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This was old draft I started before I read all the posts and realized there was nothing I could add. You and You, etc. had said it all. But maybe my concrete ending might be of value to this great thread. If a type of food is delicious, it's a value to me. If that food is healthy it's a greater value. If it's unhealthy, it's a lesser value. If it's so unhealthy that the pleasure of eating it is outweighed by the physical harm, then, overall, it becomes a non-value. [i'm not sure if "non-value" in the Objectivist lexicon was the right word; I pawned my Lexicon for rent money...I give the lefty book buyer credit for allowing it onto their shelves. Maybe Capitalism is stronger nowadays than I thought, My point is that even the things that can lead to an earlier death (than would've been had I not done them) can still be a value, because they make my lifetime greater. Though maybe shorter. Example: My dad was a great man who fought in the Korean War off air craft carriers as a lieutenant commander and was then one of the world's best interior designers since 1967 where he founded his business in Waikiki (knowing there was gonna be a boom there) and did hotels--all around the world-- a cruise ship, and an airplane until the day he died suddenly of a rare disease. He love to drink. He was an alcoholic but not in the "our lives had become unmanageable" doctrine of the flawed AA; he "Walked the Line" like the Johnny Cash movie I quoted meant. What I mean to say is that when I saw his medical records, my dad was given a year to live due to scirrocis (sorry no spell check) of the liver attributable to alcohol abuse since his days in the Navy till the morning he was taken to the emergency room for Hemachromatosis. Here's my point: We can die tomorrow on our way to work, in a car crash. My dad's liver held all the way to his "car crash." So the physical damage I do to my body, might not even matter if I never make it that far, so the enjoyment of life must be weighed with the prolongment. Tying it back to the ultimate end: a full life specific to man is NOT me on life-support. If that's all it is, with nurses wiping my ass, I'll pull the plugs outta my arms like my dad did when he came to in the hospital. That's not what Miss Rand meant when she referred to Life. Though I'm sure she wasn't saying that if you're an old folk in a hospice you should kill yourself; please don't get me wrong.....there are still things worth living for when the pain is unbearable. Music. Film. Literature. Sex (Cialis can wake the dead).

I think (though he may correct me if necessary) that StrictlyLogical is not attempting to lay out a full theory of valuation, but just observing that in general it is not enough to base ones values on life-as-bare-physical-survival; that the quality of life is also a vital factor. Come to that, I think he's correct. And while I wouldn't personally attempt to plot out my values on a graph, and don't take that as a serious suggestion, I think that's a valid way of looking at the reasoning involved, metaphorically. Much as one may try to find the most profitable point on a supply and demand curve, we seek to maximize our experience of life -- even if that may mean losing a few years on the back-end for a richer experience throughout. The actual means by which an individual determines his own values and subsequent decisions (down to eating a bowl of ice cream) are complex and depend on a lot of context and specific information. But the point is that we do not decide whether or not to eat ice cream alone according to whether it is judged to extend or shorten one's years on the planet; the quality of the years we live, quality experienced in part at least as physical pleasure (such as ice cream may provide, according to one's own taste), is highly important to ethical reasoning.