Self-Sacrifice and Moral Philosophy

On 14 February 2018, Nikolaz Cruz carried out a gun attack in a Florida High School, killing 17 people. Among the victims was the 15-year-old school student and junior cadet Peter Wang, who died while holding a door open to allow other students to escape the shooting. Wang’s heroic act of sacrifice prompted US Army to posthumously award him a Medal of Honor, while the military academy West Point honored Wang by admitting him into their class of 2025. Acts of self-sacrifice such as this have a special place in our moral lives. We admire and celebrate those who give up their lives so that others may live. Despite this important role that sacrifice plays in our moral thinking, moral philosophers have had surprisingly little to say about the nature of sacrifice.

This lack of attention to the nature of sacrifice is particularly important given that sacrifice also has an important role to play in several key debates in moral philosophy. The concept features most prominently in the discussion of moral demandingness. Many contributors to this debate claim that there are constraints on the amount of sacrifice that can be morally demanded of people. Following Susan Wolf’s (1982) and Bernard Williams’ (1979) critiques of classical modern moral theories many ethicists now argue that a moral theory that demands huge sacrifices from the addressees of the demands is faulty and must at least be altered.^*

Sacrifice also has a key role to play in the related discussion of supererogation. Since J.O. Urmson’s (1958) influential paper on supererogation, it has been widely accepted that sacrifice is an essential feature of the concept of supererogation. As Dale Dorsey (2013, 357) describes: ‘Many hold that one essential feature of the supererogatory is that supererogatory actions are supererogatory in part because they involve some non-trivial sacrifice to the agent.’ But this standard account of supererogation has recently been challenged by arguments that also make use of the concept of sacrifice. It has been claimed that an act can be supererogatory even if it does not involve any sacrifice on the part of the agent (see Archer 2015, 2016; Ferry 2013; Horgan and Timmons 2010). It has also recently been observed, that sacrifice is the very concept that links these two debates on (over-)demandingess and supererogation (see Benn 2016).

Sacrifice also plays an important role in debates concerning the nature of well-being. It has been claimed that Desire Fulfilment Theory (the view that it is only the fulfilment of desires that is non-instrumentally valuable) should be rejected because it has the absurd implication that self-sacrifice is impossible (Overvold 1980, 117). One response that has been made to this criticism is that it mistakenly assumes that an act of self-sacrifice cannot advance the agent’s self-interest. Connie Rosati (2009, 314) argues against this assumption, claiming ‘an act can both advance a person’s good and constitute an act of self-sacrifice’. Similarly, Joseph Raz (1999) has argued that self-sacrifices do not damage our well-being (see van Ackeren 2016).

Finally, sacrifice has an important role to play in the discussion of care ethics. Care ethics has been proposed as a feminist approach to ethics because it pays attention to the moral experience of women in a way that traditional moral theories do not (Jagger 1991). However, care ethics has also been criticized by feminists for encouraging women to adopt an ethics of self-sacrifice that fails to promote the interests of women (MacKinnon 1987; Hampton 1993).

Given this importance of sacrifice for some important topics in contemporary moral philosophy we might expect there to be a significant philosophical literature examining the nature of sacrifice. This is not the case. In fact, analytic philosophers have only recently started to see sacrifice as something that is worthy of sustained philosophical investigation in its own right. This debate about the nature of sacrifice remains in its infancy and there are not more than a handful papers on this topic, let alone an anthology. Thus the aim of this special issue is to foster a more explicit and direct discussion of the concept of sacrifice and its importance in moral philosophy. The papers in this volume make an important contribution to our understanding of sacrifice in three areas. The first group of papers investigates the nature of sacrifice. The next group of papers investigates the role of sacrifice in moral philosophy. Three of these papers investigate the role of sacrifice in our moral lives generally, while two investigate the role of sacrifice in relation to particular moral theories. The final two papers investigate the value of sacrifice in relation to political and theological issues.

1. The Moral Nature of Sacrifice

The first widely agreed upon feature of sacrifice is that it must involve a cost to the agent performing the act. Jonathan Dancy (1993, 118), for example, defines sacrifice as a ‘cost to the agent’. This element of sacrifice has tended to be the focus of philosophical discussion, though it is perhaps a somewhat thinner notion than the everyday use of the term. As Overvold (1980, 113–114) points out, we might think that the everyday notion of sacrifice involves further features such as the action being performed intentionally or voluntarily.

However, the claim that a sacrifice involves a cost to the agent leaves a number of questions unanswered. The first concerns the relevant comparison against which an act should be considered costly. One option would be to hold that the relevant comparison is to the position the agent was in before performing the act. However, this seems to be the wrong approach, as cases where an agent opts to cut her losses and chooses the least costly option from a range of costly alternatives should not count as cases of sacrifice (Archer 2015, 108). Instead, we should view sacrifice in a counterfactual way, in which the agent is judged to have chosen a costly option over a less costly action that was available to her (Archer 2015, 2016).

The second issue is whether the cost involved in sacrifice should be understood as an overall cost to the agent’s well-being or in a weaker way. Carbonnell (2012, 237) has argued that a sacrifice need not involve an overall cost to the agent. We can also be said to make a sacrifice when we endure some loss that is not compensated for, where this is understood as one that is not directly replaced without loss. For example, consider a child who dedicates her life to becoming a gymnast and so loses out on many of the pleasures of a normal childhood such as playdates, ice cream and lazy weekend mornings. According to Carbonell, the gymnast should count as making a sacrifice even if her decision to dedicate her life to gymnastics results in a net gain in well-being. This view fits most comfortably with an objective list view of well-being according to which there are a number of different sources of well-being.

The contributions in this volume extend this discussion of the moral significance of sacrifice in a number of ways. First, Joseph Raz’ ‘On the Moral Significance of Sacrifice’ discusses great sacrifices, that is those sacrifices that make the life of the agent bad in a serious or permanent way, but do not end her life. He distinguishes various ways in which a sacrifice is of no special moral significance and then indicates different ways in which it is. He then considers the question whether a sacrifice can be morally required by presenting arguments in favour of and against that view. His discussion stresses the need for a finer-grained discussion of sacrifice and exemplifies some of the problems that a unified and systematic theory of sacrifice is facing.

Next, in ‘How Morality Becomes Demanding?’ Marcel van Ackeren investigates what counts as a morally required sacrifice. Most of the literature presupposes the standard account which views demandingness as a matter of costs to the agent but does not argue for it. Very recently, however, various new theories have challenged this standard account. Van Ackeren defends the standard view of demandingness against the recent challenges by presenting a new variant of it. To van Ackeren demandingness is only a matter of costs to the agent. First, he argues against the new difficulty view of demandingness by showing that difficulty can increase demandingness only by being costly. Second, he shows that restrictions of options can increase demandingness only by being costly. He distinguishes three ways restricting options can increase demandingness, namely by prohibiting actions that the agent wants to perform in order to promote his well-being, by limiting the development of future preferences and projects and also by making the society less open.

Vanessa Carbonell in ‘Sacrifice and Relational Well-Being’ starts by acknowledging that the well-being account of sacrifice is attractive. However, she then argues that sacrifices made on behalf of loved ones may be problematic for this account. She argues that ‘loving sacrifices’ occur in a context where the agent’s well-being and the beneficiary’s well-being are intertwined, and concludes that a notion of ‘relational well-being’, analogous to ‘relational autonomy’, can help account for loving sacrifices without rejecting the well-being theory of sacrifice. This discussion not only highlights the intricate relation of sacrifice and well-being but also stresses the relational character of sacrifice.

2. Sacrifice and Ethical Theory

As we have already discussed, one of the main debates in which sacrifice plays an important role is the discussion of moral demandingness. Key to this discussion is the question of how much sacrifice to their own well-being can be morally demanded of people. The papers in this volume extend this discussion in several important ways.

Stephanie Collins’ ‘When Does Can Imply Ought’ investigates an intuitively plausible moral principle that she calls ‘The Assistance Principle’. According to this principle, if we have the opportunity to fulfil important interests at not too high a cost then we have a duty to do so. Collins investigates how the concept of sacrifice should inform our understanding and implementation of this principle. She argues that we need to accept a tripartite conception of sacrifice that includes agent-relative, recipient-relative, and ideal-relative sacrifice in interpreting and applying the assistance principle. In doing so, she provides a more nuanced and informative account of the assistance principle than can be found in the existing literature on the topic.

In ‘Sacrificing Value’ Lisa Tessman discusses sacrifice in relation to a conflict of values. She argues that some conflicts of values are genuine dilemmas, so that no resolution is morally clean. In cases of conflict in which self-sacrifice is one of the options, ambivalence may be particularly appropriate. There may be in such cases special sources of plurality and incommensurability of values, because in part the conflict is likely to be between something that is valued by a social group, and something that is valued particularly by an individual who has to consider self-sacrificing. And in part it is because individuals may have trouble balancing self-regarding and other-regarding concerns in the process of value construction. Tessmann provides a rich elaboration of these complications, and presents cases in which we might suspect that someone has self-sacrificed too much or too little.

Jörg Löschke’s ‘The Value of Sacrifices’ provides a fruitful new perspective on the value of sacrifice by investigating an unexplored aspect of sacrifice. Löschke argues that there are cases in which the sacrifice of person A can have an impact on the practical reasons of person B, either by generating practical reasons for B to act in certain ways or by intensifying existing reasons of B for specific courses of action. Löschke argues that sacrifices can have other-regarding normative impact because sacrifices can be intrinsically good. The intrinsic value of sacrifices is explained by the recursive account of value: sacrifices are intrinsically good if and because they are appropriate responses to intrinsic values, and appropriate responses to intrinsic values are themselves intrinsically good. Furthermore, sacrifices are difficult to make, and successful pursuit in difficult activities can also be intrinsically good.

The second group of papers in this section discusses sacrifices with regard to one distinct normative moral theory. In ‘Sentimentalist Practical Reason and Self-Sacrifice’ Michael Slote further develops his own sentimentalist approach to morality by showing that the sentimentalist can seek to reduce practical to sentimentalist considerations. Slote starts by observing that sentimentalists are hesitant to offer accounts of moral reasons for action. Slote argues that prudential reasons can be identified with the normal emotional/motivational responses people feel in situations that threaten them or offer them opportunities to attain what they need. And in the most basic cases altruistic/moral reasons involve the empathic transfer of one person’s prudential reasons and emotions to another person or persons who can help them. Practical/moral reasons for self-sacrifice also depend on empathic transfer and can vary in strength with the strength of the transfer.

Consequentialism is the normative ethical view that is most often objected to for the level of sacrifices it requires from people. In ‘Demandingness and Boundaries Between Persons’ Edward Harcourt advances this discussion by providing a novel demandingness objection to consequentialism. He starts by arguing that many arguments in the debate concerning the stranger/special other distinction are in error thanks to assumptions they share about our relations with special others, which focus entirely on what we pleasurably sacrifice to special others (see Carbonell’s contribution) and not at all on what we properly withhold from them. He then argues that boundaries between ourselves and our special others are a common feature of our relations with special others but also a good-making feature of them. He concludes that demandingness objections that rely on the argument in question fail. But he claims that the same observations about our relations with special others can give rise to a more plausible objection according to which there are demands strangers may not properly make on us.

3. Sacrifice and Protest

The final two papers in the volume consider, in different ways, the role that sacrifice can play in political protest. Amanda Cawston and Alfred Archer’s ‘Rehabilitating Self-Sacrifice: Care Ethics and the Politics of Resistance’ investigates how feminists should view acts of self-sacrifice performed by women. According to a prominent feminist critique of care ethics, such acts may run counter to feminist aims. Feminist critics of care ethics claim that this approach to morality encourages women to engage in acts of self-sacrifice rather than to promote their own well-being and development. Care ethicists have responded to this critique by identifying limits on the level, form or scope of self-sacrifice that work to restrict its role in their theories. Cawston and Archer argue that these responses fail to appreciate the positive value that self-sacrifice can play in combatting patriarchal oppression. They then provide a new response to the critique of care ethics by exploring these positive roles for self-sacrifice and thereby rehabilitate its standing with feminists.

The final paper in the volume is Sophie-Grace Chappell’s ‘The Cross’. Chappell explores the nature of sacrifice through a detailed investigation of the Christian conception of sacrifice. Chappell explores this conception through a rich and detailed investigation of what the New Testament tells us about what Jesus was doing in allowing himself to be crucified. There are two groups of meanings of this sacrifice, political and personal. The political element of this sacrifice stems from the fact that Jesus’ public proclamations of his teachings were in defiance of the authorities of the time and he knew that his execution was the inevitable consequence of this defiance. The personal aspect has to be seen, according to Chappell, in the terms of Levitical ritual sacrifice. However, it is a ritual sacrifice that transcends, consummates and abolishes ritual sacrifice. As well as providing a fresh perspective on how sacrifice in general should be understood, Chappell makes a convincing case that in order to understand Christ’s sacrifice we need to pay more attention to how The Bible explains it.

Notes

* The editors have contributed equally to the production of this special issue and the names are listed in alphabetical order.