Schroeder argues that prioritizing survival and bodily integrity above all other ends would be authoritarian and constrain individuals to a single monolithic result. Individuals want more from life than just survival, such as pursuing individual life plans, forming relationships, and conceiving ways to improve themselves and their communities. A just society should value and respect individual liberty and initiative, both for the concrete impacts it sometimes has and for the freedom and integrity acknowledged when people are free to conceive and act on their own initiatives.
Schroeder argues that prioritizing survival and bodily integrity above all other ends would be authoritarian and constrain individuals to a single monolithic result. Individuals want more from life than just survival, such as pursuing individual life plans, forming relationships, and conceiving ways to improve themselves and their communities. A just society should value and respect individual liberty and initiative, both for the concrete impacts it sometimes has and for the freedom and integrity acknowledged when people are free to conceive and act on their own initiatives.
Schroeder argues that prioritizing survival and bodily integrity above all other ends would be authoritarian and constrain individuals to a single monolithic result. Individuals want more from life than just survival, such as pursuing individual life plans, forming relationships, and conceiving ways to improve themselves and their communities. A just society should value and respect individual liberty and initiative, both for the concrete impacts it sometimes has and for the freedom and integrity acknowledged when people are free to conceive and act on their own initiatives.
Schroeder argues that prioritizing survival and bodily integrity above all other ends would be authoritarian and constrain individuals to a single monolithic result. Individuals want more from life than just survival, such as pursuing individual life plans, forming relationships, and conceiving ways to improve themselves and their communities. A just society should value and respect individual liberty and initiative, both for the concrete impacts it sometimes has and for the freedom and integrity acknowledged when people are free to conceive and act on their own initiatives.
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Sub Point B.
Schroeder explains that sacrificing rights to preserve life produces
authoritarianism. (Schroeder, Christopher H. Professor of Law, Duke University; Visiting Professor of Law, UCLA 1985- 86, 1986, Columbia Law Review, Rights Against Risks, 86 Colum. L. Rev. 495) Actually, expanding the idea of preservation to include bodily integrity on the basis of quality of life considerations has already pointed the way to a more realistic statement of those individual characteristics worth protecting. The same considerations of quality of life counsel recognizing some freedom of action and initiative within the definition of the morally relevant aspects of the individual. Doing so is consistent with a long political and philosophical heritage. 90 Deeply ingrained in practically all theories of the rights tradition is the vision of a person as capable of forming and entitled to pursue some individual life plan. 91 Given this vision, placing survival or bodily integrity absolutely above all other ends would be tantamount to saying that the life plan that one ought to adopt is that of prolonging life at all costs. That idea is unacceptably authoritarian and regimented. It would be extremely anomalous for a theory supposedly centered on the autonomy of the individual to result in a conception of justice that constrained all individuals to a monolithic result. Individual human beings want more from their lives than simple bodily integrity, and the conception of an individual, of what defines and constitutes a person, as so limited is peculiarly impoverished. Individuals are capable of formulating and pursuing life plans, of forming bonds of love, commitment, and friendship on which they subsequently act, of conceiving images of self- and community-improvement. Some of these may directly advance interests in human survival, as when dedicated doctors and scientists pursue solutions to cancer or develop chemical pesticides with a view to assisting agricultural self-sufficiency in developing countries. Some may dramatically advance the "quality of life," rather than survival itself, as when Guttenberg's press made literature more widely available or when Henry Ford pioneered the mass production of the automobile. However, even individual initiatives of much less demonstrable impact on the lives of others constitute a vital element that makes human life distinctively human. A just society ought to understand and value this element both in the concrete results it sometimes produces and in the freedom and integrity that are acknowledged when individual liberty to conceive and act upon initiative is respected.