Is it immoral to take out a student loan if you might die?

[SapereAude]

The context here is that death is imminent and there's nothing you can do about it, so you are in the process of dying rather than living.

No.

You may make that choice. But do not evade that it is in fact a choice you are making.

You can make the choice to be in the process of living (and living your ideal morality) until you are dead.

You might do well for a moment to reread some of these posts and contemplate who would be more happy, fulfilled and at peace at the time of their death- someone who takes Sophia's stance or someone whose morality throughout their life has so failed them that when faced with death they can only find solace in abandoning the philosophy they claimed to live by.

[Mindy]

The same principle would apply. Loan is just one possible concrete of many.

Somehow, you missed my point. Would you re-read the post this is a response to?

Mindy

[Hotu Matua]

Generally, a rational life (what we call life qua man) leads to a happy life.

Yet happiness is not the standard of morality.

In some exceptional circumstances, a person may reach a breaking point where living qua man, living rationally, does not translate into a happy life. But these breaking points are a rarity, and are commonly discussed as "lifeboat situations". You know them: situations in which you can only aspire to live biologically, but not as a rational man anymore.

Having said that, I must say that people with terminal illness really BENEFIT, in terms of comfort and happiness, from following a rational course of life for the most part of their very short lifespan.

For example, metastatic cancer patients will live better and happier if they are rational enough to make rational choices around their palliative treatment, money, family relationships, unmet but still possible-to-meet goals and projects, etc.

Therefore, facing death in the short term should not translate into acting irrationally. Living as a man as long as you can pays off.

Edited August 20, 2010 by Hotu Matua

[~Sophia~]

1) You are not considering my earlier posts in conjunction with those.

I was disputing this statement of yours:

If you are going to die, why does it matter? Life is fundamental here, and seeing your life coming to an end as a certainty make short term thinking more and more valid. So these principles seem to apply less and less as one approaches death.

Previous actions were not part of this statement (I don't even find them relevant to the answer)

If someone has been largely immoral all there life, and they were going to die in a short amount of time, there really isn't anything that morality can offer them

That is your opinion and not a universal truth. It can be observed that even many repeated criminals don't share your point of view. But this is really a side issue and I don't want to spend time on it. This was not part of the original question (nor your statement above).

Conversely, there are certain activities that are immoral, that have long term negative consequences, that would cease to be immoral because the long term consequences wouldn't be there any more.

That is true. One example would be smoking. However, I don't agree with you that, for example, dishonesty or fraud are no longer self harmful when you have little time left.

It is just not the kind of self harm you recognize as important or meaningful.

2) Prove it.

You mixed metaphysical value-judgments which form one's sense of life with self esteem. Best thing would be for you to go to the source and re-read keeping in mind what I said. One can affect the other but not the same thing.

Edited August 20, 2010 by ~Sophia~

[Hairnet]

I have to admit that I my claims have evolved as I have discussed this. I have been defending two different claims. I apologize for that. I am just going to rethink some things right here on this post. Hopefully by the end I can come to one conclusion that makes sense.

Moral principles mean less and less as someone goes approaches death because the amount of time that they have to plan for lessens.

A) This supposes that moral principles don't apply to the short term.

For evidence I cited that fact that people who are immoral are completely capable of dealing with reality in the short term.

In this case for instance, we are talking about a student loan. Normally we would say fraud is bad because one who lives by fraud becomes a anxious, miserable, failure prone person. The specific reason for this is that they are trying to "fake reality".

As we know, lies after a given amount of time and attention by others, will collapse. You could get away with lying once or twice, but two problems arise. Firstly a person just can't act out in isolation, people act in patterns. Someone who gets away with a scam once will do it again unless they abandon that way of life as immoral. So they will continue to do so, and then they will be discovered for the parasites they are and will become helpless. The other problem is the chronic anxiety that is caused by trying to control other people and hide reality from people.

I am not sure if this applies to one person who is going to try to get away with one scam before they die.

On one hand it is always possible that someone will discover the scam. Being discovered could potentially ruin the very little remaining life they have.

The trend setting could also be a problem. I am not sure if someone has to do something immoral once and "succeed" once before incorporating that kind of behavior into their life style, or if they start to incorporate it as a pattern the minute they engage in it. Another problem is that in this concrete scenario, a student loan, the fact that they are attending school may be viewed as success, so they most likely try other forms of dishonest behavior until disaster strikes.

So the person will either feel anxiety of not having any control over whether or not they will be discovered, or they will feel good about their scam's success and will go about engaging in more lies. This can become a problem very quickly, even in the short term.

C) So I have to conclude that people should basically be honest up until death. You could get away with the student loan scam, but there is a huge chance that this would become more trouble than it is worth. It would make more sense to work and have fun. I suppose that in your last hours you could try to scam some people and even get away with it, but it doesn't even seem like anyone who was already moral would find this to be a good use of time.

To someone who is already moral, it isn't worth the risk.

D) Still, there are a lot of things that would be normally considered immoral that aren't in the short term. Smoking is an example you provided.

NEW CONCLUSION: Moral Principles always apply, but they apply in very different ways in smaller time frames. Smoking, not saving money, and not getting educated (in a professional sense) are things that would be immoral normally but they are not immoral given the context of not having a future. There are a few other things given certain context that would become moral that normally were not. There isn't any reason to abandon moral principles before one dies however, as those things provide the highest things that life can provide.

As for people who are immoral, and how late is too late for redemption, is a completely other topic.

[Hotu Matua]

NEW CONCLUSION: Moral Principles always apply, but they apply in very different ways in smaller time frames. Smoking, not saving money, and not getting educated (in a professional sense) are things that would be immoral normally but they are not immoral given the context of not having a future. There are a few other things given certain context that would become moral that normally were not. There isn't any reason to abandon moral principles before one dies however, as those things provide the highest things that life can provide.

As for people who are immoral, and how late is too late for redemption, is a completely other topic.

Principles serve us very well to guide us through life, as concepts serve us very well to guide us through understanding reality.

But both are contextual.

We do not follow a principle for the sake of following the principle. That is Kantian morality.

We follow principles because they do a good job at leading us to our ultimate ends: a happy, bountiful, rational life.

Handling the concept "table" will help me to deal with four-legged objects with a flat surface in a way that will serve my interests, most of the time. In very few instances, though, I will be surprised to have considered such an object a table, place a book on top of it, and discover that the object is so fragile that breaks and cannot bear even the weight of a book.

If you happen to detect in advance that the four legged object with a flat surface is taht fragile, you will not deal with it as you normally deal with table. You won't place the book on it, if your end is to keep the book from falling. The concept "table" won't work to fulfill your end. You will have to accomodate to reality, to the real referent, and not insist in placing a book over it on the argument that it is a table, and tables are meant to hold objects.

In Objectivism we do not worship concepts, but existence. We do not worship moral principles, but life.

In the end of the day, concepts and moral principles are tools, wonderful as they surely are.

The problem with moral relativism is that it denies the importance of principles.

The problem with deontologism is that it worships principles.

In Objetivism we give moral principles its proper role: tools that work really well... 99% of the time... which is enough to embrace them to guide our life on this Earth.

In the same way that Newtonian physics serves us extremely well for understanding movement of bodies on a human scale (but not necessarily at interestelar or subatomic scales), Objectivism serves us extremely well for living on Earth in our human scale.

Edited August 20, 2010 by Hotu Matua