In other chapters of this essay I discuss the use of one-line rules for ethical guidance. The Golden Rule and the imperatives of Kant and Sartre try to encapsulate the essence of right behavior in one, memorable sentence.
Well, when thinking about death the other day, I conceived a new imperative that is at least as useful a touchstone as the others. I call it the Mortal Imperative:
Always choose the action that maximizes the number of people who will be sorry to hear of your death.
This is a really effective guide to right behavior! Here are some reasons why.
You do not know when you will die. It could happen in the next five minutes. For this reason you can never drop your ethical standards temporarily. No cheating someone today, planning to make up for it tomorrow: You might die before tomorrow!
You can live a near-passive life under the Golden Rule or the Imperatives if Kant and Sartre. As long as you do nothing bad to someone else, you don't violate those imperatives, even if you do nothing useful at all.
Not so with the Mortal Imperative. If you just sit there passively, you are doing nothing to increase the number of people who will regret your passing. Indeed, the longer you sit still, the fewer people who will remember you at all. In order to really live up to the Mortal Imperative, you must take continuous, positive action to reach out to other people.
In other words, consider the choice between
The first choice does nothing to increase the number of people who will miss you, and if you choose it often enough, fewer and fewer people will have reason to remember you warmly. The second choice merely helps maintain the current number of your mourners. Only the third choice acts to increase their number. The Mortal Imperative demands positive action.
The Mortal Imperative adapts nicely as your life situation changes with age. During youth, it encourages education and constructive experimentation. Why? Because what people most regret when they hear of the death of a young person is the lost of promise and potential. So the Mortal Imperative urges a young person to act to increase his or her promise and potential, by learning more, and testing and developing his or her skills in more ways.
When you die in maturity, what people regret most is the loss of someone who was a contributor to society, someone who will be hard to replace because they did many things, handled many responsibilities, and was involved in many other lives. So the Mortal Imperative urges the mature person to contribute and cope and participate in as many ways as possible.
And what people regret about the death of an elderly person is the loss of their dignity and personality. The Mortal Imperative directs an older person to be dignified, and to be an example of acceptance and wisdom.
When speaking of the Golden Rule and Kant's and Sartre's Imperatives, I objected that all three could be subverted by sophistry, largely because they depend entirely on the actor's choices with no community input. An insane person can sidestep them, and a mischeivous person can subvert them.
It is much harder to subvert the Mortal Imperative. This is because it depends, not on the actor's choices alone, but on how other people feel about those choices. It is much easier to persuade yourself that a crime is justified under the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative, than it is to persuade yourself that other people would regret your passing more after you commit a crime.
While some paranoids can persuade themselves that others will see them as heros (the assassins of John Lennon and Robert Kennedy thought this, for example), most insane people still have a fairly shrewd idea of what other peoples' opinions really are.
Here's how the Mortal Imperative compares on the four criteria:
| Prescriptive | Yes. |
| Authority | Personal affirmation only; but incorporates community standards by implication. |
| Compact | Extremely compact and highly memorizable. |
| Coverage | Covers all interaction about which other people might have an opinion. |
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