Topics Ethics

Question Is bravery - for example risking or giving one's life to save a stranger's, while one has loved-ones and dependents - laudable, or even defensible, under any theories of ethics? There are many examples of people giving up their lives - and by consequence severely afflicting those of their immediate family - through acts of self-sacrifice. Are these acts justifiable? Sometimes the risks of this kind of uncalculating bravery are so great, it seems that no reasonable person would do it, yet some do, and most people (me included) praises them for it - is this reasonable?

Accepted:
February 2, 2011

Comments

Great question! It does seem that there are cases when family or romantic relations would provide a very good reason for a person not to engage in heroic self-sacrifice. Imagine a peson is deciding between professions: a crime fighter who would be in a unit where there is a 30% morality rate over a full career or a physician. Imagine both tasks would involve saving the same number of lives, but being a physician has a very low probability of injury or even threats and so would require less bravery. If you were in that position of deciding what to do and your partner / family urged you to be a physician, I think you might have a family duty to take the less brave choice. There is actually a Biblical edict in Deuteronomy, I think, that notes that when a soldier marries, he is relieved of military duties for one or two years. That would be a case in which family / perhaps romantic love (?) might trump one's obligation to be brave in battle. Perhaps, though, the hero who saves the stranger is also motivated by the realization that this stranger may also have immediate family, a lover or spouse and friends. The hero might also want other heroes to step in if her or his family is under threat. And a hero might even wish for her or his own children to be brave heroes rather than cowards?

You might dislike popular culture, but if you are ok with it Tricia Little and I have co-authored a paper on precisely this matter in the forthcoming book: Spiderman and Philosophy. It will be published when the next Spiderman film is (finally) released.