Proposition:
When all other ethical standards pass away, life remains; life and that which fosters life in quality and quantity is the one undeniable absolute of ethics. All that which is antithetical to life and the fostering of life in quality and quantity is unethical.
Rebuttal:
The valuing of life, as with the valuing of anything else, is a subjective assertion of will. It is in no sense absolute, and there is no logical reason why we have to value life.
As it concerns humanity, which is the concern of ethics and our concern here, life itself is not relative in its value; the value of life lies in life itself, in living, as well as the quality and quantity of life. The balance point is to be found between quality and quantity. The goal is to create the greatest quality of life possible without doing avoidable violence to the quantity of life (sacrificing the wellness of the many for the few), and the greatest quantity of life possible without doing avoidable violence to the quality of life (the sacrifice of the wellness of all so that the number of all may increase). The more ethical choices are those that balance quality and quantity on the whole.
Giving of ones abundance to fill the lack of another is an example of this balance. Giving if one is lacking, even to the point of ones own poverty, to fill a portion of another’s lack would be an example of imbalance. One ought not impoverish oneself to ease another’s poverty, unless doing so would somehow give greater increase in quality or quantity of life beyond the impoverished (e.g. a single one impoverishing oneself to ease the poverty of more than one). As you can see, the calculation of which position is more ethical in a given situation is complex, but I believe, not without merit. Difficulty is not an argument against ethical conduct.
As to what logical reason there is to value life I would submit that as conscious, rational human beings, the perpetuation of life is an implicit part of existence. To argue otherwise one would need to be ill or pursuing a provocative line of thought for provocations sake.
Accepting everything as it has so far been laid out, it still leaves the problem of defining life. Does that included animals? if so, to what level? Fish? Coral? Bacteria? Evoloving clays? And if so, how do we weigh the value of one form of life over another?
So YOU say. But that is not a factual statement. It isn’t that the value of life is “relative,” it’s that it’s not a fact at all: it’s an assertion of will, your will. Even if I agree with you (and in truth I have some reservations, depending on specifics), it remains an assertion of will.
Which means we then must drop back, and ask why value existence. In the end, all moral statements come down to an assertion of will.
For our purposes here I am thinking primarily in terms of human life, though all life, plant, animal, and otherwise that fosters or enriches life would be directly linked to that and so brought under the umbrella of our concerns.
I suppose my baseline is the assumed wish of the living to live and to perpetuate life, which I would argue is the natural state of most of not all living being, let alone human beings.
Why value existence? I suppose for the same reason I cite that life ought to be valued. One (at least one that is healthy and operating naturally) does not spend life attempting to die, but attempting to, at minimum, perpetuate life.
Several things to point out here.
The assumed “wish” – a subjective value judgment that you assume all living beings will make. Even if you are right, it is still a subjective value judgment.
Existence, or life, “ought” to be valued – a subjective value judgement on your part.
I’m not at this point arguing against the idea of an affirmation-of-life concept of morality. As I said, I do have reservations about that, but haven’t voiced them so far. All I’m doing at the moment is pointing out that there is no getting away from the nature of ALL moral statements as assertions of will. No moral statement can EVER be a statement of fact, because statements of fact never include concepts like “should,” “ought,” “good,” “evil,” “better,” “worse,” and so on. The goodness or badness of an action doesn’t reside in the action, but in the interaction between the action and the person making the judgment.
There is no getting away from this. An absolute moral system is intrinsically impossible.
By your rational, the discussion of ethics is pointless. What then is the point of participating in a discussion of ethics?
Life is not relative, it is absolute; either a thing lives or it does not.
All living things operating naturally and existing in a healthy state actively pursue the perpetuation of life.
To live is to have life, to be in the state of being alive rather than the state of being dead.
For life to be, conditions must be met to foster and perpetuate living.
Living creatures pursue these conditions by nature rather than by wish, provided they are healthy and able.
To not meet these conditions, either intentionally or accidentally, results in the end of life.
To say that the value of life itself is subjective is somewhat gamey and disingenuous. One need only use ones own life as the measure to disprove such a notion. Only the decadent place no value on at least his or her own life.
It is not pointless. Just because moral statements are assertions of will not statements of fact, and not absolute, doesn’t mean you can’t change someone’s mind about what they believe is right or wrong. It’s just that you have to think, not in terms of proving moral statements the way you would prove something in science or mathematics, but in terms of persuading that your own position follows from core values that the other person would agree on. If in the end the other person DOESN’T agree on them, then and only then does it become pointless.
I think the idea of a life-based moral system is worthy of discussion. But let’s not pursue the wild goose of an “absolute” system of morality. No such thing can exist.
Fine, then for purposes of this discussion, consider me decadent.
You still don’t have an “absolute” moral standard.
I don’t mean to be discourteous in my presentation. I can be somewhat heavy handed sometimes. If ethics is a matter of persuasion, then how can one argue that eithics really matter apart from securing ones own self interests? Doesnt the value placed on ones life indicate that life has value? Imagine running across someone who says that life has no value and sticking a gun in their mouth. If they were to protest their death would that not indicate that they do value life, that life itself has value? To my mind, the selfish nature of their value judgement (“only my life has value”) wouldnt negate the judgement itself(“life has value”).
Don’t worry, I’m not offended. Remember, I labeled myself as “decadent,” you didn’t label me that way. And I did so only for the sake of argument. For one thing, by the definition you were using, I’m not decadent; I DO place a value on my own life. But still, saying that only a decadent person wouldn’t share that value doesn’t mean that the value itself has any factual content.
One can’t. If one is dealing with a truly amoral person, an entirely selfish person with no conscience who will never agree with any value judgment that requires him to compromise with other people’s interests, there is nothing you can say except to threaten force: behave yourself or I’ll have you arrested, or shoot you, or whatever. There are people like that, but luckily they are in the minority, and it’s considered a mental disorder.
With people who aren’t truly amoral, it is possible to discuss things until one reaches the point where core values diverge.
What is “value”? Can there be “value” in something independent of a person to value it?
If I value life, then life “has” value, but only because I gave it value.
But you are generalizing from a particular life to life as a whole, and the selfish person you’re talking about wouldn’t be willing to do that. You have to be talking to people who aren’t totally selfish and amoral, or you’ll be speaking a language that won’t be understood.
As for the idea of valuing life being a basis for morality – I guess maybe it’s time to voice my reservations about the idea.
Life includes and implies death. Not only does every living thing more complex than a one-celled organism have to die, but every living thing also has to kill, right up until it does die. If it’s a photosynthetic organism, it kills by denying space, water, and sunlight to competing plants, forcing them to die. If it’s an animal, then it has to eat, and in eating it kills either plants or other animals or both.
So when you speak of valuing life, you cannot mean valuing each individual living thing, because (for example) in valuing the tiger you condemn the tiger’s prey to being killed and eaten. If you mean valuing life in general, as in the entire biosphere, I can certainly see that as a value I would agree with, but not as an entire basis for morality. I’m a very committed environmentalist, but environmentalism gives us no guidance in how to treat each other within a civilized context, only in how to relate ourselves to the larger world. And how we treat each other is also important, in my judgment.
In the end, I believe trying to reduce morality to a single principle is probably a mistake. Trying to rationalize morality, so that we don’t have to make subjective judgments any more but can reason deductively from known principles with absolute assurance, is definitely a mistake, because life confronts us with choices that don’t fit the program and we end up doing things that anyone not bound to that rationalist paradigm would judge to be abominable.
Making moral judgments – asserting our will in this way – is something almost every human being instinctively does. We do it by knowing in our hearts or our guts what feels right and what feels wrong, and reasoning from that beginning according to the known facts. That’s our responsibility, and there’s no way that I know of to shirk it, no substitute for that subjective valuation, that assertion of will, at the core of all the reasoning.
The flourishing of the species theory…generally yes.
V
There is no ethic that says we must value life. Rather, we simply DO value life as a result of our survival instinct - a product of natural selection.
Ethics then, is that system of behavioral expectations and norms we encourage between one another to better enhance our mutual ability to survive. Ethics is the process we use to further life, because we happen to value it.
Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that natural selection (however you define it) is a product of our survival instinct. After all, one struggles to live, one does not live to struggle. Isn’t the value of life then implicit and beyond ethical debate?
and herein lies the rub: we don’t value “life”- even vegetarians must kill to eat - we value our lives. the ultimate in selfishness…
-Imp
The value of life IS beyond ethical debate because it is a simple fact that we DO value life - just as their is no point to debating whether or not we SHOULD breath oxygen. But in no way is natural selection a product of our survival instinct - rather, the reverse. Here’s why…
When you think about a biological organism, it has a certain form and function. That form and function could be anything. It could be a system that continuously seeks out greater heat without any other concern - light a fire and they all come running and jump in, cooking themselves. It could feel ‘pain’ whenever it was wet, or become sickened at the sight of red - anything is possible when constructing a biological machine on the chemical level.
The reason the life forms we see around us have such a strong inclination to do things that help their survival, is because - after billions of generations and years - the only things LEFT are those with the strongest behaviors toward survival.
To simplify the concept, if you had three types of organisms: one that would seek out death-inducing events, one that would seek out life-saving events, and one that didn’t care either way, which group do you think there would be more of after 5 generations? Our instincts are genetic and are passed down, and that includes fight ot flight responses, etc.
All of the organisms that had death-seeking behavioral instincts dies out extremely early - probably in the primordial soup and with continuous filtering of such behaviors in every generation since. We are simply what’s left over after everything else died off easier - that’s natural selection. A simple result of the logic of our situation as replicating systems in this universe.
“Survival of the fittest” explains a process of speciation by natural selection, it does not account for the individual organism’s subjectivity.
Life ISN’T a universal value. What matters to the organism is not this abstract concept – what does matter are the phenomenal achievements it pursues, defending the children, racing from a predator, seeking nutrition, avoiding pain. Some of these activites may serve life, but not all. Life is just a byproduct of what does matter.
I would agree with that Alogomach. I was saying ‘life’ as a shorthand and what I really meant was ‘instincts which tend to result in life surviving, through no necessary knowledge or consciousness of that effect on the part of the organism’.
In fact, I often defend eating meat to a vegetarian by pointing out that chickens, for example, do not “want to live”. For that, they would have to have some conception of what life is, what death is, and the future. They would have to have a conscious preference to go on experiencing life in the future. However, all they really have are immediate fears and responses to certain stimuli, which exist simply because their distant cousins who didn’t have those impulsive responses died off.
However, something happens with intelligent beings such as ourselves that these innate instinctive impulses seem to worm their way into our higher thinking and our motivations. It’s not like there is this completely separate intellectual entity residing in the upper brain that is totally isolated from that ‘lizard brain’ below. While all human beings are unique and have choices that can override instinctive impulses with enough effort or extenuating circumstances, human beings in general tend to care about living and this seems to be a simple fact of being inspired by our most basic instincts.
Therefore, no argument is needed to support the notion of valuing life. Rather, all ethical arguments ultimately boil down to ‘why they do or do not support life’ and the goal itself of supporting life is taken as a given.
The survival of species is not logical enough for you?