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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

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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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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.