RoR: Forum

I'll have another piece of this!

But I thought a duty ethic was what we Objectivists were not about.

You need to make your mind up about weather choosing life is an ethical question or not. By your own lights this is a matter anterior to ethical discourse so there is no duty ethic or virtue ethic or anything ethic.

That’s my whole point! If he’s beyond debate, how can it be argued that he’s a monster on the lowest rung of hell? The most one can say is that he’s reverted to the pre-moral state and opted not to live.

Ah well, that's easy. An ethical system predicated on life is bound to judge death-affirmation as the last canto of the inferno.
If one is devoted to life as the ultimate categorical imperative then self-termination is the ultimate malfunction to end all malfunctions. Nothing could be worse.
There are no amoral agents, only immoral ones.

Why do I choose life? Why the hell not? It’s rapturously beautiful, irresistible, fascinating and challenging; it beats the hell out of being dead; and opting out would be damned messy

See, gut-feeling answers like that are intellectually no better than answers like the Nike logo. It's just honey-talk.

Peikoff’s answer to the question, “Why choose life?” reads to me like, “Because it’s there, so you must.” Mine would be, “There’s no intrinsic ‘why,’ short of a powerful biological urge

No reason eh? Do or die?
But surely there is a reason for everything, if we can but find it!

I do not believe that the validity nor the value of life, the universe and everything is as arbitrary as a coin toss; Live if you whim, die if you whim!? For mine, the process of your life is one's own to determine but the fact of it is not. You are alive, therefore you must live your life out and never give in- never self-terminate. I don't mean you need to preserve the continuum of your physiological life-span, I mean that you have a duty to be true to yourself. Be what you are. In a nutshell- it's okay to die, but you must 'die with your boots on.'

[Edit

she’s thundering from Valhalla to New Zealand right now to flay me alive

As a matter of legend, I don't think anybody gets into Valhalla who doesn't go down swinging. See you all there.]

(Edited by Rick Giles on 10/10, 6:11am)

Post 1

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 8:29am

To be sure, I myself regularly rail against certain epistemologies, politics and esthetics as anti-life. That’s because their advocates and practitioners have chosen to live and then promoted things contrary to that choice

Annoying, isn't it?

Ever do anything like that yourself? That's when it really gets annoying.

It was only a matter of time before they started in on Oregon...

As far as the "duty" thing, it's not enough for an army to march on. Also, I find that whenver someone tells me that, it involves me working on someone else's project. Awe, yes, even a little somber, when contemplating something so vast. But "duty"? That sounds amazingly like something you'd get laid on you in, uh...church.

rde
But not my church. Fuck no.

(Edited by Rich Engle on 10/10, 9:32am)

Post 2

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 9:13am

it beats the hell out of being dead

Perhaps. "Who would fardels bear"?

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Post 3

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 10:02am

An ethical system predicated on life is bound to judge death-affirmation as the last canto of the inferno.
If one is devoted to life as the ultimate categorical imperative then self-termination is the ultimate malfunction to end all malfunctions. Nothing could be worse.

That may be Peikoff's gut reaction, but Lindsay's point is that Peikoff's argument defending that reaction doesn't work. Sure, we can understand his reaction, but is it consistent with Objectivism? Lindsay says no.

The point is that Objectivism holds value as an if-then operation: If you value your life, then you do thus-and-such. But, if we say that life is the standard of value, then there is no standard for valuing life, as that would make the argument circular. Even to say "I value life" would be an odd version of concept-stealing. This, I think, is a chink in the idea of life as the standard of values. Perhaps values and their consequences are the standard for evaluating a life.

Why do I choose life? Why the hell not? It’s rapturously beautiful, irresistible, fascinating and challenging; it beats the hell out of being dead; and opting out would be damned messy

>See, gut-feeling answers like that are intellectually no better than answers like the Nike logo. It's just honey-talk.

Eventually, ideas have to point to experience outside of themselves. Some questions inherently have gut-level, experiential answers. (What's your favorite ice cream flavor? Who's the love of your life?) Otherwise words and ideas would be floating abstractions, ideas referring to other ideas ad nauseam. We can still reason about those experiential reactions as we do any other aspect of reality, but we can't dismiss them as outside the realm of the intellect without making the intellect irrelevant to our experience.

Post 4

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 12:25pm

Lindsay Perigo wrote: "But were they, or any decent person for that matter, suddenly, without explanation or fanfare, to top themselves, I would have nothing to say about the morality of that action, since, by it, they would have removed themselves from morality’s purview. Their life, their death, their prerogative."

Couldn't this be stretched to argue that when suicide-bombers blow themselves up, they also would have removed themselves from morality's purview? If so, once they are beyond morality, how can the consequences of their act be judged as evil?

Sanjay

Post 5

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 12:42pm

Being very close to someone who scared the living daylights out of me and others with a failed suicide attempt a few years ago, this article does not sit well with me. Suicidal depression is arguably a medical condition aggravated by bad thinking. The person in question is better now and wants to live but might not have made it without some caring people to intervene.

I will need to cogitate on this article's message for a while.

Post 6

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 1:20pm

To not value life is flat out *immoral* (as opposed to morally optional).

Forms of not valuing life would include the following spectrum of choices:

i) Choosing death outright (absent some horrible conditions which make it unbearable). ii) "Sliding through" and never addressing it--not fully choosing or committing yourself to either the path of life or to literal suicide. iii) Not actively furthering your life or making it as fulfilling or rich or happy as it could be.

The formulation and technical semantics of why not "choosing life" is immoral is tricky. (And it is secondary and does not interest me particularly at the moment, because I am not writing a technical book on the logical structure of Objectivism).

But here are some basic keys, some fundamentals toward an answer:

1. To -not- value and pursue and enhance life contradicts your nature and is immoral because it undercuts all other ethical principles at their root. Choosing life might be called "meta-moral" in the sense that it is an axiom of ethics in the same way that volition is axiomatic. It is implied and required in all reasoning and decisions in the normative realm.

2. If someone asks me what is wrong with, how can you criticize the choices of someone who lives his life in a way that does not bring success and happiness and fulfillment and who does not practice the virtues and habits that lead to it, I would (if I were giving a -full- answer) go a step beyond the usual response of Objectivists that he is contradicting the choice he made to live.

[He may not have. And many people to varying degrees actually do not *fully* make the choice to live on a human level. In fact this may be the most common departure from morality! ]

So I would say this in response:

"He is not acting morally on *two* levels, either one of which would be a moral failing.

"First, he is acting contrary to his nature, to all the capacities and desires and aspirations and potentialities of his wonderful reasoning mind and spirit and knowledge which evolution and his development over the course of his life have given him. If he has not chosen on a basic level to try to live (in the human sense), to be a successful creature, he is immoral on this ground.

"Second, to the extent he has realized consciously the first point and chosen to be a successful creature, he is contradicting that choice if he is not doing what is necessary, not creating and practicing the virtues and life choices to implement the fundamental choice.

"The -degree- of one's morality is the degree to which one has chosen life, chosen life on the human level, and works to fully implement that choice."

--In other words, there are no tone but two levels of ethical shortcoming possible regarding (every?) action - immorality of *choice* and immorality of *execution*.--

3. If you ask "why" of an axiom and demand that one prove it, you are likely to be involved in the stolen concept fallacy. For example: "Why choose life?" The question asks that one give a moral justification from -outside- of morality. [See: 'stolen concept fallacy'.]

4. Consider another example: If you believe that it is morally and rationally optional whether or not to value life, then why can't one worship death and seek the death of all living things? Why wouldn't it moral for someone to be so consumed by hatred for himself and all life and so desirous of returning everyone to nothingness that he chose to construct a lethal virus with no cure and exterminate himself and the human race? And then one could not hear a peep of condemnation of him out of Objectivists on moral grounds? After all, the choice to live is morally optional, right?

If you see the contradictions in the above paragraph, you can see why the choice to live is *not* morally optional.

Philip Coates

PS, The conundrums and endless posts people get themselves into on the "why value life?" issue are normally due to philosophical imprecision. They often (always?) involve semantics ...or long chains of floating abstractions...which make it -sound- as if there is a contradiction. For example, on the life is the 'standard' issue, confusions over the multiple meanings of the word 'standard'.

(This post seems to answer the main questions, I currently believe. And a long series of further posts will probably merely tend to progressively dilute it or confuse it.)

PPS, I agree with Peikoff's "monster" comment (for the extreme non-life chooser). There are many cases where LP judges too harshly or too sweepingly.

But (again barring metaphysical emergencies, death of a loved one, etc.) this is not one of them.
(Edited by Philip Coates
on 10/10, 3:11pm)

Post 7

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 1:34pm

To not value life is flat out *immoral* (as opposed to morally optional).

Morals are man-made. Life is not. Life is there whether you take it or leave it.

That's where all the "valuing" really starts falling apart; it allows nothing for times where a person gets into some kind of a situation. You can say it is "immoral" and you might as well scream into the wind, if you are talking about someone that has been pushed into the wall.

Morality. Like that always is the savior. Maybe it is. What I find is that the people that often talk greatly of it have been in very few serious situations that give them anything close to the authority they seem to speak with.

Post 8

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 1:46pm

The way you spoke of 'morality' Rich makes it seem you be considering it as a relativeness

Post 9

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 1:49pm

Luke - I fear you may have missed the point of the article. I am genuinely pleased your friend has recovered, but his plight is not relevant to the theme of my article. The question is, does he—& you & I & every human being, depressed or cheerful—have a duty to live in the way that I take Peikoff to be arguing, such that if he chooses not to we are justified in labelling him a monster on the lowest rung of hell? If so, how do this "duty" & this condemnation square with the view that the choice to live is pre-moral? In my view, saying that we don't have a duty to live in no way undercuts the need for reality-based morality once the choice to live has been made. Au contraire. But one is not obligated to make that choice.

I nearly added a PS to my article listing some of the counter-arguments that occurred to me as I wrote it. But they all question-begged.

Sanjay—with your suicide bombers there is the little matter of the murders they commit in the process.

Linz

Post 10

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 2:15pm

This might be, if not the only time I have ever fully agreed with Linz (owner by fate of the same initials that..anyway), the most significant one, at least to me. Whatever Linz thinks is on his own, which seems to be a problem around here from time to time. I guess I'm just redigesting my latest round of the "there must be one objective morality" thing; it's like being tube-fed fairly decent chinese food, but over hit with MSG.

Duty.

I'll say it again: that always means a hot, sick wind is headed in my direction. It makes me check how many clips I have, if my doors are secure, if my pants, gun, and shoes are next to my bed.

"Duty" is a concept that is internally-bred. Duh. The fucking problem is when people who get that are so empowered with it decide that it needs to go into wide distribution mode. Fuck them, and their mothers.

I try to teach people out of it, if confronted directly. But that is not its nature- it is always much more fully developed when it calls on me.

rde

Post 11

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 2:39pm

I think any sane person should live his life as he planned it for himself.

Post 12

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 2:55pm

This very topic will be hashed out in JARS's next issue, between Rasmussen, Mack, Machan and some others. You may wish to keep on eye out for that issue if the matter is of interest. I defend the original view Rand lays out, not what I now hear is Peikoff's (which looks very much like that of Rasmussen and Den Uyl).
I think that Peikoff is probably best understood as saying that one ought to live, one ought to make that choice, which was Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue, as distinct from the position that one has a duty to do so. A duty is a moral or ethical responsibility one usually has to others or God or a contractual partner, whereas the responsibility to be, say, diligent or prudent or moderate or temperate or even honest is one that is binding on one independently of any connection with other people. So the Peikoff/Rasmussen/Den Uyl position would likely be that we all ought to choose life rather than non-life or death, although sometimes people may put this point in terms of a duty, albeit mistakenly (unless they do mean an obligation to live that we have to other people or God or something). Yet, even duties need not involve enforceability. I can have a duty to wish some friend a happy birthday without it being the case that this may be enforced. Still, duties do take one a step closer to enforceable obligations.

(Edited by Machan on 10/10, 2:55pm)

(Edited by Machan on 10/10, 3:05pm)

(Edited by Machan on 10/10, 3:07pm)

Post 13

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 3:04pm

Linz wrote: "
with your suicide bombers there is the little matter of the murders they commit in the process.
"

I may not have conveyed what I meant: when they choose to be beyond morality by not valuing their own life, there is no value in others' lives as well. Therefore, for them, murder is not immoral. So if you accept the premise that they are beyond morality, you also have to accept that they have no reference to value anyone's life and hence murder cannot be classified as either moral or immoral. On the other hand, if you apply *your value system* to judge their actions, which implicitly assumes that you have chosen life, you are merely asserting that it is the moral system, contradicting the main thesis of your article.

Sanjay

Post 14

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 3:09pm

Linz: Ah, OK. Well, my emotions got mixed into the whole message which is why I said I needed to cogitate on it. I would label an otherwise healthy human being who chose to end his life a tragedy rather than a monster. I don't know any other way to look at it. I certainly would not help such a person to achieve it. Wasting a life that way is just not my gig. I just have no comprehension for wanting to do it.

Regarding suicidal depression, I have heard it described to me "from the horse's mouth" as follows:

Imagine being cast into a deep, dry well with smooth walls. You land at the bottom, alive and otherwise uninjured, but with no means of escape. You have no food, no water, no ladders, no ropes, no way of communicating your need to escape to the outside world, not even jagged rocks along the walls of the well you could climb for some hope of reaching the surface. Your situation looks utterly hopeless. This is how I felt when I tried to take my life.

Now, the thing is, as someone who had to help to clean up the ensuing mess, I can fully understand Peikoff's rage at such an action. All I could think was, "God damn it! This is fucking STUPID!" Dealing with a person like this can easily fall outside the bounds of reason. By this, I mean that a person in a suicidal state of mind frequently cannot accept any good reason to live, any worthwhile value to pursue, no matter to how many you might point. It can get exasperating, especially when such a person asks you during recovery, "Why didn't you let me die?"

As I said, I need to cogitate on your message to draw my own conclusions. Dealing with a suicidally depressed person offers challenges that stretch the context in which one can apply Objectivist standards of conduct -- especially moral judgment. Since Peikoff argues that we should judge such a person a monster and you argue against that position, I need to decide where I stand. Suffice it to say that the suicide attempt, now four years past, has put an irreparable dent in my relationship with the person in question.

Post 15

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 3:24pm

>"..duty..." [Linz, Rich]

As Tibor Machan points out, you can't use this word as a synonym for the argument that choosing not to live or live fully is immoral.

Intellectual precision is necessary in this debate, and this is just an emotive and imprecise word here.

> a suicidally depressed person ... Peikoff argues that we should judge such a person a monster [Luke]

It's not the type of person he was talking about. Remember the exact quote: "A man who would throw away his life without cause, who would reject the universe on principle..." As you said yourself, "Suicidal depression is arguably a medical condition aggravated by bad thinking. The person in question is better now and wants to live but might not have made it without some caring people to intervene."

Phil

PS, Linz, Tibor M. et al, I hope you will address the quite detailed case and the variety of points I made in my post[#6].

It doesn't have to be published in JARS to be worth dealing with.
(Edited by Philip Coates
on 10/10, 4:36pm)

Post 16

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 5:03pm

Luke - who is wasting the life, and who is to define it as waste? Life, per se, simply is - the value as such comes from what one chooses to make of that life, and if so decides not to make more of it, how is that as such a waste? And the value comes from the one with the life, not from others...

Post 17

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 5:17pm

Robert, that's one of the most sensical things I've heard on the topic, though I think the waste of it comes in with the idea that this is the only life we get, no starting over. But the idea that life simply is, and the value comes from what is made of it, is more realistic than the "all life is precious" argument."
(Edited by Joe Maurone
on 10/10, 5:19pm)

Post 18

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 5:44pm

Robert, I basically agree with your point. But with those we love, their failure to find an ongoing motivation to live due to psychological problems can break one's heart.

Post 19

Monday, October 10, 2005 - 6:46pm