Robert D:
Nathan,
I have no control over your emotional response to my posts. I meant you no offense.
Presumably you have some control over yours, though.
The reason I asked if your were an Objectivist was because the original question asks what the Objectivist response to this should be. That does not mean that if you are not an Objectivist you can not comment, but as a non-O you will not be very helpful in framing an Objectivist response.
I reject your premise.
It implies that there's a monochromatic, lock-step orthodoxy, "an" Objectivist response. As nearly as I can tell, the views of Objectivists run the gamut, just as one would expect among a group of genuine individualists commenting on a complex moral issue.
I therefore suspect that I'm as qualified to "frame an Objectivist response" as you are.
Objectivists believe that one should help strangers in an emergency situation, but he should so only if it does not endanger his own life which is his highest value. Helping others is not a moral duty. Quoting Rand, “…only a lack of self-esteem could permit one to value one’s life not higher than that of any random stranger.” Insofar as the life of a single random stranger is concerned, in a single exchange of my life for another's, I'm inclined to agree. I usually would not. (Though there might be exceptions even here.)
But we're not talking about a single stranger's life.
So, how many strangers would you tell to go to hell to save your own skin? 10? 100? 1000? 1,000,000? A billion? Will you give us a number?
As large a number as you would care to mention.
That says a great deal. You just said that you would NOT exchange your life for the lives of ONE BILLION PEOPLE.
That should be a clue to reasonable people that there is something incredibly wrong with those premises and/or reasoning.
When you believe that to value another means your are willing to sacrifice yourself for his benefit, you are accepting the altruist premise that the selfless pursuit of the welfare of others is a virtue. That is incorrect.
Sacrifice is the expenditure of a higher value for a lower value.
Altrusim is, technically, the belief that we have a moral obligation to sacrifice ourselves. It is also defined as "unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others."
I accept neither.
There is nothing selfless about what I'm advocating, since compassion for and valuing of the lives of others IS an expression of our human nature, our self, not a repudiation of it. In general, human nature moves us to value the lives of others as well as our own. To deny this is to repudiate an objective fact of psychological reality.
I may not trade my life for a single stranger's. But I'd sure as hell trade it for the lives of a billion. Where I draw the line is somewhere between those two extremes. That you are willing to sell your life, but only dearly, does not change the fact that you are willing to sell it.
You finally have the terminology right.
I am SELLING my life, exchanging one value for another. It's not a sacrifice, and it's not motivated by a sense of moral obligation.
My willingness to give my life for a billion people is motivated by the fact that I would VALUE the lives of a billion people more highly than my own. Those are my values, and that is my CHOICE.
Are they "proper" values? See below.
Sacrifice? Hell, no. I'd consider it life well-spent. It's the price I would pay for something I value highly, the lives of human individuals, even though I may not know them. How can you value the life of someone you do not know? There is no basis upon which to establish value.
The implication here is that we would value the lives of other human beings, those not personally known to us, no more than we would value a rock or a broken screwdriver.
Do you really mean to say that? That unknown human individuals are of ZERO value to you?
If other human beings have zero value, on what basis do we construct the principle that others should not be objects of sacrifice to US?
If other humans have zero value as persons, then they are fitting subjects for enslavement, for use as we and those we do value see fit, for consumption and disposal. It does not take much thought to see the consequences of that premise, as any brutal slave-pen dictatorship in history will serve as the model. To deny that others are valueless, disposable objects fit only to serve our ends, however, is to acknowledge that all humans have intrinsic value, and from that we may extend to them fundamental rights arising from this value. Once we acknowledge that others, even those unknown to us, are not the equivalent of a mere rock in our hierarchy of values, then we're forced to conclude that, at some point, the preponderance of their combined value to us might move us to exchange our single life for many of theirs. No sacrifice. No altruistic sense of selfless moral obligation. Choice. A trading of a precious though lesser value for a greater value. Rand herself acknowledged this principle when it came to others. We may exchange our life for the life of another whom we dearly love. If we're psychologically healthy we would probably not value a single stranger more highly than our own life, but if we assign ANY value to the lives of others - and we should, if we value our self-interests - then at some point their combined value to us may well induce us to protect them with our lives. I see no way to deny this conclusion without repudiating the entire basis for the rights of the individual. Nathan Hawking .
(Edited by Nathan Hawking on 6/10, 3:54pm)
| 
