Taking Someone Else’s Life

    Are you taking someone’s life without even being aware of it? You might be doing just that, as the following true life story illustrates. 

    A father was telling his graduate son what career the young man should pursue. The son listened to what his father had to say and then, very respectfully, replied, “You’ve lived your life and now you want to live mine. That is, while you’ll get to live two lives, yours and mine, i’ll get to live no life at all. Why do you want to take my life from me?” 

    This story had a happy ending. The father allowed his son to pursue his own choice of career, which the young man did with great success. But, most importantly, he got to live his own life, and not have it taken away from him by his well-meaning father. 

    Without being aware of it, all of us try to take away the lives of other people, more often than not for the most well-intentioned of reasons. We try to take away the lives of our children, or our spouses, or our friends, or others we come in contact with. We try to take away their lives from them by wanting them to do not what they might want to do, but what we want them to do. We want them to live not how they would chose to live, but how we think they should live. We want to live their lives as well as live our own. 

    We might genuinely have at heart the best interests of those whose lives we seek to lead. But no matter how laudable – and indeed sensible, from the practical point of view – our intervention in seeking to live someone else’s life for them might be, it still amounts to our leading two, or more, lives at the expense of those whose lives we metaphorically take away from them. 

    One of the most forceful champions of the inalienable right of individuals to live their lives according to their legitimate and lawful inclinations was the moral philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant’s famous ‘categorical imperative’ forms the foundation of almost all modern discourse on morality and ethics, including the principle of universal human rights. 
    Shorn of the technical jargon much loved by philosophers – Kant being no exception to this rule – the ‘categorical imperative’, the moral compass, which must guide us in all our dealings with our fellow human beings, be they family and friends or total strangers, is that we must treat all individuals as ends in themselves, and not as means to an end that we desire of them. Our children, our    family members, and the lives they lead are ends in themselves, and not a means by which we can lead surrogate lives through them. 

    Does this mean that we should not give practical advice to people in order to save them from possible harm? Of course not. If a child is about to put her hand on a red-hot tawa which will burn her we are morally obliged not only to advise her not to do so, but to yank her hand away from danger. Similarly, if we know that someone is wilfully about to break the law, or risk exposure to disease by unhealthy habits such as smoking, we would be failing our moral duty if we didn’t try to prevent them from doing so. 

    The moral of the story is, live your own life, and let others live theirs. In simple, un-Kantian language, live and let live. Not live and let die

Jug Suraiya 

THE SPEAKING TREE