How to Save a Life

My job during the summer is to be a lifeguard.  Watching water all day is surprisingly hard work, at least when you work at a waterpark, so there's not a lot of spare mental capacity while I'm on the job.  Nevertheless, I have found myself musing while I work about the role of a lifeguard. As a lifeguard, my job is, broadly speaking, to protect human life.  My job is not to ask whether life is something which is worth protecting.  I am not concerned with whether the people I am protecting want to be alive.  I do not ask such philosophical questions such as whether it is better to be alive or dead, or what the social benefits of a particular person's life is.  No, my job is just to save your life if it comes to that.  Life is the value and the good I am single mindedly charged with protecting.

I suppose it's worth mentioning that I am employed by the county government.  The municipality I am working for has, for whatever reason, has decided that life is worth protecting.  And so it pays me to do just that.

Just as we need lifeguards (and doctors, firefighters, etc.) to enforce the ideal (here that life is a chief good to be protected), we need philosophers (and theologians, lawyers, politicians, etc.) to protect the ideal itself.  There needs to be someone who reminds us why we place a value on the things we do.  Chesterton always seems intrude upon these posts.  Needless to say, one can hardly go wrong by submitting to Mr. Chesterton's intrusions.  Therefore, I unapologetically place one of my favorite quotes from him here, which concerns the importance of ideals.

Nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

Orthodoxy, Chapter VII, The Eternal Revolution

Since nature doesn't give us ideals, we need human ideals and we need unpractical people to argue about them and hold the right ones in place.  Human nature ensures that we are going to hold some doctrine, so it's worth making sure the doctrine we are holding is the right one.