I understand your goal and argument better. I think the most powerful counter-philosophy is a religious one, where a man’s ultimate goal is serving Allah in whatever form is required.
So long as a person has values, the person needs to be alive, as you just said. So long as they have some ultimate goal that does not involve their immediate destruction, they need a code of values to guide their choices and actions – this is what I would call a code of morality: A code of values to guide someone’s actions and choices to meet some end or attain some ultimate value.
If a person’s ultimate value is to glorify Allah, and the facts demand a course of action that will soon result in his death, then he will require a moral code that instructs him how to kill himself. In that transitional period, he will be alive but seeking non-existence. Until he is able to get himself into the bus with the explosives, his intermediate goal is to continue existing. So I agree with the basic logical framework of your argument – if you have a moral code at all (“a set of principles that guide your choices”), making a choice implies existing, which means being alive. Then even if living is not your ultimate end, it is a necessary one. Of course this cashes out in terms of rather different sets of actual choices, since the suicide bomber has very short-range prospects for existence and will eventually drop the temporary goal of existence in favor of non-existence.
So long as we are all humans, there are certain requirements for our survival given our nature, no matter what we individually believe.
Yeah, but concretely what are they? Normal people would not choose to get infected with Ebola since that would be inconsistent with long-term survival. A terrorist could, though, since they only need to exist long enough to spread the disease.
To reiterate: Isn’t it true that everybody who is alive has some ultimate value?
No, actually there is where your argument is probably the weakest. Ultra-apathetics / nihilists would not have any ultimate value – they would simply neither want to live or die. Buddhism is based on the idea of just not giving a damn. Although in fact I think they have a distinction between “should” and “should not”, but still, it can’t just be taken for granted that all men have an ultimate goal. There is this question whether the Greek philosopher Pyrrho was a complete and utter nihilist: whether or not there are any utter nihilists, I think some consideration of them would be called for.