by Wayne Dunn

"You should sacrifice for the sake of others." Most of us were raised on that slogan. In fact, it is commonly preached that morality and sacrifice travel hand-in-hand, that the former can never even be approached without generous portions of the latter.

But is sacrifice really a necessary component of morality, as we've been taught?

Before beginning to answer that question, one must understand what a sacrifice is—and what it is not.

Unfortunately "sacrifice" is misused to describe practically anything that involves helping others, performing unpleasant tasks, or forgoing personal desires. But in order for it to convey a precise meaning, a word must be defined by only the most essential characteristics of the concept it names. One does not, for example, define "car" as "something that moves and has color," though cars do in fact move and do in fact have color—but so do birds, comets, smoke, and hula-dancers. Likewise, "sacrifice" must be limited to its essentials; it must be defined so as not to include every action under the sun.

You sacrifice only when you surrender something you value for the sake of something you value less or not at all. But before continuing, one must know what a "value" is.

A value, according to philosopher Ayn Rand, is "something you act to gain and/or keep." If you act to gain a car, for example, then a car is something you value. If you act to gain illegal drugs, then drugs are something you value. As you can see, the mere fact that one acts to gain something one might think is a value doesn't necessarily mean it is. Some people, clearly, engage in irrational or outright self-destructive behavior, which they may fully desire to do. But regardless of the nature of their desires, the fact remains that each individual values some things more highly than he does other things. In other words, each person has his own hierarchy or scale of values, whether it is rational or not, whether he bothers to evaluate it or not, or whether he even realizes it or not. (This does not mean that varying "values" are equal ¾ it merely means merely they vary).

To reiterate, a sacrifice is when you relinquish a higher value to preserve or obtain a lesser one. For instance, if you value your friendship with A more than your friendship with B, but yet you break with A at B's inexplicable request, you have sacrificed—you have surrendered your higher value to a lower one.

If that were reversed—if you surrendered a lesser value for the sake of a greater one¾ then you have not actually sacrificed. If, for example, you severed ties with B after discovering he was deliberately subverting your more highly valued friendship with A, then your action was not sacrificial. Jettisoning a lower value in order to uphold a higher one is not really a sacrifice, but, in the long run, is a benefit, a gain. And you should call a gain a gain.

To further illustrate, the student who values education more than her expensive stereo is not sacrificing when she sells it to pay for tuition. She is upholding her higher value. She expects to profit, not lose, in the long run. She knows that her self-interest is better advanced with an education than with a music-system. The mother who skips her favorite program in order to attend her kid's basketball game is not sacrificing if she values her child's endeavors more than an evening in front on the TV. She is espousing her higher value. She knows her own self-interest is promoted by endorsing the rational desires of the person she chose to raise. The man with lung cancer does not sacrifice when he forgoes smoking the cigarette he craves. He is embracing his higher value. He desires to benefit, not lose, from his abstinence. He knows that his self-interest is served by being healthier. The person who joins the army to preserve freedom for himself and his loved ones is not sacrificing. He is defending something he highly values; he knows that it's to his benefit, not detriment, to live in a free country. He is personally interested in freedom.

When viewed in context and approached with an exact definition, it is clear that many actions commonly called sacrifices are actually self-interested investments. For instance, if a baseball pitcher spends several hours practicing each day in the grueling heat and, as a result, pitches a no-hitter that propels his team to the championships, he did not sacrifice. He did exactly what he wanted to do to attain a rational goal he wanted to attain. Could anyone argue that he had no personal desire to see his team win? Or that he did it only for his team, that he himself didn't care one way or another about his own performance? Of course not.

There is one other possibility regarding the surrender of a value: doing so to obtain an equal value. But that's not a sacrifice¾ that's a trade. When you buy a pair of shoes, you are neither sacrificing your money nor is the store owner sacrificing her footwear. Both parties are trading value for value, and to both, it's worth it. The same could be said, for instance, about two friends who spend time together. If they did not trade values, i.e., if one (or both) derived no personal benefit from knowing the other, then they should not bother calling themselves friends.

"But isn't sacrifice justified," one might ask, "in issues of life and death?" Let's look at such an example.

Imagine a woman whose husband, whom she loved above all else, needed a lifesaving surgery. She used all her money, sold her favorite jewelry, and took an extra job to pay for his operation, and, consequently, he lived. Regardless of how most might characterize her actions, the wife did not sacrifice. She valued him more than all the money she spent on his cure. She surrendered her lower values—money, time, and personal possessions—to uphold her highest value, her husband. She did not lose by preserving the life of the man she loves—she gained.

What, then, would have entailed a sacrifice in that scenario? Well, if the woman valued the money above the man, yet saved him anyway—perhaps out of a sense of duty or out of fears of what relatives might think—then the expensive operation was a sacrifice. She jettisoned her higher value, money, to save a man she held in lower regard.

We are taught that sacrifice is praiseworthy. But should the man prefer his wife regard his preservation as a matter of self-sacrifice? And should we heap praise on the type of person who would consider it a sacrifice?

Now let us look at a variation on the above example. Imagine if the woman had been posed with the option of saving either her beloved or five total strangers. Are not five lives better than one? What, then, is the difference between her husband and the five other people? Nothing except his value to his wife. She actually has an interest in his welfare—a selfish interest. She realizes that her own life is much better with him in it. She loves him more than anyone else and, perhaps, has no desire to live without him. She has enormous concern—personal, self-interested concern—for his well-being. She does not have the same interest in the five strangers. Saving them at the expense of her husband would constitute a tremendous self-sacrifice for her.

Most people would instantly choose their spouse over total strangers (or even friends), and would have no regrets about it. But, being ingrained with the morality of self-sacrifice, people generally would not regard that decision as exceptionally virtuous. You do not score humanitarian brownie points by helping someone you undyingly love. Why not? Precisely because you yourself benefit from your action—precisely because upholding the people you value is an act imbued with self-interest (although most people do not formally characterize it that way).

Now, imagine if the woman had saved the five at the expense of her cherished husband. She would likely be hailed as a saint because—and only because—she sacrificed something she valued. If you doubt that, consider what would happen if it were later learned that she had not really loved her husband, as believed, but had saved the others only because she was secretly in love with one of them. Her humanitarian status would undoubtedly be revoked. But why would that be, if the end result—the five having been saved—was the same? Because then her act would be seen, not as a sacrifice, but as one "tarnished" by "mere" self-interest.

Morality, we are taught, equates to sacrifice. To be moral, according to that code, one is obliged to lose, to renounce, to surrender, to abdicate, to forfeit one's time, money, possessions, relationships, dreams, aspirations, goals, ambitions, and sacrifice them for the sake of others. Yet life requires—what? Life, fundamentally, requires self-interested, goal-oriented, value-gaining actions. In other words, life demands the polar opposite of what the morality of self-sacrifice praises. One can only conclude, then, that the ethics of self-sacrifice is the enemy of life, that the sacrificial morality, in all its variations, offers only this to the individual: an altar upon which to butcher his values—and a standing ovation when he plunges the knife.

But if that's true—if life, fundamentally, demands self-interested action—how, then, does a proponent of self-sacrifice manage to remain alive? He lives by not sacrificing constantly, by not always practicing what he preaches, by alternating and flip-flopping between serving his own needs and serving the needs of others. His favorite catch phrase, which is really an escape clause, is, "No need to go to extremes," which means, "No need to be consistent." And that's exactly the point: he can't be consistent—not if he actually wants to live. The degree to which he survives is directly proportional to the degree to which he shirks his sacrificial moral system and, instead, pursues his own interests and values.

When you understand sacrifice, you understand that it inescapably involves values. And values amount to people, things, or ideas. So where there is sacrifice, there are people, things, or ideas being sacrificed. If your system of ethics resembles a sacrificial furnace, realize that it is being fueled by values. And that is precisely the reason why any morality that extols sacrifice must be rejected¾ rejected outright and replaced by a system of ethics based, not on sacrificing values, but on rationally identifying, pursuing, gaining and upholding them.

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