I present a puzzle concerning individual self-sacrificing altruism (SSA) that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been considered before. I develop an argument that challenges the common sense attitudes towards self-sacrificial altruism in typical, paradigmatic cases. I consider SSA involving sacrificing one’s life for other human beings, focusing, for the sake of simplicity, on saving a single person. We have reasons to think that many paradigmatic acts of SSA may, on reflection, be irrational, that typical moral heroes are mistaken, that dispositional self-sacrificers should perhaps resist their good urges to keep saving people, and that the enchantments of heroism should regularly be resisted.
I present a puzzle concerning individual self-sacrificing altruism (SSA) that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been considered before.
I consider acts of SSA involving sacrificing one’s life for other human beings, focusing, for the sake of simplicity, on saving a single person. I believe that the argument can be extended to saving more than one, but will not do this here. I assume that the self-sacrificing agents in question have good lives which are worth preserving, that they are happy about their lives, and that they could (if it were not for their self-sacrifice) expect to enjoy their lives for a lengthy period of time. The self-sacrifice is, for them, something that they would in itself wish not to do; it is a great
I focus on the objective goodness or rightness of acts of SSA, and assume for the sake of this discussion that the idea of objective goodness or rightness makes sense (a number of different meta-ethical views might suffice here). I look at SSA that is voluntary, intentional, autonomous and supererogatory (that is, beyond one’s duty). The people saved are strangers to the self-sacrificing rescuer and the latter is not acting in any relevant professional capacity, nor is the saviour otherwise responsible for saving them. I also assume that the self-sacrificer’s life is “for her to give”, in that she is not, say, a single parent to five young children, so that self-sacrifice would involve great direct harm to others to whom she has major obligations. I concentrate my efforts on instances of SSA that involve sacrificing one’s life, or putting it at great risk. The self-sacrificers need to be conscious of the nature of their decisions and actions as instances of altruistic self-sacrifice of this sort, at least in a weak sense. Yet putting one’s life at what one reasonably takes to be great risk suffices for the sake of our discussion, even if the hero recognises the possibility of survival and indeed survives. In the rest of this discussion, we shall speak of instances of SSA as genuine instances of self-sacrifice, even when there were great risks taken that did not in fact materialize; and hence it was not an actual self-sacrifice in the strict sense. I also assume, for the sake of this discussion, that those whom the would-be saviours attempted to save were indeed saved, and that it was reasonable for the would-be saviours to assume that they would be. We do not need to concern ourselves here with doubts about committing an SSA that follow from the chance that the person who is to be saved will not in fact be saved.
Finally, I focus on individuals sacrificing themselves as individuals, not as part of collective groups or within special structures (for example, army conscripts). These cases raise questions concerning matters such as legal obligations, contracts, and collective goods that would take us in different directions.
Paradigmatic examples of SSAs would include jumping in and trying to save another person from drowning in a turbulent sea, an action that is extremely risky given one’s swimming ability; confronting, bare-handed, criminals who are tormenting an innocent person in a subway; or jumping in front of a running horse that would otherwise trample over a child. Such acts are typically seen as being good yet much beyond reasonable moral expectation, and are thus supererogatory and highly admirable, indeed heroic.
The basis for our discussion will be, as stated, the idea of supererogation. This means that we will be setting aside strong consequentialist positions (such as traditional utilitarianism) which rule out the supererogatory. The idea of the supererogatory also means that, conceptually, the cases involved will not be ones in which deontological duties to risk one’s life in order to save others will apply. Likewise, we will be assuming the absence of any tacit or explicit contractual arrangements here; nor are there any pertinent expectations of reciprocity. This means that the traditional normative theories will not be the direct way to evaluate this supererogatory altruism puzzle. Hence, setting aside empirical uncertainty, the evaluation of instances of SSA will aim for broad sensitivity to the emerging gains and losses in value. Whether an instance of SSA is correct or mistaken shall primarily depend on whether the act increases or decreases value. The aim will be to try to capture at least initially a broad spectrum of intuitions.
Let us now consider a few examples that can help us understand the distinction between mistaken and correct acts of SSA. The easiest sort of case would be the dramatic risk-taking involved in rushing into one’s burning house when it is going up in flames, trying to save the family’s pet (say, the pet hamster), who is caught inside. For all the sorrow about the hamster, one should not put one’s life at great risk for such a cause. Let us call such examples
Assume now that two young men and a young woman sacrifice themselves in order to save one other person who is known to be a no good, hate-filled, despicable, and previously violently harmful bully. All decent people who know this person think of him as a worthless scum. Let us assume that he is no longer actually dangerous, despite his continuous vile racist and sexist desires and intentions. Let us call him the
A typical case of SSA, by contrast with that of the bully, is thought to be very different. In a typical case, one sacrifices oneself and saves, we assume, a fairly good, decent human being. If one risks one’s life and saves such a person, this is considered a great deed.
Another person was about to die, and instead will live, because you, in an act of SSA, sacrificed yourself in order to save him. So, the result is a “switch”: instead of a situation in which that person dies and you continue living, we have one in which he lives but you die.
What has been left out of the evaluation, however, is the value of the self-sacrificing altruist,
Recall the good people who sacrificed themselves for the sake of the
The stark choice appears to be between (i) being a hero and making a moral mistake; or (ii) not attempting to save the other person. And being a hero is a mistake
If this is compelling, we have here an intriguing problem: Acts of SSA that save only one person are a wonderful thing (they are morally amazing, supererogatory acts of altruistic self-sacrifice). However, Acts that are always morally mistaken are not morally wonderful.
This might be seen as a paradox, or an elegant
Hence,
Recall that we are assuming throughout that it is supererogatory to save the other person, and one would not be bad were one not to do it. There is, therefore, no symmetrical paradox here, such as that one is bad for
Let us return to the decision to opt for SSA. Before the act of SSA is done, it might seem as though it is a good idea to do the “switch”, saving the other at one’s expense, or at least not a bad idea, because you and that person are, still, of more or less equal value. However, if one understands the point of this paper, then, when one is about to make the sacrifice, one already understands that, once the deed is done, it quite likely will have been a mistake, for one has, overall, destroyed more value than one has saved. SSA can appear to be a moral opportunity but, on reflection, it suddenly begins to seem, very possibly, like a moral mistake.
It might seem puzzling where the lost value of the self-sacrificer is. Once she has done her deed, she ceases to exist. So there is no person remaining to whom the value would be assigned. But this is a false puzzle. The very problem is that we have lost an unusually morally admirable human being. The value of the person who is no longer in existence has been lost, and
The significance of counting oneself as a hero in this way is further supported by the idea of
There seems to be a direct relationship here between desert and moral worth. This person’s freely sacrificing himself in the way we are considering makes him deserving; he acquires unusually high moral worth and has become praise
Note also that the numbers seem to strongly affect how we think about SSA cases—risking death to save 30 ordinary people seems more easily justified than if only one such person is at stake, which suggests in another way that even common-sense is concerned with the value of the saved. For this reason I have in this paper framed the puzzle as SSA applying to saving a single person.
My claim that typical cases of SSA involve sacrificing a person who, through the sacrifice, has become much more valuable than the person she saves, raises a number of questions. The first is whether the self-sacrificing person indeed gains in moral worth only when she sacrifices herself. If she is strongly disposed to sacrifice herself for moral reasons should the occasion arise, is she not already of unusual moral worth—more valuable in the relevant sense than others who entirely lack such a disposition? There are various possibilities here. One is that it is only with the act that the person gains in value. Another is that she already has some high value just because of her character and dispositions, but gains even more in value when she actually does the self-sacrificing act. A third is that actually doing the act does not matter. I will assume in the rest of the discussion that all or most of the value arises with the act of SSA. It seems to me, for example, that, although one is already admirable for being willing to consider SSA, if one then stops short of doing so, one’s value remains much lower than it would have been had one acted.
A second issue is what kind of value this is. It is not primarily the value of her life
Being a person who is ready for SSA makes one morally rare and worthy. We have seen that it is compelling to take this into consideration when contemplating such acts of SSA. However, what does this imply for those persons who have
What does this mean? If we follow our previous conclusion, then this woman needs to be extra careful.
It might be countered, first, that the one-time hero surely is not morally amazing in every way, and indeed she can have many moral faults. Second, that there is no special, rare value in self-sacrificing altruists, and in the concomitant importance of their continuing to live in the world, unless they
But focusing on the faults of a SSA hero when considering her overall value; or dismissing her status as a person of rare value, unless she continues to exercise it at risk of self-sacrifice, is deeply mistaken—and unfair. Compare the idea of a genuine war hero: surely one retains the status even if the war was long ago, and one has chosen to live a mundane, average life ever since. SSA of the right sort, as we are assuming in our discussion (that is, non-pathological, intentional, immense risk-taking, and so forth), needs to be considered as giving the hero
In response to the apparent paradoxes we have encountered, of
However, this radical shift to romanticism comes at a heavy price, of disconnecting our attitudes towards SSA from the typical sort of moral “calculation” and justification of moral thinking. It would, as it were, concede that we are unable to rationally defend typical acts of SSA. It would also distance moral action and thought from those places where “calculation” seems correct in indicating that SSA would be a mistake (for example, the
It might be argued, as against the case that I have made, that an act of self-sacrificing altruism, by its very nature as SSA,
The problem with this reply, however, is that it seems to beg the question. It simply
Note that I do not require that we deny that there is value being added to the world by the self-sacrifice. For example, a death occurring in non-successful altruistic self-sacrifice (where the person is not saved) is impersonally better,
We might note here that there is widespread and special mourning when someone like Gandhi, Sakharov or Martin Luther King dies. We recognize that there has been an unusually great loss—not perhaps to any individual but to the world. Even when such a person is very old and no longer engaging in acts of great altruism, we are aware of a special loss—that a person of the greatest worth no longer exists.
Moreover, speaking about the beauty of sacrifice in this way raises various dangers. One is that the “logic” of the romantic view leads to risk-taking and value-destruction beyond reason and morality. Repeatedly, in the mass media we see heroes praised for risking their lives for a pet or an object; for example, jumping into a frozen river to save the family dog, rushing into a fire to rescue the cat, or confronting the burglars in order to save the family’s jewellery. Romantic gestures such as these are indeed chivalrous and heroic. But they are also typically irrational, careless, and irresponsible. Second, an added risk is that, paradoxically, the more imbalance there is in the results of the sacrifice, the greater the added value may seem. Some might even think that the sacrifice is all the more saintly if the beneficiary is clearly
It would not do for the presenter of this view to fall back on the subjective intentions or attitudes of the self-sacrificers, however romantic. For, after all, such intentions and attitudes are present also in
It might be further argued that one’s error in self-sacrificing oneself erases one’s status as a moral hero or heroine, hence, paradoxically, once again making one’s self-sacrifice permissible. But, at least in the clearer cases, that would be unreasonable. One is heroic, but quite possibly mistaken; mistakes should not be made, but do not eliminate the heroism—they make it misguided. Surely we can leave room for the idea that in many paradigmatic cases of SSA the sacrificer
Another possible reply to my challenge might be that the evaluation of acts of SSA should not be made according to a balanced evaluation of loss and gain, of the resulting state of affairs, but in the light of the idea of the
In reply, we need not deny that this may be the hero’s phenomenology. It is also what we seem to be admiring in self-sacrificing altruists, the person’s willingness to be responsive to the needs of an “other” with the ultimate gift, risking his or her life; the agent’s selflessness. Yet we can nevertheless persist in wondering whether the self-sacrifice is correct. That it is convincingly thought of as a mistake in cases such as
It might be claimed that my position, that people who become of greater impersonal value because of their moral merit have reasons to preserve themselves, raises a specter of dubious implications. If these reasons are stronger than the reasons to preserve the lives of ordinary people, what does this imply about, for example, health care distribution? Should governments now be reviewing people’s moral ledgers to determine which are most worthy of receiving priority in getting vaccines?
But I can maintain my view concerning the higher moral worth that SSA can generate, without this necessarily implying anything about proper social policy. There are excellent moral and political reasons not to publically allocate vaccines according to perceived moral merit, just as voting rights ought to be allocated equally. This does not imply that the loss of any human life is, impersonally, of equal weight, just as not all persons vote equally sensibly. Likewise, if we recall repentant
Moreover, common sense intuition does often favor the idea that, given a choice, it is better to save a morally worthy or deserving person rather than a scoundrel. Some favor the view that all potential victims should have an equal chance of being rescued, but many do not. My assumption about the differential value of morally worthy and morally unworthy people is not, here, in radical conflict with a large part of common beliefs about equality.
I may be thought to be too quick to dismiss the worry about how my view generalizes—surely it is not just a question of social policy. In particular, doesn’t the same issue apply to supererogation more generally, and to many altruistic acts? If we are both equally morally worthy, and I help you, I become more morally worthy, and thus deserve more than you, and, in anticipation, should I then not help you? I think that we need to firmly distinguish here between “normal” assistance and the issue of self-sacrifice. There is no motivation for limiting altruistic assistance to equals, and no inherent difficulty with generosity; there is little reason to see this as, in itself, problematic. With SSA, by contrast, the contributor is on course to eliminate himself (whether this materializes in the end or not). The question is one of
It might be further claimed that the seemingly irrational heroic acts of SSA do make sense, from a more strategic perspective. We also have to take into account
However, there is, first, a question of the extent to which such collateral gains actually occur, and what weight we ought to give to them as compared to the other factors. Some temporary public “feel good” effect, or even a minor increase in charitable donations, does not seem sufficiently important.
Then there is, second, a risk of begging the question, but here pragmatically: if the public perceives most acts of SSA as morally laudatory, then this may generate collateral gains. But if, as the challenge I pose suggests, many such acts are moral mistakes, and this is recognized, then the perception of actual acts of SSA as widespread moral mistakes is much less likely to produce collateral gains.
It might then be said, because of the importance of the collateral gains, that the nature of acts of SSA as mistaken-in-themselves should not be publically disclosed, and ought to remain as it were esoteric knowledge. Put differently, the positive value of these acts lies not so much in themselves, but in the effects of the way in which they are perceived. But this move in effect concedes my challenge, and indeed gives it so much weight as to require hiding it. For it says that in themselves, cases of SSA such as we are considering
Moreover, there is something deeply repellent in the idea that minor, cumulative, non-heroic gains make the difference and tip the balance in favor of acts of SSA. These are the cases in which typically a human being (and an exceptionally admirable one at that) sacrifices his or her life. Perhaps such acts of SSA do have their indirect uses, but this can hardly be the major consideration. In cases of rushing to sacrifice oneself, what seems to matter is the person one tries to save, and one’s own life. If my argument is convincing, we should also worry about the effects of heroic examples of SSA in motivating others to commit
Finally, it might be countered that all humans are of
Furthermore, an insistence that only the formal sense of equal human worth, which everyone is born with, matters, would make it impossible to reach the conclusions we saw as very plausible at the beginning of this paper. For example, that sacrificing oneself for the
A more moderate egalitarian stance may, however, be more plausible. There might be an explanation for our intuitions concerning cases such as
Another and perhaps more plausible variant might be gradualist, with an imprecise threshold: it would imply that self-sacrifice is a greater mistake the farther below the threshold the potential beneficiary is, and more acceptable and admirable the farther above the threshold the potential beneficiary is. Yet while helpful in advancing our thinking, such attempts do not seem to me sufficient to diffuse my challenge. The loss of altruistic self-sacrificers, who are exceptional people with extraordinary value, does not seem to be adequately addressed even by these formulations, insofar as they nevertheless seek to retain our commonsense intuitions on paradigmatic instances of SSA. This and many of my previous points can be seen from a thought experiment resembling John Rawls’
Assume a typical situation of SSA such as we are investigating, where one person jumps into the turbulent sea, risking his life in order to save a stranger. We know that the heroic savior has drowned and that the person he tried to save, who would have drowned otherwise, was indeed saved thanks to the heroic savior who drowned. We also know that the person saved was one among five very different people, one of whom was then out at sea, but we do not know which one. All we can do is
The
The
The
An ordinary person
A previous SSA Hero
Clearly the sacrifice of the hero was a mistake concerning the
Would we hope that the person saved was a past hero of a similar nature, rather than merely an ordinary person? Such a hope seems to me quite reasonable, and this is significant in defending the value of the morally heroic person over the ordinary one. Otherwise, why would we prefer and hope that the person saved was of the former sort, rather than of the latter?
Note that I do not require that we think that hope is an automatic indication of rightness, and on reflection this would often clearly not be so. If we know that a certain billionaire is buying quantities of lottery tickets for this week’s lottery, it seems morally appropriate to hope that some other, much poorer person wins rather than him. The poorer person’s winning would be a better state of affairs, all considered. Yet this does not entail that we would be permitted to fix the lottery so as to prevent this billionaire from winning. The
Now consider a somewhat different version of
It seems to me that here as well the conclusion concerning the first three persons would firmly emerge, and probably even more strongly. We very much hope that the
If so, this, first, further supports my arguments concerning
Once we focus on the fact that the loss of the self-sacrificer in typical cases of SSA is a special loss since the person is particularly worthy, we arrive at the puzzle concerning self-sacrifice I am raising here, and at the disturbing conclusion that our positive view of typical cases of SSA might well be mistaken.
The topic of supererogatory self-sacrifice has been relatively neglected: “Despite this important role that sacrifice plays in our moral thinking, moral philosophers have had surprisingly little to say about the nature of sacrifice” (p. 301). Marcel van Ackeren and Alfred Archer, “Self-Sacrifice and Moral Philosophy,”
If convincing, this would merge with a broader view concerning morality which I call “Crazy Ethics” (first introduced in Saul Smilansky, “Free Will as a Case of ‘Crazy Ethics’,” in
See, for example, Joseph Raz, “On the Moral Significance of Sacrifice,”
The rejection of impersonal comparisons of states of affairs in terms of value would be a way of avoiding my conclusions, but this is an intuitive price that very few will be willing to pay; see
We note but need not concern ourselves here with the distinction (familiar, for example, from discussions of utilitarianism) between the standards that make an action right, and the justified decision procedure. It is one thing to say that a feature may render an action wrong, it is quite another to say that we always should consider that feature. Our focus is on the conclusion that emerges from adequate calculations, calculations which determine the moral status of the self-sacrificing action.
Another, consequentialist, argument against SSA of the sort under consideration might be that people who are prepared to sacrifice their lives in order to save another are likely to do more good in the world (apart from the sacrifice) than the average ordinary person, in the future. Hence their remaining alive, rather than the (we are assuming) ordinary person they might save, would be preferable. This argument however seems vulnerable to doubts such as whether a potential SSA would indeed do significantly more future good, and to opposing consequentialist considerations, such as the collateral effects (see below) of the example set by the self-sacrifice.
The question concerns altruism in general, and we can set aside here the doubts that follow from the present puzzle.
Another cost is that this romanticism involves the hero taking a different view of herself from that which it is rational for the rest of us to take of her.
See Jörg Löschke, “The Value of Sacrifices,”
For a closely related discussion of the inherent tension between moral improvement and the conditions for the attainment of moral worth see Saul Smilansky, “Morality and Moral Worth”, in
It might be argued that some version of this suspicion could also apply to my view about the greater value of the heroic person. It would merely be that, on my account, the value is added to the person as well as the world. Admittedly, it is important to my view that the SSA person not be primarily motivated by the aim of increasing her own value. Yet beyond that my view is the best antidote against these dangers. My emphasis on “calculation” and aversion to inappropriate self-sacrifice counter these temptations of the romantic tendency surrounding self-sacrifice.
The role played here by general social and political considerations as constraints on public policy can be seen when such concerns are largely absent, in one-time individual decision making. Deciding to save a person because of considerations of outstanding moral desert can be permissible, as I showed in Saul Smilansky, “A Hostage Situation,”
We might be more amenable to such a sacrifice if it were thought that it would lead the person saved to radically change his ways, and perhaps perform similarly valuable acts. But this of course is very rare, and cannot rationally be a consideration in favor of the self-sacrifice.
Compare that there are many things that it would be morally wrong to do, but one can nevertheless be happy if they occur; see Saul Smilansky, “On Not Being Sorry about the Morally Bad” in
Versions of this paper were given at the Department of Philosophy, University of Turku, at the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, and in the Israeli Philosophical Association Annual Meeting; I am grateful to many participants for their comments. I am very grateful to Lucy Allais, Aliza Avraham, Aaron Ben-Zeev, Jonathan Berg, David Enoch, Amihud Gilead, David Heyd, Guy Kahane, Arnon Keren, Iddo Landau, Ran Lanzet, Sam Lebens, Arad Levin, Tal Manor, Jeff McMahan, Ariel Meirav, Juha Räikkä, Alma Smilansky-Teichner, Daniel Statman, Rivka Weinberg, and anonymous referees for the