Things worth than death?
Suffering, pain and by extension death have been suggested as things which are bad. Perhaps they might be called things that do not make one's life go well. I would say that these things aren't truly bad and sometimes they can cause a life to go better. Moreover the only things that can really make your life worse are those that would cause one to act against one's principles. There has to be some value to one's principles otherwise one should wonder why would Socrates choose to remain in Athens and be executed. I haven't read Socrates in a while so I might not remember all of this correctly. In any case it suggests that there are principles that Socrates values more than even his own life, such that he does not even view death as a real harm. It would have been a harm to him to have repudiated his principles at behest of the Athenians. This is a substantially different view of the Good than the one that we would commonly think of but it is an important one. The Good(in this view) persists in seeking truth and holding fast to this and other related principles. So one might say that is all well and good for the Academy but consider some Nazi cases. We have the Mayor of a Town who must execute three men otherwise the Nazi Army will kill 1000 people. One might ask the virtuous mayor if he will kill the three men and I think he would as a man of principle say no.
1. Killing the men would be submitting to the Nazi Authority and becoming complicit in their evil.
2. Even if they Nazis kill you and your town thats all they can do to you, they can't hurt you anymore after that (I think Gandhi might have said something along these lines) because all they'll have is your corpse(s).
Take this example, we know that there were certain Jewish prisoners in the camps that worked for the Nazis. I am not sure to what end but those prisoners were probably executed eventually. To what end does serving the Nazis benefit one's life? If anything these people betrayed their people, the Jewish Nation. Better then to resist than to allow them to use you against your own people. That is worse than death, to be complicit in the extermination of one's own people.
No matter how many people the Nazis kill it is the Nazis who are killing them and not the one who refuses ones assent to take part.
So I leave you to consider:how much is integrity worth?
1. Killing the men would be submitting to the Nazi Authority and becoming complicit in their evil.
2. Even if they Nazis kill you and your town thats all they can do to you, they can't hurt you anymore after that (I think Gandhi might have said something along these lines) because all they'll have is your corpse(s).
Take this example, we know that there were certain Jewish prisoners in the camps that worked for the Nazis. I am not sure to what end but those prisoners were probably executed eventually. To what end does serving the Nazis benefit one's life? If anything these people betrayed their people, the Jewish Nation. Better then to resist than to allow them to use you against your own people. That is worse than death, to be complicit in the extermination of one's own people.
No matter how many people the Nazis kill it is the Nazis who are killing them and not the one who refuses ones assent to take part.
So I leave you to consider:how much is integrity worth?
posted by Oakwise at
7:47 PM
1 Comments:
I agree that integrity and principle are very valuable habits to have. Indeed, it seems to me that the possession of integrity is possibly the most important virtue one can possess. However, I want to point out the cost of valuing integrity so highly. In the “Magus” case, the cost is ~997 lives; the cost will go beyond this to whatever threshold one believes in. Is one person’s integrity really worth thousands, perhaps millions of lives? This is a high price to pay. While losing one’s integrity is worse than dying, is one person losing his integrity worse than several thousand people dying? Anyone who answers “yes” has a highly implausible picture of the good.
The problem, I believe, is the starting point. Integrity is related to constraints, not to well-being. By starting off from “losing one’s integrity is worse than suffering and dying”, we place integrity in well-being, as another item to be added up and weighed like all the others. Integrity is the virtue of adhering to constraints when the benefits, especially personal benefits, greatly outweigh the costs. Starting from here, we can see that the core issue at stake in the Magus case is not the integrity of the mayor, but the existence of a constraint against doing harm for the greater good. The mayor is forbidden to kill the 3 because of the constraint against harm.
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Joshua Frear, at 4:21 PM
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