Is failure to take care of oneself a moral offense?

 

Is failure to take care of oneself a moral offense? There is, of course, a history of this, and I long ago concluded: nonsense, at least when it comes to judging others. What they do is their business, and even if they are reckless, so long as they don't endanger others, I make no pronouncement.

I think your conclusion is quite defensible. Failing to take care of oneself is not, in itself, a moral offense. It can be foolish, imprudent, self-destructive, or sad without thereby becoming immoral.

There is an old tendency—particularly strong in religious and moralistic traditions—to treat the body as something entrusted to us, so that neglecting it becomes a kind of dereliction of duty. From there it is an easy step to judging gluttony, drunkenness, promiscuity, laziness, smoking, and eventually almost any behavior someone regards as insufficiently disciplined. The boundary between prudence and morality gets badly blurred.

I would make one distinction, though. You can have moral obligations arising from the consequences of neglecting yourself, without the neglect itself being immoral. If someone has children who depend upon him, deliberately wrecking his health may impose an unfair burden on them. If someone becomes so intoxicated that he drives, the offense isn't that he mistreated his liver; it's that he endangered other people. And if someone knowingly refuses reasonable treatment while others have undertaken obligations to care for him, questions of fairness can arise.

But absent those effects on others, I don't see much moral ground for judging.

And there is an interesting asymmetry here: we generally don't regard taking care of oneself exceptionally well as a moral achievement either. Someone who eats perfectly, exercises every day, gets eight hours of sleep, never drinks, and has regular medical examinations may be extremely prudent. But I wouldn't call him morally superior to his neighbor who eats doughnuts, smokes cigars, stays up until two in the morning, and dies at seventy.

Perhaps the cleanest distinction is:

Morality asks, "What do I owe other people?"
Prudence asks, "What is sensible for me?"

The two sometimes overlap, but they aren't the same thing. And turning every question of personal prudence into a moral judgment is a remarkably effective way of producing busybodies.

Same page. I think Seventh Day Adventists make an issue of this, but except for smoking and excess alcohol, Jehovah's Witnesses took self-neglect as a sign of immaturity and hence not qualified to become an elder, but otherwise not an offense to God.

Yes, that's a useful distinction, and I think your characterization of the Jehovah's Witness position captures something subtle: the behavior could be evidence of a character deficiency without itself being a transgression.

In the elder context, the question wasn't simply "Does this person eat badly?" but rather "Does this demonstrate a lack of self-control, discipline, or good judgment?" Those qualities mattered because an elder was supposed to be an example to the congregation. So excessive self-neglect could disqualify someone from the office without necessarily meaning that he had committed a sin merely by neglecting himself.

The Seventh-day Adventist tradition goes considerably further. Its health teaching—particularly the emphasis on diet, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, exercise, and general bodily stewardship—has historically been tied much more explicitly to religious obligation. There is a theological idea there that the body is God's property or a temple, so what one does with it has religious significance in itself.

The interesting thing is that both systems can arrive at nearly the same practical recommendation while making quite different moral claims.

And I think your original principle exposes the problem with the stronger version: if I harm myself but nobody else is harmed, where exactly is the injured party who makes this a moral offense? Saying "God is offended" merely relocates the question; it doesn't answer why an omnipotent God should regard my bad cholesterol or my refusal to exercise as a moral transgression.

There is also something wonderfully dangerous about making self-care a moral category. Once you do that, the person who is healthier becomes not merely healthier but better. And that opens the door to judging people for circumstances, habits, appetites, genetics, age, disability, and sheer bad luck. I think your "their business" principle avoids an enormous amount of that nonsense.

Linked to this is the question of suicide and its morality. Here again one may try to intervene, just as one tries to persuade someone to stop smoking, but it is sad but not grounds for moral condemnation.

Yes—and this is where the distinction between moral judgment and intervention becomes especially important.

One can reasonably believe that suicide is a terrible choice, try vigorously to prevent it, and still reject the proposition that the person is therefore morally wicked. Those aren't contradictory positions.

I think the strongest argument for intervention is not "You are doing something immoral" but "You may be making an irreversible decision under circumstances that can change, and I don't want you to die if there is a reasonable chance you would later want to live." That's a very different proposition.

And suicide has the peculiar feature that, unlike smoking or overeating, the harm to oneself is final. That gives other people considerably more reason to intervene temporarily, particularly when someone is acutely distressed, intoxicated, psychotic, or otherwise not exercising their ordinary capacity for deliberation. But even there, intervention needn't imply condemnation.

Historically, of course, Christianity made suicide a particularly clear moral offense. Augustine of Hippo and later Thomas Aquinas supplied influential arguments against it, and Western societies subsequently incorporated those judgments into law and social stigma. There is an interesting irony: the moral condemnation often survived even after the practical legal reasons for treating suicide as a crime largely disappeared.

Your position seems to me to be something like: I may desperately wish that you wouldn't do it; I may try to persuade you; I may even regard the decision as terribly mistaken. But I don't thereby acquire the right to pronounce you a bad person.

That's a considerably more humane position than "You have sinned."

And it fits your earlier distinction nicely: we can have reasons to interfere with someone's choice without pretending that every choice we want to prevent is a moral offense.

"This too will pass." Brain chemicals come and go, and depression with it, sometimes with medical or other forms of help.

Exactly. And that is perhaps the strongest practical argument against moral condemnation.

"This too will pass" isn't always true in the sense that the underlying circumstances will necessarily improve. But the mental state in which a person makes the judgment can change dramatically. Depression can make a permanent solution to a temporary state seem perfectly rational. Then the neurochemistry changes, circumstances change, treatment works, or simply time passes—and the person's evaluation of the same life can be entirely different.

That makes suicide morally rather different from, say, deliberately stealing from someone. In the latter case, the moral judgment concerns an action imposed upon another person. In suicide, the central tragedy is that the person may be making an irreversible decision about his own future while experiencing a profoundly distorted valuation of that future.

So I would distinguish three propositions:

1. "Don't do it." — perfectly reasonable.

2. "Let me help you get through this period." — potentially lifesaving.

3. "You are morally bad for wanting to do it." — a very different proposition, and one I don't think follows.

There is something rather profound in the old phrase this too will pass. It doesn't promise happiness. It merely says the present state of mind is not necessarily a permanent description of reality. That's enough reason to postpone an irreversible decision.

And, as you say, sometimes the answer is medical; sometimes psychological; sometimes social; sometimes simply having somebody sit there and talk nonsense with you until tomorrow. Human beings are biochemical creatures, whether we find that philosophically satisfying or not.