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Altruism and Self-sacrifice
Robert B. Talisse
Steven Cahn’s Altruism Puzzle asks whether morality could require otherregarding action that is self-sacrificing to the ultimate degree. My answer is yes;
we could be morally required to end our own lives for the sake of others. Yet,
perhaps surprisingly, I also hold that in the case identified by Cahn, one is not
required to sacrifice one’s life.
I begin with Cahn’s example—call it the Bomb Case. Then I’ll say something
about the more general view I favor. In the Bomb Case, I am not obligated to foil
the plot at the expense of my own life because morality cannot require me to bear
such a high cost for someone else’s immorality. Let us call the view that in the
Bomb Case one is obligated to foil the plot Strong Altruism. Strong Altruism is
unlivable because it holds that at any moment my life could be disrupted to the
ultimate degree by an obligation to perform a self-sacrificing action simply
because someone else has decided to do something dreadful. To appeal to a
consideration associated with Bernard Williams, among others: Living a moral
life requires us to be able to build our lives around certain long-term projects. Of
course, our life plans could at any moment be derailed by contingencies of various
kinds; and in some cases, contingencies give rise to moral obligations which
conflict with our life plans; however, as Strong Altruism counts among these
contingencies the radically evil designs of extremely immoral others, it makes
moral lives things too easily co-opted by the worst among us. Indeed, in the moral
economy proposed by Strong Altruism, a tiny band of madmen could make the
moral life impossible for us all by routinely staging situations like the Bomb Case
and allowing selected numbers of decent people the opportunity to foil their plots.
In short, Strong Altruism allows evil people to take the moral life hostage. It seems
odd to think that this could be required by morality.
This response to the Bomb Case does not entail that self-interest, even
ultimate self-interest, always trumps our duties to others. The rejection of Strong
Altruism does not entail a rejection of altruism as such. Consider a companion
case, the Virus Case:
You discover that you are the sole carrier of a virus that is deadly in 99% of humans. As a
carrier, your own life is not at risk. However, if the virus is allowed to mature, it will quickly
become highly contagious, and thousands will become infected and die. No method of
quarantine is sufficient to prevent the spread of the virus once it has reached maturity. The
only way to prevent the outbreak is to ingest a poison that will surely kill the virus, but will
also inevitably kill you.
JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 44 No. 2, Summer 2013, 112–114.
© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Altruism and Self-sacrifice
113
The Virus Case is like the Bomb Case in nearly all respects. The crucial difference
is that in the Bomb Case, the self-sacrificing action is required in order to save
people from serious harm that is the result of the gross immorality of another
agent. In the Virus Case, the self-sacrificing action is required in order to save
people from harm that is not the result of another’s gross immorality. In the Virus
Case, one is indeed obligated to ingest the poison for the sake of saving the
thousands of lives that would otherwise perish. That is, in the Virus Case, morality
requires other-regarding behavior that is self-sacrificing.
A critic might object that the two cases do not differ significantly with respect
to the Williams-style consideration operating in my treatment of the Bomb Case.
Such a critic could argue that it is no less unsettling of the moral life to think that
one could be morally required to sacrifice oneself due to having had the bad luck
of catching a virus than it would be to think that someone else’s gross immorality
could require one to commit an act of self-sacrifice. In both cases, one is obligated
to pay the ultimate price in order to save others from serious harm resulting from
something that is not of one’s doing.
It seems to me that in both cases, the subject is a victim of a kind of bad luck
in that each is placed in a moral conundrum by forces out of his control. But the
moral significance of the bad luck differs in the cases. In the Bomb Case, one has
the bad luck of being in the unique position to thwart another’s gross immorality;
one is placed in a grave moral conundrum at the hand of a thoroughly immoral
agent. In the virus case, the bad luck is brute; one is obligated to sacrifice oneself,
but this is not at the hand of another. That, due to bad brute luck, an obligation to
self-sacrifice could simply befall us is admittedly a disconcerting, perhaps terrifying, thought. But it is morally different from the thought that someone else’s
immorality could be the source of such an obligation. As I’ve said, this latter
thought places our lives too much in the hands of evil others; it places the lives of
decent persons at the mercy of the extremely evil.
Consider a further complication: The Injection Case. This case is identical to
the Virus Case except for the fact that one is injected with the deadly virus by an
evil scientist bent on destroying humanity. Here, I think self-sacrifice is indeed
required. But self-sacrifice in this case is not a capitulation of the moral life to the
evil of the scientist, because, given the extremely high lethality of the virus and the
fact that one’s ability to live morally depends upon the ability of others to live
morally as well, allowing the scientist’s plot to go forward will render the moral
life impossible; I relinquish my ability to live the moral life no matter what I do,
so I should sacrifice myself so that others may pursue their moral projects.
But now imagine the closely related Moderated Injection Case. It is identical
to the Injection Case, except for the fact that the injected virus is lethal in only
5 percent of humans. Let us assume, as seems plausible, that one’s ability to live
a moral life is not rendered impossible by the death of 5 percent of humanity at the
hands of a virus. Here, my intuitions flip: to require self-sacrifice in this case
would be to cede to the evil scientist too much control over the lives of morally
decent people.
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Robert B. Talisse
There is certainly much more to say, and a lot hangs on whether it is possible
to get a clear sense of where the morally relevant thresholds lie. It is clear that the
behavior of some could be the source of obligations in others, as when my wife
makes plans for us both to meet friends for dinner without consulting me first. And
I concede that the immoral behavior of some could be the source of moral
obligations in others, as when my neighbors’ negligent parenting creates a moral
obligation for me to intervene. I also accept that the extremely bad behavior of
some could be the source of extremely costly moral obligations in others. But I
cannot see how morality could require a morally decent person to pay the ultimate
price for gross immorality on the part of others. In short, self-sacrifice may
sometimes be morally required, but it is simply not the kind of obligation that a
morally despicable person can impose upon a morally responsible person.