Yes, in some cases. Are those a minority, or a majority of the cases where you have to put your life into balance and decide if it’s worth being sacrificed for something, or having that thing sacrificed instead ?
It all hinges on your values too. Here it seemed like it was a given that one’s life was being considered as valuable, but that under some threshold, the probability of survival was too small to deserve a personal sacrifice (money, time, pleasure, energy, etc.). All of this from a personal standpoint, weighting personal, individual benefits, and individual costs. If all that is being considered is your own subjective enjoyment of life, then it still seems to me that any personal sacrifice is at most as undesirable as the loss of your life. And this calls into question, how much do we value our own personal enjoyment and life, when compared with other values such as other’s general well being ? In other words, how selfish and altruistic are we, both in which proportion, and in which cases ?
Let us say you value freedom (not just for yourself but for friend/family/fellow countrymen). If you have a choice:
Option 1)Increased the amount of freedom, but killed you Option 2) Decreased the amount of freedom but allowed you to live,
Which would should you choose?
I’d pick 1, sometimes your own death is necessary to promote values even if you won’t be around to enjoy the benefits, e.g fighting against the nazis.
Yes, in some cases. Are those a minority, or a majority of the cases where you have to put your life into balance and decide if it’s worth being sacrificed for something, or having that thing sacrificed instead ?
It all hinges on your values too. Here it seemed like it was a given that one’s life was being considered as valuable, but that under some threshold, the probability of survival was too small to deserve a personal sacrifice (money, time, pleasure, energy, etc.). All of this from a personal standpoint, weighting personal, individual benefits, and individual costs. If all that is being considered is your own subjective enjoyment of life, then it still seems to me that any personal sacrifice is at most as undesirable as the loss of your life. And this calls into question, how much do we value our own personal enjoyment and life, when compared with other values such as other’s general well being ? In other words, how selfish and altruistic are we, both in which proportion, and in which cases ?