Is it OK to steal/kill to save the life of your child?

[bluey]

The paragraphs Grames has quoted come from Miss Rand's essay "Textbook of Americanism," in which she discusses the basic political principles necessary to establish and maintain a free society. They appear under the section titled: "Does The Motive Change The Nature Of A Dictatorship?"

Clearly, Miss Rand is writing about governments and their policies, not the choices individual men might face in times of extreme crisis. (At the risk of sounding presumptuous, even my strongest critics would probably not accuse me of being a collectivist.)

One idea, though, is essential to the discussion at hand: Man always retains his fundamental right to life. This means the right to defend, protect, and work to sustain one's own existence: Man can never be required to regard himself (or turn himself into) an object of sacrifice — no matter how dire the straits, no matter what other values might be involved — "not ever, not at any time, not for any purpose whatsoever."

Once again, morality and its principles are a matter of context.

1. Even if you could never be expected to relinquish your own right to life, you would still not be justified in stealing or killing to save the life of your child. Not even if you think they mean more to you than your own life. What would stop someone from valuing, say, every child's life over her own life? Nothing but force? Taking a value from person A and giving it to person B, to your own detriment, and defending yourself by saying that you're doing it for yourself (ie because you want to see your child alive) despite the fact that, if caught, you won't be alive or free to do any valuing at all, is altrusim, pure and simple.

2. Let's look at what you just said and how it totally doesn't apply here. Man always has the right to: a) defend, b ) protect and c) work to sustain one's own existence. I completely agree. My first argument is that failure to do those three things before an emergency situation arises is NOT a justification for looting someone else when your neck is on the line. However, since I know you want to isolate a moment in time, analyzing the situation without considering events before or after, I'll do that too and pretend that there's some perfectly legitimate reason why looting is your only option in this situation (i.e. you haven't violated any rights up to this point), and that stealing medicine from a sick kid or killing someone to keep your own kid alive isn't a criminal offence in every jurisdiction anywhere and that you'd clearly end up with a net loss in value. So I'll argue instead that killing or stealing to save your child's life is not defending, protecting, or working to sustain your life. Who, in this situation, are you defending your life from? No one is initiating force (except you) and it isn't even you whose life is in danger. So that right of ours doesn't justify this action. Protect? Again, protection from illness is mainly something you do before you get sick. You absolutely have the right to take care of yourself and, once sick, to get the best medical attention available to you. Nobody could stop you. Oh - unless you try to kill them, then they'll stop you, because that's NOT what "protect" means at all. How about working to sustain one's life - killing someone to steal their money to buy medicine for your child is pretty honest labour, right? Especially if you do it out of desperation at the last minute because you aren't able to face reality and/or because you don't believe in preparing for emergencies? Your statement that "Man always retains his fundamental right to life. This means the right to defend, protect, and work to sustain one's own existence" doesn't mean "Man always has the right to take whatever he needs from his neighbours, even if he has to kill them for it, but only if it's really really really serious (to him personally) and he can't think of any other way to solve his problems or deal with his reality". Sacrifice is exactly what you're advocating - you're sacrificing someone's life or property for your own ends, and sacrificing yourself for someone else (your life, or freedom, or integrity for your child, who is NOT you even if they mean a lot to you).

In the end though, I don't think you think it's within your rights at all. I think you're just saying you would do it anyway, even if it isn't, ethics be damned, and that you wouldn't feel any guilt or regret over it afterward. That I can't argue with, because I can't argue with an emotion. Let's just say that if it were me or my kid that you tried to pull one over on for your benefit - believe me, you wouldn't be better off in the end. And I would not only feel justified in defending myself and my family against your violation of our rights, I also would be right, alive, free, and human.

I can't make it any more clear than that, and won't be attempting to.

[edit for messy html]

Edited October 23, 2008 by bluey

[Grames]

The paragraphs Grames has quoted come from Miss Rand's essay "Textbook of Americanism," in which she discusses the basic political principles necessary to establish and maintain a free society. They appear under the section titled: "Does The Motive Change The Nature Of A Dictatorship?"

Clearly, Miss Rand is writing about governments and their policies, not the choices individual men might face in times of extreme crisis. (At the risk of sounding presumptuous, even my strongest critics would probably not accuse me of being a collectivist.)

One idea, though, is essential to the discussion at hand: Man always retains his fundamental right to life. This means the right to defend, protect, and work to sustain one's own existence: Man can never be required to regard himself (or turn himself into) an object of sacrifice — no matter how dire the straits, no matter what other values might be involved — "not ever, not at any time, not for any purpose whatsoever."

Once again, morality and its principles are a matter of context.

I do not accuse Kevin Delaney of being a collectivist, but I did not want to engage in out of context quoting. Nevertheless, the concept of the inalienability of individual rights has wider application than the context of government action. This is because individual rights are derived from the metaphysical nature of man, which applies to every man in every context with the exception of a metaphysical emergency.

In the context of a metaphysical emergency the aspects of man that are fundamental to his survival are changed. A temporary change in the evaluation of the metaphysical nature of man renders all derivative ideas moot, including normal ethics and moral rights. Inalienability is an application of the concepts of the hierarchy of knowledge and the fallacy of the stolen concept in that no derivative economic or political idea can change a man's rights but a logically prior metaphysical change can.

But emergencies can differ in their scope. Emergencies always have a finite scope; there are going to be people uneffected by the emergency. The social context relating people in an emergency to people not in an emergency does not change (this is the major point made by Rand's essay "The Ethics of Emergencies"). The modification (or disappearance) of ethics and rights is only applicable to people stuck in an emergency together, that is people "on the same lifeboat" relating to each other. Relations "off the lifeboat" are unchanged. Nor do you have the right to "expand the lifeboat" by roping other people into your emergency.

Consider this epistemological aside: If one's private emergency has no outward signs and people don't know an emergency exists unless one tells them, then according to Kevin Delaney's emergency ethics they have lost their claim to have rights and don't even know it. This is absurd. If you are not certain that you have rights, you don't have them.

Working backward from loss your saying "this must be altruistic thinking because I caused the loss of a greater value by respecting other's rights, a lesser value" is wrong. The emergency situation caused your loss. It is irrational to assume responsibility for the metaphysical. Sacrifice is trading a greater value for a lesser, or no value. There is no sacrifice involved here because there is no trading with the metaphysical.

[KevinD]

In his podcast of 2/9/09, Leonard Peikoff commented on a virtually identical question to the one which began this thread.

Do you know what a lifeboat question is? "What do you do when there are more people in the lifeboat than food, and someone has to die. What does Objectivism say?"

[T]hose questions are completely illegitimate, because morality is for circumstances where it's possible for men to coexist. If they can't, then you can't have any morality.

This is a lifeboat question. . . . "My wife is extremely sick. She is my greatest value. She will die in 24 hours if I do not acquire a certain medicine for her.

"I leave the house and go to the pharmacy, and find out that that the last bottle of medicine has been sold to the man in front of me. There is no other place I can get this medicine. By coincidence, the man who purchased the medicine is walking home in front of me. I approach the man and explain to him my situation, and request that he give me the medicine. However, he says no, as his wife is in the same situation as mine.

"He turns around and continues to walk away. I know that if I wanted to, I could easily overpower this man and steal the medicine. Now my question is: What is the moral thing to do?"

I'd like to know some things about the realistic possibility of this example. For instance: She's only going to live for 24 hours. How long did you know that? Who told you, and why did you wait? How many other pharmacies have you tried? How many websites? Did you try the manufacturer?

This whole thing, point after point, is a completely unreal situation. You're just setting up two men, for no reason, with no plausibility, [who] want the same thing desperately — should they kill each other?

What you have to do, before you ask moral questions, is figure out are they realistic? And what should the characters in them have done, what could they have done, that would have vitiated and wiped out the very possibility of the situation.

You can hear this podcast at Dr. Peikoff's website.

[Jill]

This is unrealistic, but I'm giving it a shot anyway. One can use one's imagination.

So apocalipse happens and I'm living in the fallout of civilisation as we know it. There's only a bit of life saving medicine left and it's my neighbor's child who has it. I ask my child what he rather do. If my child was too ill or too young to communicate, I would steal the medicine on his behalf and flee so we wouldn't be caught.

The morality of the wife situation is different from the child one, because one's wife doesn't exist due to one's choice. One doesn't owe her life in the same way.

Edited February 26, 2009 by Jill

[Nacirema]

This is unrealistic, but I'm giving it a shot anyway. One can use one's imagination.

So apocalipse happens and I'm living in the fallout of civilisation as we know it. There's only a bit of life saving medicine left and it's my neighbor's child who has it. I ask my child what he rather do. If my child was too ill or too young to communicate, I would steal the medicine on his behalf and flee so we wouldn't be caught.

The morality of the wife situation is different from the child one, because one's wife doesn't exist due to one's choice. One doesn't owe her life in the same way.

So it's okay to steal and/or kill for your child because he (essentially) didn't choose to be born, making you the steward of his well being?

Let's take this further: Why can't this apply to my wife, or even to myself? After all, my wife never choose to be born, and I know I never got to weigh in on whether I wanted to be made alive or not. By that reasoning, since I never chose to exist then I'm justified in taking whatever I can because the universe had thrust existence upon me, and I should do whatever I need to do to stay alive.

Also, more importantly/directly to the point, what if stealing the medicine puts some other child at risk? After all, this is the apocalypse, so other people must be sick as well. Your neighbor's child didn't choose to be born anymore than you did, so what gives you the right to take it away from him?