Say I am hungry. Without food, I will die, therefore it is imperative, above all else, that I find food. It is absolutely the most important thing on my agenda. Say the only available food is the rotting lump of bread the orphan next to me is eating. I take the bread from her and eat it as my self-interest dictates. But without that piece of bread the orphan will also die. So the orphan has a right to take it too. Therefore who is right in this case as there is only one objective right. Who has a right to that bread. What would be the moral thing to do?
Say I am hungry. Without food, I will die, therefore it is imperative, above all else, that I find food. It is absolutely the most important thing on my agenda. Say the only available food is the rotting lump of bread the orphan next to me is eating. I take the bread from her and eat it as my self-interest dictates. But without that piece of bread the orphan will also die. So the orphan has a right to take it too. Therefore who is right in this case as there is only one objective right. Who has a right to that bread. What would be the moral thing to do?
You should eat the orphan.
Seriously, this is a non-existent scenario. You should pick a third option, where you don’t die and you don’t take away the bread from the poor, dying blind, quadruplegic retarded torture victim orphan with burns over 90% or her body (if you’re going to play the emotional appeal card, you might as well use the trump card). So get up off the floor, leave that crackhouse, go down to the local Quikimart where they’re hiring night clerks, and buy yourself a nice juicy steak. Or rotting pile of bean curd, if that’s your preference. Out of basic compassion for that poor lump of human refuse, you could even bring her a side of fries.
In other words, this is a false dichotomy. You made some choice earlier to get in this situation. What was that choice?
You should eat the orphan.
Seriously, this is a non-existent scenario. You should pick a third option, where you don’t die and you don’t take away the bread from the poor, dying blind, quadruplegic retarded torture victim orphan with burns over 90% or her body (if you’re going to play the emotional appeal card, you might as well use the trump card). So get up off the floor, leave that crackhouse, go down to the local Quikimart where they’re hiring night clerks, and buy yourself a nice juicy steak. Or rotting pile of bean curd, if that’s your preference. Out of basic compassion for that poor lump of human refuse, you could even bring her a side of fries.
In other words, this is a false dichotomy. You made some choice earlier to get in this situation. What was that choice?
Let us say they were in a fighter jet but the fighter jet crashed in the middle of a desert. The desert is totally barren. Through their GPS device, they the length of the path they will have to cross to reach civilization. Person A has some food with him. But one person requires all of that food to carry himself across. If he took less, he could not get through the desert. Therefore sharing is useless. What is objectively and morally right to do in such a case? There must be one right since the right is not subjective.
This could be an extreme scenario but a system of ethics should apply to all cases.
Let us say they were in a fighter jet but the fighter jet crashed in the middle of a desert. The desert is totally barren. Through their GPS device, they the length of the path they will have to cross to reach civilization. Person A has some food with him. But one person requires all of that food to carry himself across. If he took less, he could not get through the desert. Therefore sharing is useless. What is objectively and morally right to do in such a case? There must be one right since the right is not subjective.
This could be an extreme scenario but a system of ethics should apply to all cases.
Why did this guy chose to get in a fighter jet with a blind, crippled legless orphan? Why did he do so without packing any survival provisions? Can we drop the orphan assumption, and make this other person be a healthy and capable adult (whose parents are both alive)? Is he with his wife? His worst enemy? A murderer? What value is the other person to him? Why did he decide to go without any food except for a rotting lump of bread? What about water? Who owns the food? Why doesn’t one of these people stay put and the other take the food and go for help? The person who walks out of the desert potentially has a greater physical need for food to survive the trip out: this suggests a “nobody dies” scenario. How exact is their knowledge of their nutritional requirements?
There is one right answer for a given scenario, but no two scenarios are exactly the same. We want… information.
Say I am hungry. Without food, I will die, therefore it is imperative, above all else, that I find food… What would be the moral thing to do?
I think what you are trying to express are situations known as lifeboat scenarios, highly unusal emergency situations that (thankfully) most everyone never gets to experience in real life. We define our ethical principles where rights and rational choices are possible, but in lifeboat scenarios there are no rational choices that can respect rights. Morality does not apply in lifeboat scenarios.
You should eat the orphan.
This gets my vote for Funniest Outrageous Comment of the Month. Perhaps of the year!
Why did this guy chose to get in a fighter jet with a blind, crippled legless orphan? Why did he do so without packing any survival provisions? Can we drop the orphan assumption, and make this other person be a healthy and capable adult (whose parents are both alive)? Is he with his wife? His worst enemy? A murderer? What value is the other person to him? Why did he decide to go without any food except for a rotting lump of bread? What about water? Who owns the food? Why doesn’t one of these people stay put and the other take the food and go for help? The person who walks out of the desert potentially has a greater physical need for food to survive the trip out: this suggests a “nobody dies” scenario. How exact is their knowledge of their nutritional requirements?
There is one right answer for a given scenario, but no two scenarios are exactly the same. We want… information.
He doesn’t have to be a legless crippled orphan. What about two air force men whose jet crashes in the middle of a battle?
I think what you are trying to express are situations known as lifeboat scenarios, highly unusal emergency situations that (thankfully) most everyone never gets to experience in real life. We define our ethical principles where rights and rational choices are possible, but in lifeboat scenarios there are no rational choices that can respect rights. Morality does not apply in lifeboat scenarios.
But isn’t morality a set of values required to live?
This gets my vote for Funniest Outrageous Comment of the Month. Perhaps of the year!
I agree!
But isn’t morality a set of values required to live?
Yes-but these situations are not, in essence, a part of life. As Stephen said,
lifeboat scenarios, highly unusal emergency situations that (thankfully) most everyone never gets to experience in real life.
Yes-but these situations are not, in essence, a part of life. As Stephen said,
They may not be a part of ordinary day to day life but what if sometime they do become a part of life to someone somewhere. How is he/she to handle it then? He needs a code of morality. He cannot make arbitrary decisions.
They may not be a part of ordinary day to day life but what if sometime they do become a part of life to someone somewhere. How is he/she to handle it then? He needs a code of morality. He cannot make arbitrary decisions.
All knowledge, including knowledge of moral principles, is contextual. These kinds of scenarios simply provide extreme contexts, and try to show how moral principles are “impossible” to apply there, “so why bother”.
They’re actually not “impossible” just a lot more complex, and you need a lot more information than the simple-sounding scenerio provides.
The reason we “bother” is because 99.999% of the time, the context is not so marginal.
These kinds of “dilemmas” seem to be seeking moral principles that apply regardless of context; something like “intrinsic” principles.
Tommy,
I hope I’m not missing something but I’ve noticed most of your posts are always revolving around specific concretes. Once you grasp the underlying concepts these concretes will not pose you so many problems. Try reading/learning more about objectivism, take some time to absorb the information and come back and talk.
They may not be a part of ordinary day to day life but what if sometime they do become a part of life to someone somewhere. How is he/she to handle it then? He needs a code of morality. He cannot make arbitrary decisions.
Rand’s principle of emergencies, as I understand it: end the emergency ASAP. Emergencies are rare, temporary situations that make value-seeking impossible. Because of that, the usual principles of ethics are inapplicable; all that one can do is try to end the emergency and get things back to normal.
And yes, that might mean eating the orphan. 
Rand’s principle of emergencies, as I understand it: end the emergency ASAP. Emergencies are rare, temporary situations that make value-seeking impossible. Because of that, the usual principles of ethics are inapplicable; all that one can do is try to end the emergency and get things back to normal.
And yes, that might mean eating the orphan.
The fact of the matter is, if they take the bread by force, they are not at all doing anything towards living. Theft is not a process of life, but of death. The situation does not change that in order to live you have to produce. If an immediate emergency need warrants any action that can be taken, couldn’t any bum starving to death on the street becuase he is incapable of doing anything of value be ethically right in assualting the nearest person? And wouldn’t that mean any person waiting for an organ transplant can commit homicide and harvest what they need from a healthy body? These “emergency” situations are just an excuse to act immorally due to an immediate need. Need is not right, even if it is urgent.
If an immediate emergency need warrants any action that can be taken, couldn’t any bum starving to death on the street becuase he is incapable of doing anything of value be ethically right in assualting the nearest person? And wouldn’t that mean any person waiting for an organ transplant can commit homicide and harvest what they need from a healthy body? These “emergency” situations are just an excuse to act immorally due to an immediate need. Need is not right, even if it is urgent.
You are using situation which don’t just “all of a sudden happen”. They develop, generally over a long period of time of making “anti-life” choices. Bums on the street aren’t there because they were working hard, making all the right ethical decisions, and living rational lives up until the point where they are starving on the street. Every bum I have ever run into in an occupational capacity has had some substance abuse issue, some mental health issue, some issue with authority or just a lousy work ethic (any one, combination or all of the above). The bum situation does not parallel the “lifeboat” scenario. Even the organ transplant situation is likely to have a very different set of dynamics leading up to the emergency status offering other rational choices prior to reaching a flashpoint.
VES
But isn’t morality a set of values required to live?
Not just live, but live qua man – by reason. What I’m trying to force you into is saying (and seeing) where reason leaves the scene. You have to show me that survival qua man is not possible, and I’ve explained to you why I think you’re wrong. You might do better if you made this a “trapped in an undersea cave with no air, and 1 hour of oxygen between you”, where the realities are more clear-cut. Everybody dies.
If survival by reason is possible, then moral issues are relevant. The right to property is not the highest rational value for man: rather, it is something necessary for man to survive by reason. If survival by reason is simply impossible, then property rights are irrelevant, and morality falls by the wayside. But as I’ve pointed out, at some point you did have a free choice, which needs to be evaluated. So for example if you chose to leave behind the standard 3-week survival ration pack in the fighter so that you could cart along a television set, in case you get bored – that decision deserves to be evaluated morally.
First, in case it was not clear from my original post, I have not responded to the specific concretes of the scenario presented by TommyEdison, but rather I responded to what I thought he was after, the principle involved in lifeboat scenarios. The actual example he presented had a number of ambiguities and rather than spend several posts trying to clarify the problem, I thought it better to address the essence of the issue.
But isn’t morality a set of values required to live?
Yes, but morality is not an out-of-context absolute. Morality applies where man can live as man, in the context where rational choices are possible. If you were the only human being alive, you would still need morality to guide your actions, but the issue of rights would not arise. It is only in the context of our interactions with others that rights are an issue, and proper moral principles help us to identify the rights that human interaction requires.
In a typical lifeboat scenario (“two people are in a lifeboat with only enough food for one to survive,” or something similar) there are no rational choices possible which respect each others rights. The metaphysics is such that ethical principles of human interaction have been removed from the situation, and morality simply does not, and cannot, apply.
But this not the normal metaphysics of the world within which man lives. It is an anomaly, an aberration, an atypical unusal situation that some others usually concoct in an attempt to undermine the objective nature of morality. We base our proper way of acting on our nature and the nature of the world in which live, not on some bizarre emergency occurrence that is unlikely to ever happen.
In short, we do not base our morality on singular metaphysical situations in which the possibility for rights-respecting actions does not exist.
They may not be a part of ordinary day to day life but what if sometime they do become a part of life to someone somewhere. How is he/she to handle it then? He needs a code of morality. He cannot make arbitrary decisions.
He acts to preserve his life. No other action is possible.
Thread started with:
Say I am hungry. Without food, I will die, therefore it is imperative, above all else, that I find food. … Say the only available food is the rotting lump of bread the orphan next to me is eating…What would be the moral thing to do?
Later, after someone properly cites problems inherent in the ethics of emergencies,
They may not be a part of ordinary day to day life but what if sometime they do become a part of life to someone somewhere. How is he/she to handle it then? He needs a code of morality. He cannot make arbitrary decisions.
True, you should not make arbitrary decisions. By the same token, you should not construct arbitrary contexts to force conflicts of interests that end up in “who do we kill?” dead ends when you’re trying to be clear on a morality of life ethics.
One moral thing for a hungry adult to do near a child who has food is to look at reality and ask some questions (i.e., think, reason) – e.g., how on earth did the kid get the food!?; from where?; is there more?; etc.
I take the bread from her and eat it as my self-interest dictates.
Self-interest does not equal a range of the moment focus. Rational self-interest holds the context of a lifetime and uses it to project courses of action, including in unusual circumstances. Grab the food from the child? Is the space of this man’s life just for the next few minutes? How hard is it to ask the kind of obvious, quick questions mentioned above and seek ongoing life for two? As someone else asked, how did he get into this context in the first place? For example, did he inflict the emergency on himself and the child and whoever else is part of the context? etc.
I just happen have read last night Ayn Rand’s 4-29-61 letter to John Hospers on this topic. A relevant quote from page 552 (hardcover) follows:
“Every code of morality is based on and derived from a metaphysics, that is: from a certain view of the nature of the universe in which man has to live and act. Observe that the altruist morality is based on a “malevolent universe” premise, on the view that man’s life is, by nature, a calamity, that emergencies, disasters, scourges, catastrophes, are the norm of his existence. Are they? Observe also that the advocates of altruism always offer “lifeboat” siutations as examples from which to derive the rules of moral conduct … The fact is that men do not live in lifeboats – and that a lifeboat is not the place on which to base one’s metaphysics.”
My amen to that is this – if I ever find myself stuck in a lifeboat with someone else, I’ll pray that I get “stuck” with another deeply selfish man – i.e., a man of thought and action. Then I’ll have a better chance to survive the emergency and get on with my life.
Thank you for clearing that dilemma.