick’s story isn’t about some psychopathic criminal who undeservedly received a second chance in life- it’s a story about the subjectivity of morality.
This story is on a completely metaphysical level.
I currently have two questions running through my head. First, why does Vick believe that dog fighting is acceptable? In order to understand a person’s beliefs, it’s best to visit their formative years, which were not particularly healthy for Vick. Growing up in a public housing project, Vick’s young parents worked several jobs to make ends meet. The young Michael eventually developed a close bond with a group of friends, friends to which he stayed loyal all his life.
Vick’s childhood environment swarmed with violence. As a product of affluent suburbia, I can’t imagine some of the things that he saw; while my friends and I walked our dogs at night, Vick and his friends hid from gang wars. I think it should be clear who would feel more affected by a dog fight.
It even makes sense, in a very loose way, that Vick would care little about an animal, seeing as how he watched people brutally murder each other as a small child.
I lack the audacity to venture further into Vick’s personal life, but my second question is broader.
Do we really choose what we believe?
On the surface it seems obvious. Yes, I choose to believe in the Christian doctrine of faith. Yes, I choose to believe that all human beings and animals should be treated with a certain level of decency.
To say that I choose these things, however, cannot be the full story. I believe in things like Christianity due in large part to the environment in which I was raised; I can say with some degree of certainty that had my parents practiced a different religion I would embrace whatever it was.
While there are plenty of examples of people who form opinions that contradict those of their formative environment, I still argue that on some level our beliefs are direct responses to experience. More to the point, we do not choose to have many experiences, encountering things like affluence or gang violence by utter chance.
If that really is the case, that our environment is determined in large part by chance, blaming Michael Vick for his beliefs seems about as logical as blaming myself for being born into a comfortable lifestyle.
Of course choice deserves more credit than I give it. Vick ultimately chose to act the way he did and he paid, in my opinion, a just price.
But while I won’t feel happy to see Michael Vick on the field this Sunday, I won’t feel angry either. What I believe is that every lifestyle is interconnected, meaning that on some level we are all responsible for each other. It is not my fault that Vick believes what he does, but I do choose to belong to a society that allows wealth and violent poverty to exist simultaneously.
How can I be surprised when somewhere in that society someone defiles our moral code?
I feel completely unqualified to judge Michael Vick. Perhaps free will and self-determination aren’t as powerful as we think.
Max Cunningham is a staff columnist for The DSJ. His views do not necessarily represent those of the entire staff.