“Smiley, there is no fixed person there at all. Not your skin, not your internal organs, not your bones, not your memories. There is only the record of your choices.”

Then how do you account for the fact that (despite our bodies replacing their cells entirely every — what? — seven years or so) every individual displays observable characteristics that subsist over time — even over their entire lives? I include appearance, personality, disabilities, recurring dreams, anything and everything. If we can form some coherent idea of another person’s identity, then doesn’t that mean that enough characteristics of a person remain fixed as to make the idea of a fixed person meaningful at the very least?

I’m not going to quote it again, but I’d also like to address the application of your “Golden Rule” that John takes such exception to.

I disagree with John insofar as I don’t think you’re suggesting that Miss Rittelmeyer’s sister shouldn’t be alive. My problem with that passage is different. My problem is that your method of determining ethical action depends entirely on counter-factuals. You put yourself in someone else’s shoes. but this is a fiction. It’s also self-contradictory with your position regarding the fixedness of identity.

First, by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, you fail to deal with that actual person. You write your own desires, beliefs, and prejudices onto that person and so ignore the reality that is there. The fact is that Miss Rittelmeyer’s sister does have desires at least (however inferior you judge them to be), and may even have beliefs in a meaningful sense. She enjoys relationships with other people. By effacing all of this, you privilege a fiction rather than facts in making ethical decisions. The fact is that Miss Rittelmeyer’s sister does not feel herself a burden, and she does like being read to and eating Jell-o (or whatever she happens to like). Facts ought to take precedence over self-serving thought experiments made by people with little or no interest in an individual’s life.

Second, if there is no fixed identity of a person, then the thought experiment of “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes” is incoherent. If there is no fixed identity, then, if you were in the shoes of another, you could not predict what desires, etc. you would have. In Miss Rittelmeyer’s sister’s shoes you would want to be read to and have some Jell-o (or whatever the case may be). You would not want to avoid being a burden on your family.

I would like to assert again that there is such a thing as fixed identity of persons, but even if there isn’t, your “Golden Rule” remains a perversely solipsistic method of making ethical decisions. We know enough facts about other human beings to tailor our decisions to what they feel and what they desire. By putting ourselves in their shoes, we overwrite those factual considerations with self-centered fictions.

… I never said, nor implied, that Helen’s sister should not be alive.

Yes, you did:

… we can imagine how we might feel in her place, what our desires might be were we to become aware that her fate was ours. We might choose to not suffer that fate. Not because we don’t want the that life but because we don’t want to be that burden. We might decide that whatever grace Helen and her parents acheive because of their care for us, the burden of our care is too high a price. And who knows, if we do not burden their life, perhaps they will adopt a deserving child, or bear another one who bring them joy less alloyed with pain.

That’s implication, at least, and it’s frankly nauseating.

Smiley, there is no fixed person there at all. Not your skin, not your internal organs, not your bones, not your memories. There is only the record of your choices.

Nonetheless, we choose to love people as best we can, however imperfect and inconstant that love may be. Is love acting for the good of another? At least in part, yes. Clearly, we disagree about what constitutes the good of another. I suspect the we differ on Terri Schiavo, for example. I believe acting for her good meant terminating life support in accordance with her expressly stated desires. In my mind, that is loving the woman who was. Acting against her wishes would not be an act of love, it would be an act of selfishness.

Jake

Love is desiring and acting towards the Good for another.

On this definition, love becomes an element of ethics driving all other elements insofar as all other elements (including autonomy) are subsumed in the idea of “the Good.”

Also on this definition, we must assume either a fixed and unchanging idea of “the Good,” which applies equally to all human beings regardless of specific identity, or we must assume a non-postmodern view of the individual whereby said individual has fixed characteristics that may make general, abstract principles of “the Good” into concrete desires and actions.

If we assume the latter (as, I think, Miss Rittelmeyer does), then we must make a distinction between those aspects of a human being that are essential and those aspects which are merely accidental. If a disability is so thoroughgoing as to constitute an essential aspect of a person, then loving and even ethical action towards that person becomes impossible if one seeks to undo or prevent that disability.

Acceptance of the essential aspects of a person is the necessary foundation to pursuing the Good for them.

What I see Jake saying is that (1) there is no “the Good,” but merely a myriad of accidental goods. A human being has no interest in life apart from the concrete relationships and essentially transitory pleasures that said human being actually enjoys or desires. Also, (2) ethics are inherently subjective. I take his speech about the Golden Rule to mean that ethical behavior is essentially the imputation one’s own self-interest unto others. Or, to state it differently, the charitable acceptance of others’ right to pursue their own self-interests. For this reason, there need be no fixed identity of persons for the sake of ethics beyond a relatively consistent pursuit of self-interest.

My objections to these ideas that I see Jake putting forward all rest in the fact that they make true intimacy and true love impossible. By “true intimacy,” I mean a real encounter with another human being’s (for lack of a better word) Being (note the capital “B”). By “true love,” I mean the definition I give above. Such love is an end in and of itself.

Jake’s position is essentially solipsistic. All that matters is for ethics is one’s own ethical responsibilities. One may act ethically without having knowledge of what is the Good for another person. One may thus act ethically without pursuing intimacy or love as I have defined them. This in and of itself is enough for me to reject Jake’s position.

Beyond this, the real experience of human beings tells us that the most significant and exemplary ethical actions do not operate on the basis Jake describes. Good parents do not follow Jake’s Golden Rule on behalf of their children. Rather, they seek to obtain some objectively good life for their children in view of the temperaments and characteristics of their children. And this irrespective of many of their own desires and certainly irrespective of their children’s desires.

Mother Theresa was shockingly unconcerned with the autonomy of those she aided. She was a horrifically bad Western liberal. But she was an exemplar of ethical action.

Love can certainly be a component of ethical behavior, but it can also be destructive and self-serving.

And the same goes in spades for autonomy.

But anyway, it’s not worth pursuing this any further. I find your position repellent, and am genuinely uncomfortable with the fact that you’re willing to sit there and publicly claim that you think my friend’s sister should not be alive, that if she were able to comprehend the question she’d decide that in her present state she’d be too much of a “burden” for her parents and sister. Yeah, I’ll pass on that.

And as for the Doublethink comment, it probably got marked as spam and caught up in a filter. Don’t give yourself too much credit.

You need ethics. You have the church to help you. I do not. The rules, if law is to be sourced in them, must apply to and for us equally, though we believe differently.

Let’s look at Helen’s sister from the pov of the golden rule. Did Helen mention what her sister might want, even once? If she did, I couldn’t find it. As it is, her sister couldn’t comprehend the question, much less answer it. But we can imagine how we might feel in her place, what our desires might be were we to become aware that her fate was ours. We might choose to not suffer that fate. Not because we don’t want the that life but because we don’t want to be that burden. We might decide that whatever grace Helen and her parents acheive because of their care for us, the burden of our care is too high a price. And who knows, if we do not burden their life, perhaps they will adopt a deserving child, or bear another one who bring them joy less alloyed with pain.

We actually have a model for such a choice – Do Not Resuscitate instructions and living wills. Here people make judgements about their life, not the life of some other person. In certain situations where the potential for resuscitation is likely to arise, a significant fraction of people choose to not be resuscitated. Is this act of autonomy a selfish or a loving act? It is a loving act, I believe. Not that it matters what I believe.

Were such a thing possible, what would the beings in that 91% have to say? I know what I would say. I would take a pass, thank you. I would not burden those who would come to love me. I have made that decision in my life.

On another note, Doublethink put my comment back up. A perfect example of their name!

Jake

I think disorders that results in disabilities and imminent death should be cured if the cure is available. I draw the line on “curing” at the idea of designer babies. There is a difference between a parent wanting their child to be happy and creating a trophy to parade around.

John, you were the one who said that rights are a pernicious evil. Yet suddenly a right to life springs into the discussion, and from you.

Well I certainly never said that. And no, it wasn’t I who (re)introduced the notion of a right to life; it was you, and I was just observing that the surrounding argument was no good.

And, yes, the consequences of that autonomy are all that remains of our lives.

No, the consequences of our lives are what remain of our lives.

John, you were the one who said that rights are a pernicious evil. Yet suddenly a right to life springs into the discussion, and from you.

I agree with your first stated position – we have no inalienable rights. Including a “right to life”.

Autonomy is not taken away from us when we die – there is no “us” to lose autonomy. And, yes, the consequences of that autonomy are all that remains of our lives. You said that very well.

Jake