Re: Ethics in Emergencies

By coincidence, I think, Diana has made a post about saving people in emergencies.  In it, she discusses some of the responses that Leonard Peikoff has given with regard to questions about emergencies. The situation about calling the police to help someone is a little different, but there is some additional and more succinct reasoning presented.

You can't value your life and decide to live with others of your species and say, "They're nothing to me, I don't care if they live or die." That's self-contradiction.

In the scenario described, the person calling for help really doesn't lose anything except perhaps cell phone minutes.

Diana's own comments on these emergency scenarios are also interesting:

Rather, as can be seen from Dr. Peikoff's remarks, the problem with "lifeboat ethics" is that the proposed scenarios are concocted so as to produce irresolvable conflicts between people. By various artificial constraints, they make life in society impossible. They preclude any rational solutions to the problem at hand. Is it then any wonder that the results are unseemly? Of course not.

This is akin to a point I am going to make in the second part of my own post on this matter.

The general premise behind Objectivist ethics does not change -- that one must make decisions that support life.  The problem is that the requirements for life are radically different than they are in every day life.  People try to come up with these crazy shipwreck scenarios to get you to choose between dying and stealing or something.  Obviously, just because you would steal when it's life-or-death does not mean you would steal when you left your purse in the car.

These crazy situations simply illustrate that context is relevant to ethics.  Unlike Kant, no rational person would assert that some particular action is categorically wrong in every situation.  (I am of the opinion that Kant must have been an inveterate liar because of how hung up he was on saying that lying is always wrong.)

Posted by: Flibbertigibbet at 08:30 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Category: Importance of Ideas
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