| | Obviously this is a topic where emotions run high. And some of the examples are picked to exaggerate the emotional impact while sacrificing clarity on the topic. I find myself not agreeing with almost any of the positions offered, although for various reasons. I'd like to reformulate some of the positions in the hopes of offering how an outsider (myself) viewed the debate.
The essential question in the debate (which wasn't part of the original article/thread) was if you're in a life or death situation where you can only live if some innocent person dies, how does morality help guide your decision.
One position, which I believe Bill promotes and that I essentially agree with, is that morality is a tool for living. The principles, ideals, and moral guides are all tools aimed at promoting your life. Consequently, any generalizations based on "normal" contexts, like the belief you shouldn't kill innocent people, don't apply. The reason these generalizations are adopted in normal contexts is because they promote your life. They're not the foundation of morality. They're the consequences of it. It's life as the standard that justifies these moral guides in a normal context. And if they don't promote life as the standard in some other situation (emergency is an example), those moral guides are simply not justified.
There are a few arguments against this position, which I'll try to explain and then say why I find them unconvincing.
First, there's the assertion that discarding these moral principles or moral guides when they don't benefit you is a form of pragmatism. This sounds like a good argument. Pragmatism is bad right? Politicians are pragmatists, right?
The problem is that pragmatism is one half of a false-dichotomy, the other half being idealism. Pragmatism does not simply mean doing what is practical. If it did, Objectivist ethics would be pragmatic, since it is practical. Instead, pragmatism is not just a rejection of idealism. It is actually a rejection of moral principles. It's a range-of-the-moment decision making that won't bother to anticipate likely consequences of your actions because that's just theory. I wrote more here:
http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Rowlands/The_Idealism-Pragmatism_Dichotomy.shtml
The short of it is, it is a false dichotomy. Objectivist ethics shows that moral principles need not be self-destructive. They can actually be practical. You don't have to choose between ideals divorced from practice, or practicality divorced from long range thinking.
The common view that moral principles are moral rules, telling you that you must obey them regardless of whether they hurt or help you, is actually a form of idealism. It promotes a view of moral principles that demands you to be a slave to them, instead of them being a tool for your successful living. Rejecting moral guides when you're in a context where they are no longer justified is not pragmatism. It's contextualism.
Another argument says that it may indeed be necessary to kill someone in order to survive in that kind of life-boat scenario, but that you shouldn't do it because you will feel guilty.
I think Bill asked the right question. Isn't your feeling of guilt a response to your acceptance of it being immoral? Emotions are not a tool of cognition. They reflect your value judgments. In order to say that the guilt is deserved, you have to first prove that the action is immoral. The point here is that the emotion itself doesn't prove that at all. Let me give an example.
Lisa is a pacifist. She strongly feels that all life is valuable, and she wouldn't hurt a fly if she could avoid it. Now Murderer Max breaks into her house, ready to kill her and her family. She can stop him with the household gun (her husband's, which she always wanted to get rid of). But she thinks about it. She says to herself, "I couldn't live with the guilt of having killed another human being". And so they all are horribly tortured and killed. The end.
Was she right because she felt strongly about it? Or would we say that she's misplacing a generalized good will towards decent people? We could argue that defensive force was not only justified, but was a morally required. But to do that, we couldn't simply argue that WE feel that way. We'd show that if you hold your life as the standard, than the correct course of action was to protect yourself and your family.
So the emotional argument isn't really an argument at all. In particular, the idea that feeling guilty about killing the other person isn't a good argument. Just as Lisa would argue that she'd feel guilty, and she really might, we'd have to argue that she shouldn't feel guilty and she needs to get over it.
This doesn't mean that no arguments regarding emotions are worth considering. For instance, if you do have a generalized good will towards other people, you would feel bad about the other person dying. This doesn't assume that you think your action was justified or not. Even if it is justified, you wouldn't walk away from the situation happy and care free. You'd probably even feel some survivor guilt, even if you thought it was justified.
The question is, are these things reasons to let yourself die? What if the situation were different, where your participation didn't decide anything. What if the terrorist simply killed the other person. You'd still feel a loss, and probably survivor guilt. Should you commit suicide? Are these emotions good reasons to stop living? Because that's the argument, isn't it? These emotions would impede your happiness, so you should just let yourself die.
A different argument comes from the view that rights are metaphysical "things" that people have. If I have a "right", you can't morally hurt me. It's like a moral repulser beam. It emits immoraltrons (undetectable subatomic particles) around you, and anyone who gets too close gets stripped of their morality.
This view of rights upholds other people's rights as some form of intrinsic value, that you must respect or you're "immoral". Instead of not hurting them because it violates your own interests, you're not supposed to hurt them because you'll be metaphysically labeled "immoral". Instead of grounding your moral choices in your own life and happiness, you accept a set of rules you must obey or you don't get the status of being moral.
A different view of rights bases it on your own life and happiness, your own self-interest. Instead of mystical metaphysical demands that you act a particular way, we have good reasons for recognizing rights and respecting them. These moral principles promote our lives, and allow harmonious living with others. These benefits are the justification for recognizing the moral principle of rights.
When the justification no longer applies, such as these insanely unlikely scenarios being argued about, continuing to act as if they did apply becomes sacrificial. But the metaphysical view of rights never goes away, because it was never morally justified in the first place. It was simply morally asserted and demanded. No context is necessary. It can't lose a justification that it never had. And because it's not justified by a benefit to your life and happiness, it's possible that under some circumstances it will conflict with one or both. Far from being a strong point in favor of metaphysical rights, this is a critical weakness, assuming we uphold life as our standard of value.
The next position offered is the view that certain virtues or characteristics are constitutive of life. It claims that it's not life that should be our standard of value, but a certain kind of life. The good life, if you will. And what does the good life consist of? Whatever things a philosopher decides are morally good.
I disagree with this view thoroughly, and may write something more about it in time. But let me highlight a few of the major problems with it.
First, it doesn't add anything useful. With life as the standard, we already have a compelling reason for being rational and productive. These aren't some extra characteristics that are wholly unconnected to life. Life is a process of self-generated, self-sustaining action. To sustain your life, you need both rationality and productivity. If life is your goal, the target is not subsistence survival where a slight breeze will ensure your death. It's a robust life, where your actions lead to more opportunities, more security, more fulfillment, etc. But the metric is always survival. The more robust life is a life that better ensures your ability to live. That is, to continue the process of self-generated, self-sustaining action.
The second problem is that it tries to smuggle moral judgments in through the meta-ethics. If I think rationality is good, I can make a case for it by referring to life as the standard of value and show how it is a critical virtue. But by declaring it constitutive of life, you're simply assuming it is good. No argument is necessary. No proof. No way to double check. By simply claiming that morality is aimed at "the good life", which includes rationality, you get to just assume it's good.
Of course, for rationality and productivity, the two most basic virtues that encompass all of life's choices, it may not seem controversial. But what happens when they tack on a few other characteristics. How about if I say that the good life involves having frequent and pleasurable sex. Or that it includes always telling the truth. Or it includes a spiritual oneness with god!!!
Do you commit suicide if you don't have frequent enough sex? If you can't live the good life, there's no point to living, right?
The good life ends up being a combination of all of your pre-existing value judgments. It's similar to how emotions work. They are a response to your value-judgments. If you try to formulate an ethics based on your emotions, you're really basing it on whatever random beliefs you had picked up over time. The same with the good life. If you throw in all the things that you already think are good into your definition of what good is, you're just perpetuating whatever baggage you already adopted.
The final reason against this idea of throwing random values into your standard of good is that even if they are good in most cases, you're removing them from the bounds of justification. I could argue that honesty serves our lives in most cases, but when the murderer comes knocking on the door, we should all be willing to lie. I can do that because the principles of honesty are understood and justified by their benefit to our lives. But if we decide to throw honesty into the standard of value itself, there is no more hierarchy of importance. I can't picked between honesty and life because both are tied together into a single standard. If I can't have both, I don't want either! If I can't live a life of honesty, then death is preferable?!?!
The key issue here is that the various values you throw in the mix are not separate values. If they were, as in your standard of value was life and your other standard of value was honesty, then you'd basically be promoting intrinsic values. What happens when there are conflicts? Who know. Rational comparison is out the door since there's no hierarchy and no way to judge which is more important.
By mixing these intrinsic values together, you're essentially disallowing a trade-off between them. Only actions that promote these values and don't sacrifice any of the other constitutive values can be considered moral. In short, it reduces your choices. Where you might normally make tough trade-offs, here you're not allowed. And in the honesty example I just gave, you're not allowed to lie to the murderer. The only life you can choose is the honest one.
Of course, there will be some who argue that it's not this bad. That you wouldn't add honesty to the good life as some blind rule that leads you to death. That would be an irrational form of honesty. We'd only include rational honesty into the good life. But what is rational honesty? Only the honesty that happens to serve your life. And so the fix to this problem is to undo it and once again have life as the standard and honesty as a tool in support of that life. The fix is to abandon the idea of constitutive values.
How does this play out in the murder an innocent to survive debate? The constitutive position attempts to remove the possibility of killing the person by saying that the moral standard itself includes not killing innocent people. It takes a value assumed by the promoters of the theory, declares that it is part of the standard itself, and so dismisses the possibility that the standard of value could be compatible with that action. By changing the standard to include the wished for result, it begs the question.
If we analyze these positions, there are some generalizations that can be made.
First, there is the position that if life is the standard, that in some unrealistic life-boat circumstance, killing an innocent person might be the most moral act. All other moral guides are only justified when they promote your life, and so aren't contextually valid.
One category of responses tries to change the standard of value so the choice is rejected. This includes the "good life" argument, the metaphysical rights, and even the "pragmatism" charge. The good life explicitly tries to change the standard. Metaphysical rights tries to add an intrinsic value, effectively interfering with the standard. And the "pragmatism" charge claims that the moral principles are worth pursuing even if they don't promote life, which effectively converts them into intrinsic values as well.
The other category of responses tries to work within the context of life as the standard. Instead of arguing with the method, it argues with the conclusion by bring up factors. The example of this was the argument that the guilt would make your life undesirable. I find this argument those most compelling because it actually attempts to show that it's not in your interest, instead of simply redefining what your interest is. But as I mentioned, I also disagree with this. One version claims that you'll feel guilty about the decision, which assumes you believe that the choice is immoral. And the second, better version claims you'll be sad and feel survivor guilt which is probably true, but doesn't seem to outweigh the whole dying alternative.
As far as the rapist example goes, it seems like it's constructed to promote emotions and not constructive debate. Even in the more vanilla cases of these life or death scenarios, there seems to be little agreement on the standards of evaluating the different arguments. Sometimes a more emotional example can produce better results, but I don't think this is one of those cases. The previous act of rape overwhelms the scenario. Instead of an argument about what are his choices and which choice is most compatible with life as the standard, other considerations have become more important.
Teresa asked why we should even be concerned with his interests. A few people asked whether he really values his life that much. But I believe those are irrelevant. Objectivist ethics shouldn't produce different suggestions for people based on whether they really value their lives. It should be a statement of fact. This is the option that best promotes his life. He may not choose it. He may sabotage it. He may not deserve it. But we should be able to take life as the standard and rationally determine which action best approaches that standard.
|
|
