Sacrificing Value

ABSTRACT

When is sacrifice – and particularly self-sacrifice – called for? This question turns out to be difficult to answer, for it tends to arise when values conflict, and hence the answer to it depends on how conflicts of values are to be resolved. If values are constructed, and if there is no single right way to construct them or prioritize them when they conflict, though there are identifiable ways in which the construction of values can go wrong, we may be left in a position of ambivalence about what should be sacrificed. In cases of conflict in which self-sacrifice is one of the options, ambivalence may be particularly appropriate. In part this is because there may be in such cases special sources of plurality and incommensurability of values, because 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. This paper elaborates these complications, and presents cases in which we might suspect that someone has self-sacrificed too much or too little.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-sacrifice
• pluralism
• constructivism
• adaptive preferences
• pathological altruism
• opportunity hoarding

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a comparison with other ways of treating this point, see Rosati (2009), who remarks that ‘the key to understanding self-sacrifice is, so to speak, to put the self back into the sacrifice’ (313); and Carbonell (2015), who responds to Rosati’s remark by noting that we can distinguish between what is traditionally called ‘self-sacrifice’ and what she dubs ‘sacrifices of self’, a term that she uses to refer to cases in which what is sacrificed is ‘our identity or moral agency’ (55). I use the term ‘self-sacrifice’ to be inclusive of what Carbonell calls ‘sacrifices of self’.

2. Carbonell’s (2012, 2015) discussions of self-sacrifice also emphasize the implications of value pluralism, including the lack of commensurability and inter-substitutability of values.

3. I have in mind the kind of consequentialism that Tim Mulgan (2001, 38) refers to a ‘simple consequentialism’.

4. For a full account of my position, see Tessman 2015.

5. See Bagnoli 2002; Lenman 2010; Lenman and Shemmer 2012; Street 2012.

6. This position is fully developed in Tessman 2015, esp. ch. 3.

7. A very similar claim is made by Margaret Urban Walker (2003, 109), who argues that when our moral understandings are made transparent and we see them for what they actually are, we will lose confidence in them if ‘these understandings turn out to be driven by deception, manipulation, coercion, or violence directed at some of us by others, where all are nonetheless supposed to ‘share’ in this purported vision of the good’.

8. The agentic skills include: (1) Introspection skills; (2) Communication skills; (3) Memory skills; (4) Imagination skills; (5) Analytical skills and reasoning skills; (6) Self-nurturing skills; (7) Volitional skills; and 8; Interpersonal skills. (Meyers 2002, 20; see also1989; for an earlier version).

9. Thus the ‘do-gooder’ differs from the ‘moral saints’ discussed in Carbonell 2012, for she stipulates that they are not pathological (228).

10. See https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ and http://www.givewell.org/.