Survival
The Value of Survival
What is the value of survival?
This question is related to another question in ethics: What is wrong with killing? Whatever answer we come up with is going to have important implications for a number of moral issues, from capital punishment to abortion to euthanasia to the killing for food.
This essay is directed against the idea that survival is the only thing that has value, and that all other things have value in virtue of their ability to contribute to (for that which is good) or subtract from (for that which is bad) survival.
There are two ways in which something can have value. It can be an object of a desire, or it can be useful for bringing about something that is an object of desire. Sex provides an example of something that has value as an object of desire. Though people do, at times, engage in sex as a means of achieving some further goal (i.e., for example, to have a baby, to hurt somebody, or to make money) for the most part people have sex because they want to have sex. Sex itself is that which is desired.
A computer laptop provides an example of something that has value in the second sense. People seldom acquire laptops because they have a drive to have a laptop. They acquire laptops as a tool — because the laptop allows them to do things that have value. I have a laptop so that I can spend my time on the bus, while I commute to and from work, writing.
There is no third type of value. There is no such thing, for example, as intrinsic value — something that has value independent of the fact that it is an object of desire or useful in bringing about something that is an object of desire. A person who says that something has value, but who cannot say who wants it, or who wants what the object of evaluation can bring about, is making a false claim. They are talking about entities that do not exist.
Survival For Its Own Sake
For the most part, I do not think that we actually value survival much for its own sake.
One of the reasons for believing this is because of our evolutionary past. In order for evolution to select for a desire to survive, it must be the case that a creature has to actually have a desire to survive. Furthermore, that creature has to be able to identify states of affairs as “those that promote survival” and “those that hinder survival”, so that it can be disposed to select the former and avoid the latter.
There is no reason to believe that animals have this capability.
Again, we can look at sex as an example of how evolution has influenced our desires. Evolution did not give animals in nature a desire to replicate their genes, and a belief that sex is a means for accomplishing this end. Evolution selected those creatures with a desire to have sex, with procreation being an unintended (and perhaps often unwanted) side effect of the creature doing what it wants.
We can see the same thing with respect to hunger. Evolution did not give creatures a desire to survive and a belief that eating was useful for those creatures that wanted to survive. It gave creatures a desire to eat, and a taste for those things that would keep the creature alive, and a dislike for those things that would poison the creature, for the most part. Survival is an unintended side effect of these creatures getting what they want.
We see these facts manifest themselves in us. We, too, desire sex independent of any interest we may have in replicating our genes. We have a desire to eat to the point that we eat quantities of food that threaten our survival. We like the foods that kept our biological ancestors alive in a state of nature where famine was possible and it was good to build up fat reserves in times of plenty as fuel in times of scarcity. We still have those desires, even though we have eliminated scarcity, to the point that we eat too much.
Pain, too, is not something that we avoid only when the painful event threatens our health. Nature has made us so that we tend to feel pain at events that threaten our survival and reproductive capability, so that we avoid those things. However, we continue to be adverse to pain, even under circumstances where that aversion threatens our well-being. We put off going to the dentist, and we ignore the physical therapist, because it hurts, and we do not like to hurt. We do not avoid pain as a means of survival. We avoid pain, period.
Since humans acquired the ability to recognize death for what it is, and to recognize what threatens our survival, nature has had an opportunity to select in favor of a desire to survive. In addition, human brains are malleable. Just as we are able to learn about death, we are able to learn an aversion to death. Yet, evidence can be found in the way we regard sex, food, and pain, that we still have not acquired a strong aversion to death for its own sake.
Survival as a Tool
One of the most common mistakes that I see people make is that they look at the value survival has as a tool and, from this, infer that it must have some sort of intrinsic or desire-independent value. For the vast majority of the things that we want, we either have to be alive to realize that desire, or it at least would be useful to be alive.
The grandparent cannot see his grandchildren graduate from college if he is a corpse; nor can a couple in love spend a nice evening playing bridge on the patio as the sun sets over the mountains unless they are both alive. It is difficult, at best, for a corpse to finish that novel he always wanted to write, or for a traveler to experience the sits and sounds of the parts of the world he has not yet seen.
It is very easy to look at survival and see all of its uses, and to recognize how much there is to lose if a person does not survive.
Some people seem to think that looking at survival as a tool somehow diminishes its value. If survival only has value as a means, they think, then it has no real value and can be too easily discarded. Therefore, they insist that survival must be viewed as being valuable for its own sake.
The assumption behind this view is mistaken. The key to a vault full of gold has just as much value as the gold that is contained within the vault. The key to everything that has value in one’s life, from spending time with a loved one to watching the grandkids graduate from college, is as valuable as all of the things that one will lose if that life is lost.
Life has value as a means — as a tool. For must of us, life has a great deal of value indeed, and the fact that this value resides in its usefulness — the fact that it is necessary for the fulfillment of so many of our hopes and dreams — in no way diminishes its value. However, we can then ask about the value of a life when it is no longer a useful tool. If an agent is laying in a comatose state, from which she can never recover, then she will never be able to use her life to fulfill any of her hopes in dreams. As a tool, that life has no real value even to the person whose life it is.
It is also possible for a person to be in a position where death is more useful than life. Let us imagine a person in extreme pain, with a natural aversion to pain. The pain is so overpowering that the agent cannot think clearly, cannot use his life to achieve any other goal he may have. Life, then, is not realizing any state that the agent desires, and realizes only states to which the agent is adverse. In this case, death becomes a more useful tool than life.
We can also imagine a person who has spent his entire life building up a savings, and has written a will leaving it all to charity. It was his life’s dream to make sure that he left the world better off than it would have been, and this was how he wanted to do it. Now, he is laying in a hospital, unable to think or speak. Those who are preserving his life are paid out of the accounts he set up to be used for charity. In keeping this patient alive, we would be destroying his dreams. Life, here, is not a useful tool either.
Another relevant case is that of a prisoner who knows important military information that the NAZIs or some other culture of evil could use. He fears that if he is tortured, he will eventually break and reveal the information. It is a fact that torture is often effective, even on those who have a great deal to lose. If he was dead, however, then his secret would be safe. This is another case where death is a more valuable tool than life.
Moral Value of Survival
As I said above, intrinsic value does not exist. Survival is either something that we desire, or that is useful in realizing some other situation that we desire. Any statement attributing any other type of value to survival is false. Any argument that aims at saying what we should or should not do that is based on such a false premise is flawed.
The exceptional instrumental value of survival argues for promoting a very strong aversion to anything that threatens that survival. To the degree that others in society are adverse to doing things that threaten our survival, to that degree we are likely to continue to enjoy the benefits for which survival is necessary. So, we should be using the social tools at our disposal to promote a particularly strong aversion to killing.
Our aversion to killing should probably be so strong that we are even adverse to killing murderers. There may well be a reason why societies without capital punishment also have lower murder rates — its people have such a strong aversion to killing that they will not even kill murderers, and this strong cultural aversion to killing also makes it less likely that anybody will want to commit murder.
We may have similar reason to promote an aversion to killing fetuses with respect to abortion, killing the terminally ill with respect to euthanasia, or killing animals with respect to eating meat. If we created a society with such a strong aversion to killing, then perhaps it would also be a society where fewer people were being murdered. However, statistics from countries that have lower murder rates relate this fact only to the absence of capital punishment, and not to any of these other concerns.
In short, survival has a great deal of value — that is true. However, its value is largely instrumental (because of its usefulness), which means that its value diminishes as its usefulness diminishes. To force survival on people in situations where survival is not useful to them may prolong their life, but may do so only by taking away from them that which makes life worthwhile.