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Explicitly defining living as man

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Cogito

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Hi all, I've been browsing these forums for the past few weeks and this is my first post.

I've been having some trouble with finding explicit rules for what truly should be valued and what shouldn't. Given any particular case, I can say "that is proper for man" or "that is not", but I can't figure out an overall rule. My problem is this: if you say that life isn't morgue avoidance(and I don't think that is the case), by what standard do you decide that it is worth shortening your life for some value? Why is it moral to occasionally eat fatty foods even though it will shorten your life while it isn't moral to inject drugs into your body? Please note that I do not in any way equate the two and I know there is a difference, I am just trying to explicitly justify that which I implicitly hold to be true. Thanks in advance for your answers.

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I'm new as well, and this is also a central question I have.

As I see it, the difficulty arises due to an incomplete, incorrect, or circular definition of "Man's Life". We can safely say what it is not: it is not mere subsistence. Rather, it is existence as "man qua man", or life according to man's nature: a life proper to man. This is unobjectionable as a starting point, but what's needed is a good deal of fleshing out via inquiry into the complete and precise nature of man. On an individual level, this would require a lot of self-study and introspection to come to a useful understanding. It is not an easy task.

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My problem is this: if you say that life isn't morgue avoidance(and I don't think that is the case), by what standard do you decide that it is worth shortening your life for some value? Why is it moral to occasionally eat fatty foods even though it will shorten your life while it isn't moral to inject drugs into your body?
There are two parts to this question. First, it is simply false that eating fatty foods will shorten your life, though the food Nazis will tell you otherwise. And a dish of warm apple cake with cream is a profoundly life-affirming experience, at least if I make it. Second, it is at best pointless to take drugs, and possibly harmful to your body (depending on the drug). The distinction is actually kind of subtle. People often try to reduce the two cases to simple "pleasure", i.e. the claim that food and drugs are morally interchangeable and if you feel happy doing it, then do it. I've never really understood that equation, since drugs seriously impair your nature in ending your rational faculty, at least for a while. Usually, this doesn't happen with apple cake.
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Alright... Fine. How about the difference between refusing to do any work beyond that which would be required to eat, and deciding to take a smoke every once in a while? Neither impairs a person's cognitive ability, not working is immoral, and taking a smoke as a sort of stress relief or whatever reason people smoke can be even though it shortens your life.

And, anticipating the "there is no proof that smoking shortens your life argument"... We have two options:

1. There exists some value which is detrimental to the value of "morgue avoidance" yet is proper for man's life, in which case that value and all others like it must be justified by an explicit standard.

2. There does not exist said value, in which case proper for man's life is in fact equivalent with "morgue avoidance".

I know the answer is the 1st, I'm just wondering what the standard is.

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