DavidOdden and Grames: Does morality ever require man to commit suicide? Your position is that adherence to moral principles means that we must sometimes refrain from acting to rescue the lives of those we love. Are we ever similarly obligated not to act to defend and protect our own lives?
DavidOdden and Grames: Does morality ever require man to commit suicide? Your position is that adherence to moral principles means that we must sometimes refrain from acting to rescue the lives of those we love. Are we ever similarly obligated not to act to defend and protect our own lives?
Your terminology is mixed. It biases your question.
“commit suicide”
“refrain from acting to rescue”
“not to act to defend and protect”
The question maybe better stated. “If your death is forseeable, is any action valid to sustain your life?” I think the answer is clearly no.
Refraining from any action is not the same as committing suicide. Committing suicide is choosing to die. Refraining from acting in a certain manner (which is choosing to act in a certain manner) is choosing to live your life in a certain way. All moral men (men who chose to live a certain way) will eventually die. So ethics properly applied, applies to non-emergencies. Just based upon that, if your death is forseeable, and it is a non-emergency, there may be ways of preserving your life which are not moral. For example, being unable to afford a life-saving medication to treat a potentially fatal illness does not give you the moral right to steal it instead.
Refraining from any action is not the same as committing suicide. Committing suicide is choosing to die.
If you are faced with the option: either take some kind of action in a given circumstance or die, and you choose not to take the action, for all intents and purposes you have chosen to die. Call it what you will, my question is: Can morality ever require man to make this choice?
So ethics properly applied, applies to non-emergencies.
I agree. But what is an emergency? Are emergencies only metaphysical events such as fires, floods, earthquakes — as DavidOdden and Grames have indicated? Is there such a thing as a personal emergency, one in which only one’s own life is in danger, or the life of someone you care about? Does having a gun pressed into your back qualify as an emergency situation — at least for you the victim? Does morality end where a gun — or any other kind of real, objective threat to one’s life — begins?
Just based upon that, if your death is forseeable, and it is a non-emergency, there may be ways of preserving your life which are not moral. For example, being unable to afford a life-saving medication to treat a potentially fatal illness does not give you the moral right to steal it instead.
One never has the right, per se, to steal somebody’s property. However, in a crisis of life or death one cannot be concerned about respecting anybody else’s rights. Assuming you are an otherwise moral person, morality will never force you to select non-existence over existence. If a morality is based on life, under extreme emergency circumstances one is justified in taking whatever actions are necessary in order to preserve it.
If you are faced with the option: either take some kind of action in a given circumstance or die, and you choose not to take the action, for all intents and purposes you have chosen to die. Call it what you will, my question is: Can morality ever require man to make this choice?
That isn’t really choosing to die, it’s just choosing to live realistically and accepting the fact that all lives eventually end in death. Choosing to live right and accepting the consequences of that (even if the consequences are death now as opposed to death in the future) isn’t at all the same as suicide.
I agree. But what is an emergency? Are emergencies only metaphysical events such as fires, floods, earthquakes — as DavidOdden and Grames have indicated? Is there such a thing as a personal emergency, one in which only one’s own life is in danger, or the life of someone you care about? Does having a gun pressed into your back qualify as an emergency situation — at least for you the victim? Does morality end where a gun — or any other kind of real, objective threat to one’s life — begins?
I think the criteria Ayn Rand used to define an emergency is when there is no moral option, therefore you (and everyone else) have to just do whatever you can. In a flood there is no initiation of force, everyone is in an equal position of vying for their own lives and so pure strength and ingenuity are going to be the determining factors in who lives and who dies - you have just as much of a right to use your mind as anyone else in this situation and if that ends up being good for you and bad for them there’s still no blame to be placed. If someone holds a gun to your head then that person is initiating force and you have every moral right to do whatever you have to to defend yourself, retaliation included. Someone being sick doesn’t count as an emergency because it’s just you in that situation and it still doesn’t give you a right to use force against someone who is completely removed from your personal tragedy and therefore can’t (morally) be forced into helping you.
One never has the right, per se, to steal somebody’s property. However, in a crisis of life or death one cannot be concerned about respecting anybody else’s rights. Assuming you are an otherwise moral person, morality will never force you to select non-existence over existence. If a morality is based on life, under extreme emergency circumstances one is justified in taking whatever actions are necessary in order to preserve it.
One of the facts of life is that it’s going to end. You can’t ignore this fact and use it as a justification for force. You aren’t choosing non-existence - you’re accepting existence as it is, death and a lot of other potentially terrible side effects included.
One never has the right, per se, to steal somebody’s property. However, in a crisis of life or death one cannot be concerned about respecting anybody else’s rights. Assuming you are an otherwise moral person, morality will never force you to select non-existence over existence. If a morality is based on life, under extreme emergency circumstances one is justified in taking whatever actions are necessary in order to preserve it.
“Life” is not morgue avoidance. That is not what is meant by life in the Objectivist ethics. Any sort of life is not necessarily preferable to death.
What you are calling emergency is not. The fact is that everyone will be in this situation at some point in their life. And those who are successful at avoiding it once will be there again. As one gets older the cost of living goes up. You run out of life, when the cost of sustaining to you overwhelms your resources. That natural effect does not give you the right to then choose to live by any means. This is not an emergency.
One of the facts of life is that it’s going to end. You can’t ignore this fact and use it as a justification for force. You aren’t choosing non-existence - you’re accepting existence as it is, death and a lot of other potentially terrible side effects included.
That everyone is going to die someday is irrelevant to the question of whether anyone must necessarily perish today. True, before too long, we’re all going to meet our maker — so what? The fact of eventual death is no moral criteron; if it were, there would be no reason for anyone to live morally under any circumstances.
It’s interesting to see so many people putting forth what amounts to a fatalist view of moral action. Reality never dictates that anyone must suffer and die; no one is obligated to “accept” a given situtation just because things happen to be that way.
I have to wonder how some of you would put your views into practice, should you ever find yourself in a crisis where your own life or the life of someone you love was on the line. Would you hesitate to use a cell phone which is not yours to call for help — on the grounds that using somebody’s minutes without permission violates property rights? Would you refuse to break a window and sieze medicine which could save my precious, irreplacable life — even though, I’m telling you now, I’d gladly repay the owner 10 times over and take whatever legal heat might follow? Just how far would you not go to save the lives of those you claim to be important to you?
Do please spell out your answers to this in as specific detail as you can. I need to know which of you I must avoid befriending!
“Life” is not morgue avoidance.
It certainly entails that!
Are you seriously suggesting that sometimes, in order to live the life proper to a human being, one must biologically be dead?
This discussion has become too bizarre for words.
I need to know which of you I must avoid befriending!
Trust me, I don’t want to be within 100 miles of you when you decide that you’re going through a personal life and death “emergency”. Friends living by principles like that are worse than enemies.
Your position is that adherence to moral principles means that we must sometimes refrain from acting to rescue the lives of those we love.
A man’s right to act according to his own judgment to gain and keep value is not absolute: it does not conflict with and infringe on another man’s right to act according to his own judgment to gain and keep value. That means that you do not have the right to force a man to sacrifice his values for you. Men’s rights are not contradictory. The assumption that there is such an absolute right implies that existence qua man (living by reason, not force) is impossible. Presumably we don’t have to debate whether that would be an absurd conclusion.
One crucial element of the lifeboat hypothetical is that a man is faced with the impossibility of value, because he will be dead. In this child-sickness scenario, life is still possible for you if you make the moral choice. Questions of whether it’s in some sense “okay” to initiate force against another in order to preserve your actual highest value (your existence) could be discussed, but here we are not talking about your highest value. As Rearden’s unpleasant mother and wife established, relatedness does not constitute being an automatic to someone, so the fact of someone being a child does not confer an automatic cancellation of morality and does not create a right to someone else’s life. At best, you might conclude that if a man values something enough, he may end up doing desparate and immoral things to keep that value, be it a child, a house, a car or a favorite photo.
Consider the absurdity that would result from concluding that a man has a right to use force to keep any value that he is threatened with the loss of. I could kill a man so that I could feed my wife and sone, if I were out of a job and threatened with starvation; I could hold up a bank to get the money to pay for medicine for my dog; I could trespass on my neighbor’s property and chop down their tree which casts a shadow on our back yard and makes it impossible to grow tomatoes.
That everyone is going to die someday is irrelevant to the question of whether anyone must necessarily perish today. True, before too long, we’re all going to meet our maker — so what? The fact of eventual death is no moral criteron; if it were, there would be no reason for anyone to live morally under any circumstances.
The fact of imminent death is no moral criterion either. Death is never a moral criterion.
It’s interesting to see so many people putting forth what amounts to a fatalist view of moral action. Reality never dictates that anyone must suffer and die; no one is obligated to “accept” a given situtation just because things happen to be that way.
Not all situations are ‘given’ in the same way and some are to be accepted because they preclude moral action. I urge you to re-read Ayn Rand’s article “The Metaphysical vs. The Man-Made.” In the hierarchy of Objectivist principles, metaphysics come before ethics and value judgements. This is why if an emergency situation is going to change what you think is ethical, it had better be a metaphysical emergency, a situation that makes the existence of man in accordance with his identity impossible and originates in nature not in other men’s deliberate actions. Even during an emergency the identity of man’s nature does not change.
For clarity I will attempt to relate this thread back to the original Rand essay “The Ethics of Emergencies”. In that essay it was concluded one ought to render nonscarificial aid to others in an emergency. Here the question is, “if I am the one in an emergency, and others do not render aid, I have the right to kill them and take what I need. I can disregard others judgements of what is nonsacrificial aid for them, even though I would expect them to honor mine.” I hope this draws out the hypocrisy clearly enough for everyone to see.
“God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
This remarkable statement is attributed to a theologian with whose ideas I disagree in every fundamental respect: Reinhold Niebuhr. But—omitting the form of a prayer, i.e., the implication that one’s mental-emotional states are a gift from God—that statement is profoundly true, as a summary and a guideline: it names the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve. The statement is beautiful in its eloquent simplicity; but the achievement of that attitude involves philosophy’s deepest metaphysical-moral issues.
The faculty of volition gives man a special status in two crucial respects: 1. unlike the metaphysically given, man’s products, whether material or intellectual, are not to be accepted uncritically—and 2. by its metaphysically given nature, a man’s volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic constituents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the entity “man.” Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.
What has to be “obeyed” is man’s metaphysically given nature—in the sense in which one “obeys” the nature of all existents; this means, in man’s case, that one must recognize the fact that his mind is not to be “commanded” in any sense, including the sense applicable to the rest of nature. Natural objects can be reshaped to serve men’s goals and are to be regarded as means to men’s ends, but man himself cannot and is not.
In regard to nature, “to accept what I cannot change” means to accept the metaphysically given; “to change what I can” means to strive to rearrange the given by acquiring knowledge—as science and technology (e.g., medicine) are doing; “to know the difference” means to know that one cannot rebel against nature and, when no action is possible, one must accept nature serenely.
In regard to man, “to accept” does not mean to agree, and “to change” does not mean to force. What one must accept is the fact that the minds of other men are not in one’s power, as one’s own mind is not in theirs; one must accept their right to make their own choices, and one must agree or disagree, accept or reject, join or oppose them, as one’s mind dictates. The only means of “changing” men is the same as the means of “changing” nature: knowledge—which, in regard to men, is to be used as a process of persuasion, when and if their minds are active; when they are not, one must leave them to the consequences of their own errors. “To know the difference” means that one must never accept man-made evils (there are no others) in silent resignation, one must never submit to them voluntarily—and even if one is imprisoned in some ghastly dictatorship’s jail, where no action is possible, serenity comes from the knowledge that one does not accept it.
One never accepts injustice but what nature does to you is not unjust or evil.
The fact of eventual death is no moral criteron; if it were, there would be no reason for anyone to live morally under any circumstances.
The fact that death is no moral criterion means we must act morally in every circumstance. Even the ones that might involve death.
The thing about living qua man is that a life earned by deliberately killing someone who is no threat to you simply because you can and want to is not better than death. Even if you want to because you want to avoid death.
It’s interesting to see so many people putting forth what amounts to a fatalist view of moral action. Reality never dictates that anyone must suffer and die; no one is obligated to “accept” a given situtation just because things happen to be that way.
A fatalist view would say that there is no point to life because it must eventually end in death. I am saying that there is so much value in life that to destroy that value (by destroying that value in someone else, by killing them when they haven’t done anything to you except do the best they can to exist) is to negate your own life.
I have to wonder how some of you would put your views into practice, should you ever find yourself in a crisis where your own life or the life of someone you love was on the line. Would you hesitate to use a cell phone which is not yours to call for help — on the grounds that using somebody’s minutes without permission violates property rights? Would you refuse to break a window and sieze medicine which could save my precious, irreplacable life — even though, I’m telling you now, I’d gladly repay the owner 10 times over and take whatever legal heat might follow? Just how far would you not go to save the lives of those you claim to be important to you?
If my cell phone were lying somewhere where someone was about to die if they didn’t use it, then I hope they wouldn’t wait for my permission before calling 911. If I didn’t want something like that to happen then I shouldn’t leave my stuff lying around. Be realistic. Using the resources at hand to deal with a situation you find yourself in is NOT the same as killing some other child so my child can live, when the only justification for it is that it is MY child.
Your life may be precious and irreplaceable to you, but from my perspective there are billions just like you. If my kid is sick and you come sneaking in through the window at night to steal his medicine so your kid can have it instead, well you’re asking to die right there basically.
Do please spell out your answers to this in as specific detail as you can. I need to know which of you I must avoid befriending!
Sure, if you hate having friends who will respect your rights and plan for emergencies …
The fact that death is no moral criterion means we must act morally in every circumstance.
This is context-dropping. There is no commandment which says: “Thou shalt act morally.”
Morality arises in the context of a human being with options struggling to achieve life. This necessarily includes biological life — if I’m dead, no values, no choices, nothing is possible to me. A morality of life will never say to you: “In order to remain moral, die — and/or permit your innocent loved ones to be killed.” Egoist ethics always provides you with the option of choosing life — your own life, or the lives of those you care about.
Be realistic.
That’s what I’m trying to do with my questions. As I mentioned earlier, deciding whether to kill somebody to save another’s life is not too likely a scenario; having to use/and or dispose of property which is not yours in an emergency is something which any of us might well encounter.
When I was a teenager, I took a driver’s ed class which was truly excellent. At one point, the instructor described some hypothetical traffic crises; one was having the brakes go out in one’s car while traveling downhill at a fair rate of speed. He asked the class to name ideas as to what one might do in such a situation.
After a few tepid responses, the instructor suggested sideswiping parked cars as a means of bringing one’s own car to a stop. This agitated several members of the group: That’s destruction of property! But you’d pay for the damage, the instructor countered. It didn’t matter. He raised the stakes: “You’re facing imminent death if you don’t do it.” They wouldn’t budge. To these young people, respecting property rights was an out-of-context absolute — a moral commandment to be followed regardless of circumstance.
I’ll never forget the part-mystified, part-amused look on our instructor’s face as he listened to these teenagers’ reproaches. He never did succeed in convincing them that banging up a few strangers’ cars is a tiny price to pay for continued existence. I feel a sad kind of kinship with him now.
When I was a teenager, I took a driver’s ed class which was truly excellent. At one point, the instructor described some hypothetical traffic crises; one was having the brakes go out in one’s car while traveling downhill at a fair rate of speed. He asked the class to name ideas as to what one might do in such a situation.
After a few tepid responses, the instructor suggested sideswiping parked cars as a means of bringing one’s own car to a stop. This agitated several members of the group: That’s destruction of property! But you’d pay for the damage, the instructor countered. It didn’t matter. He raised the stakes: “You’re facing imminent death if you don’t do it.” They wouldn’t budge. To these young people, respecting property rights was an out-of-context absolute — a moral commandment to be followed regardless of circumstance.
Damaging parked cars to protect ones own life is one thing, and it would not free you from the responsibility of compensating the owners of those cars for the damage you caused. That being said, would you advocate plowing into a crowd of pedestrians in order to bring your own car to a stop?
Kevin, under your interpretation, what would prevent someone from refusing to work–and then, when he is about to starve to death, justifying stealing his food?
Don’t confuse selfishness with parasitism. The kind of person you describe is totally immoral — not because of his choice to steal, but in the way he conducts his life.
If someone wants to claim that principles are irrelevant, that he can get along in life somehow without them, the rest of us should take him at his word and leave him to perish accordingly. If he initiates force against another person, he cannot claim justification for his actions. What — he miraculously transformed into a thinking egoist ten minutes before death by starvation? Ten seconds after his belly is fed, you can be sure he’ll be back to his non-thinking, non-productive, looting and mooching ways.
All of the examples discussed so far in this thread involve innocent victims of circumstance; people caught in severe emergency situations through no fault of their own. The person in your example is not innocent, nor is he technically experiencing an emergency: His whole life is a crisis, owing entirely to his evasions.
[W]ould you advocate plowing into a crowd of pedestrians in order to bring your own car to a stop?
I wouldn’t advocate it, because no one can prescribe specifically what a person should do in such a dreadful situation. Assuming there was no other available option (you must either hit the pedestrians, or risk being killed yourself), one couldn’t judge the actions of someone unfortunate enough to find himself in that position.
Damaging parked cars to protect ones own life is one thing, and it would not free you from the responsibility of compensating the owners of those cars for the damage you caused. That being said, would you advocate plowing into a crowd of pedestrians in order to bring your own car to a stop?
LOL 
Awesome counter-example. This is what the thread is about, not mere property damage. Restitution for property damage can be negotiated after the fact, restitution for murder is not possible. Technically this would be a type of manslaughter not murder but there would definitely by charging and judging.
This is context-dropping. There is no commandment which says: “Thou shalt act morally.”
By “must” I meant: if you’re going to act morally at all, introducing a natural death into the situation doesn’t change anything. Obviously there’s no commandment, and there doesn’t need to be.
Morality arises in the context of a human being with options struggling to achieve life. This necessarily includes biological life
Well there’s no other kind of life that I know of …
— if I’m dead, no values, no choices, nothing is possible to me. A morality of life will never say to you: “In order to remain moral, die — and/or permit your innocent loved ones to be killed.” Egoist ethics always provides you with the option of choosing life — your own life, or the lives of those you care about.
No, because reality says to you that sometimes you don’t get a choice. Morality isn’t a tool that you use to make your life better. Morality is recognizing that reality exists and you can’t just choose to ignore reality in situations you don’t like. Well - of course, you can choose to, but only by acting irrationally. Are you saying that you’re committed to acting rationally except in situations where your very highest values are at stake?
I don’t know why you think you will always have the option to extend your own life? Cause I hate to break it to you …
That’s what I’m trying to do with my questions. As I mentioned earlier, deciding whether to kill somebody to save another’s life is not too likely a scenario; having to use/and or dispose of property which is not yours in an emergency is something which any of us might well encounter.
Well in that case I think it has already been covered: You do what you have to do and make restitution to the property owners later. In the car example below, there’s a good reason why people have car insurance. That’s what it’s for. Even in that case, though, you have to act rationally - for example by keeping your brakes in good repair in the first place, by not doing any more property damage than you have to, by steering into a parked car instead of a crowd on the sidewalk, etc. If you live ethically in daily life then you’ll have lots of practice using your reasoning skills in lots of different situations and that practice will really help in an emergency.
In a situation with a sick child, if you want to act ethically in the first place (I’m beginning to wonder whether you do, considering that you seem to want to chuck morality out the window whenever something unexpected happens), you have the same responsibility* to act rationally. Have health insurance, keep your credit healthy, have friends, find a charity, mortgage your house, something.
In Atlas Shrugged, isn’t there a part where Galt or Francisco tells Dagny that because she has acted irrationally for so long, she’s only got two irrational choices left to her, but that doesn’t free her from the responsibility of choosing? So maybe the answer you’re looking for is that if you get yourself into a situation where you only have irrational options, that it’s ok to be irrational. Well I wouldn’t say it’s okay. It’s still irrational and therefore immoral and therefore still your fault if something bad happens - if you have to pay or go to jail there’s no ethical loophole to get you out of it. Is that what you mean?
*Not a responsibility because of god or authority or anything like that. A responsibility in the sense that you’re the one who will have to explain to your kid why he’s alive but probably still sick and now you’re in jail and can’t work and things are actually going to get a lot worse. That’s another reason to be ethical: because being ethical means being rational, and being rational means making the best decision for yourself and usually when you makes rational decisions you’ll be right (in the sense that you’ll make things better, not worse, at least in the long term). Even in emergencies, when you’re really emotional and want to do something drastic. Isn’t reality great?
I discern two differences between this scenario and a typical lifeboat scenario. First, only one party (you and your child) is in danger. There is no general large scale disaster or predicament making life impossible for your neighbors.
Well actually the parties in danger are your child, the person you are thinking of stealing the medicine from, and the other child that won’t get the medicine because you steal it. Would the whole world have to be in danger for it to constitue a lifeboat scenario? Even in the model “lifeboat” situation the only people in danger are you and the other person. By your critera, being in a lifeboat would not be a lifeboat scenario.
Second, although the illness is time-limited, unlike a lifeboat scenario the story is not going to be resolved after you save your child’s life. Oh no, you aren’t out on the raging main or on a trackless mountainside, this story takes place in the middle of civilization. The other child will have relatives, lets say a father who will want vengeance. Being a poetic sort he doesn’t kill you, he kills your child. Of course, you kill him. Now three people are dead and you are imprisoned. This is where blind irrationality can take you.
If you are in a lifeboat and you kill the other person in the lifeboat in order to survive, won’t that guys family find out eventually? Or the coast guard will arrest you when they rescue you? Once again, you are inventing non-essential critera for something to constitute a lifeboat scenario.
An emergency where the only means of survival is the violation of another man’s rights is a lifeboat scenario. Period.
Egoist ethics always provides you with the option of choosing life — your own life, or the lives of those you care about.
No, because reality says to you that sometimes you don’t get a choice.
Reality doesn’t talk to people: it doesn’t order anyone to bear misery and defeat merely because he happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Existence exists: at times a person might find himself in situations where there are literally no options — the boulder is rolling toward him, for example, and he just can’t leap out of the way in time — but these are not moral issues. Morality is only relevant where man faces alternatives: Should I choose X, or should I choose Y? If “X” stands for continued existence, and “Y” means lights out for you, an egoistic ethical system can never require man to choose the latter.
Morality isn’t a tool that you use to make your life better.
My morality most definitely is a tool to make my life better; it is the means by which I am able to enjoy myself and live.
What fundamental principle is your morality based on?
My morality most definitely is a tool to make my life better; it is the means by which I am able to enjoy myself and live.
Yup, at the expense of others.
“that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
You must be forgetting the 2nd half of that. Or do you want to make that “… live for mine… most of the time.”
Morality is only relevant where man faces alternatives: Should I choose X, or should I choose Y?
This is wrong in a fundamental way. Morality is a code of action designed to guide a man in reaching his fundamental goal: his existence. When his own existence is literally and metaphysically impossible, then morality is irrelevant. But you are not talking about actual cases of morality being irrelevant, where there is no choice between actions leading to his ultimate goal. You are ignoring the fact that when a spouse, child or pet dies or is injured, you do not die. You are allowing the existence of others to dictate your actions; but that is the moral code of altruism, not egoism.