“there are two people in a lifeboat with no food, no water, no means of sustaining their lives, out in the middle of an ocean or similar body of water, and no land nearby, no rescuers on the way, that they know of.”

be that both people try to help each other stay alive in the face of limited resources, using their intellect to try and find some form of production (fishing, collecting plankton or algaes, distilling salt water into potable water, etc.) while trying to signal and/or navigate in a direction likely to lead to rescue or escape?

It is unlikely that both people would die at the same instant. In that event, the surviving person could reasonably use the resources of the person who is no longer a rational being (they are now basically just a pile of meat and bone) without moral conflict, as food, as bait, as shelter (protection from sun) or whatever.

There would be no advantage in a perceived resource-less environment to killing the other person prematurely, when they are not costing you anything in terms of resources, and they may be able to come up with an idea that may help to resolve their problems.

If this post is just an exercise in philosophy, but without seeking an actual answer (which I’m guessing it may be since no explicitly proposed solution was included in the post) feel free to ignore my utilitarian perspective. :-)

– Brian

“The fact of the matter is that, when a person says “ethics do not apply in a life boat, therefore it is right to kill and eat the other life boater”, one is smuggling-in, implicitly, both ethical values and ethical purpose. They are sneaking it in the back door and then claiming that “ethics do not apply”. What they really want to do is reject virtue.”

Very nice.

-Chrisnoscrub047

I find the worst part is it assumes a correct answer and tries to push a person into either saying something “obviously” wrong or contradicting their ethics. However if you throw out objectivity, then how can anyone have any answer to the problem? As Paul McKeever says in his article, the other ethical philosophies don’t have any rational basis for their decisions. The only answer is objectivity.

Also I chose not to get into a situation where I’d need a lifeboat.

In general, I do not like lifeboat situation questions because I think they are often used to prove that human beings are, at some basic level, irredeemably depraved.

I was very interested in your answer because you insisted that even in life and death situations human beings have the responsibility to choose their actions. What is really interesting is that according to people who study human behavior in disasters, most people in such situations do indeed choose their behavior and they do not often panic. For example, when people evacuated the twin towers, they tended to act in an orderly manner and even helped one another. This is not an example of irrational selflessness; rather, it exemplifies human self-understanding as choice makers.

Even in the Nazi concentration camps, where people often knew that they would be murdered, they often behaved with moral courage. It is as if, knowing that the choice was between death as a human being and existence deprived of their identity as a moral agent, they chose to continue identifying themselves as human beings capable of moral choice.

Such stories come out of nearly every account of extreme situations. Acts of moral courage demonstrate that most of us, at the core, continue to see ourselves as human beings and not as beasts right up to the moment of death.

I don’t have “Ayn Rand Answers”, and I do not have a full quotation of the question asked and the full answer given by Ayn Rand. However, my understanding was that she was addressing situations in which X will be killed by Z if X does not kill Y. In other words, it appears that she was addressing a question in which X is wondering whether or not to kill Y in self-defence. That is a very different situation than one in which Z is not threatening/going to kill X, such that there is no issue of self-defence.

I have little difficulty with most self-defence situations: if Z is using Y as a human shield and threatening to shoot X, and if X can avoid being shot only by shooting through Y to get Z, then it is right for X to shoot through Y, and it is wrong for Z to have used Y as a human shield. In such a case, Z is Y’s murderer even if the bullet that kills Y comes from X’s gun.

If, on the other hand, Y is nobody’s human shield, but Z tells X to choose between shooting Y or being shot by Z, it would be wrong for X to shoot Y: X would be the murderer of Y, and so would Z, in such a situation. It would be right, and not murder, for X or Y (or both) to shoot Z.

Have you read Ayn Rand’s answer to all lifeboat questions in Robert Meyhew’s book “Ayn Rand Answers.” If not, turn to pages 113-114 in that book, read it, and do tell what you think of it.

Joseph Kellard

Cheers,

Paul

I think the best answer to these questions, though, no matter what you think, is to refuse to answer at all. They are malicious BS questions, whose only possible answers are either BAD or REALLY BAD. It’s a thinly veiled attack on rationality itself. As such, they do not even deserve the time of day, except to denounce them and move on.

Oh, and I like how you transcribed one of your videos like this. I, for one, am able to concentrate and remember something a lot better when reading it than when hearing it. It also takes less time.