Hey y’all, hope you are well! I wanted to write a post about Sacrifice and Morality and get some of your opinions on the subject.

I will use Sacrifice to mean, “a voluntary action that causes a significant cost to the agent enacting it” - whether the “cost” deals with money, livelihood, or pleasure depends on the kind of sacrifice. I fleshed this definition out from Jonathan Dancy’s writings and some of my own thoughts.
Is sacrifice a good thing? I think by and large that most people would posit that sacrifice is a good thing and sometimes even a morally demanding/necessary thing. We make sacrifices everyday for the betterment of others, often without realizing it, but here I am talking more about big, life-for-life type sacrifices. I think that the world’s views about sacrifice come from our core morality. However, if one is a moral anti-realist or moral nihilist, then they cannot posit that sacrifice is a good thing, because there is no “good”/“bad” intrinsic value in anything. Mackie would contend that there are no moral properties, so saying “Sacrifice is good” or any other moral assertion is false through and through. But do our deepest moral convictions, the ones we have built society on and the ones that govern how we treat others in our day-to-day lives reveal this to be true? A naturalist/moral nihilist would see these core moral beliefs that feel like they are good/true, like “sacrifice is good when necessary”, as the byproduct of evolutionary biology. I want to argue that an evolutionary approach to this argument is faulty, as giving up one’s life for someone works directly at odds to the idea of “reproductive success/fitness” as your life ends and your genes end with you, yet sacrifice is widely held to be “good” in our core morality. To examine this, I think that a modified Trolley problem might be useful, and we don’t see them enough in the Philosophy of Religion forums so I think it’ll be fun! Here we go!

1) We find ourselves with a core morality
2) If naturalism and moral nihilism are true, then there are no moral values or obligations
3) A part of this core morality (P1) is the belief that there may be an obligation to sacrifice oneself for the betterment of others (altruism), and that this sacrifice is a good thing (a moral value)
C) Therefore, naturalism and moral nihilism are false

Maybe I don’t want to make the conclusion so rigid as “these two things are false”, so I could substitute that they are less likely to be true than moral realism by changing the premises up a bit, but you get the point.

If you want to say that (3) is false, and that sacrifice is not good or bad, but only seems to be good/obligatory because of an evolutionary argument for a core morality, I’d wonder how some acts of self-sacrifice could be explained in this way. Like in this Trolly Problem:

You find yourself stuck on a trolley track and see 5 people you do not know tied to a different set of tracks parallel to yours. The runaway trolley is heading towards the 5 people, and you notice that a lever lies in reach of your hand. If you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to your set of tracks and you will be runover instead. Do you pull the lever to sacrifice yourself or allow the 5 to die.

Or, imagine you are flying a plane and you realize that you forgot to fill it up with fuel before taking off, and the plane has run out of gas mid-flight. The plane is barreling downwards towards a school below you. You could eject from the plane, and survive, but the plane will certainly crash into the school. Or, you could remain in the plane and direct it towards the field beside the playground and spare the people inside the school. Do you have an obligation to sacrifice yourself, because you are the reason that the plane is falling? How does sacrificing yourself make any sense in an evolutionary view of our core morality? Are crashing into the school and sacrificing yourself the same?

Let me know what you think, and I can tweak the little things if y’all poke a bunch of holes in this one!