Hell no. Only a jerk or psychopath would make saving your life contingent on any kind of quid pro quo.
That’s a bad misreading of what MrDibble actually wrote. It’s far more evident that it is extortion that doesn’t mean much to him, and I totally agree with this.
One’s word, given under duress, is not one’s given word. It’s one’s compelled foresworn insincere and unmeant vow, an empty promise, null and void upon the instance of its utterance. It isn’t “my word,” but a lie I had to tell to stay alive when a monstrous stinkard threatened to leave me to die if I didn’t say it.
If I point a gun at you and say, “You will vote for Trump, or else I’ll just kill you now,” and you say, “Okay, yeah, right, sure, you got it, uh huh, I promise I will vote for Trump,” are you bound to “keep your word” and vote for Trump?
To me, that was never an actual promise. I withheld consent, and maintained a mental exemption. The contract fails to attain a “meeting of minds.” It is not a contract at all, and there is no court in the U.S. (probably the world) that would compel you to fulfill it.
Note that I was specifically replying to Dibble’s assertion that the billionaire has no obligation to pay Sean the promised million dollars for risking her lifeto save his.
As I wrote above, I’m okay with refusing to pay up sexually; the right to bodily autonomy is absolute. But it seems to me that calling the risking of one’s life for the sake of another “extortion” is absurd. Sean did not create the situation; Sean would have been perfectly justified in getting the hell out of hte basement once it was obvious the building was coming down around their ears. How is it unreasonable for Sean to ask for a reason to risk her own neck?
Seems to me that for an act to be extortion, the actor must be proposing to do something she has no right to do. Sean was contemplating NOT doing something that she had every right to refrain from doing.
Yup but I don’t think it’s just the active/passive element that’s a problem here. There’s also a problem of setting a threshold for what constitues enough distress/duress to invalidate a financial promise.
Say somebody loses their job, misses some mortgage payments, is under threat of eviction in a month. You make them a cash offer to buy their house. It’s a lowball compared to what they might get if they could spruce up their house and market it through normal channels over a few months, but your offer is the best they have. They agree to sell to you. Before closing, they inherit enough money, they are no longer in distress, and they want to renegue on the sale. Here, I think nobody would say that you were being unethical to hold them to the sale.
From here, you could create a continuous set of hypotheticals between this situation and a situation where somebody is under threat of immediate sudden death, with progressively greater amounts of distress/duress, and I don’t see where there is any bright line about where the level of distress/duress is so great that somebody should not be held to financial commitments.
Riemann, the difference between your hypo and mine is that. in mine, Sean actually does what is promised, and without it the billionaire would have died. Sean delivered on his promise. For yours to be a genuine parallel, the home buyer would have had to pay up as promised (the way Sean got you/Chris/Bill Gates out of the burning building, nearly dyingin the process), and then the seller would refuse to vacate the house.
And even if your seller offers to refund the buyer’s money, the situations still aren’t truly parallel. In the burning house case, the billionaire would have died stands to lose much more than his house. Given the choice between losing your house and dying, you wouldn’t take the former?
This wasn’t the aspect I was seeking to address.
My point is that other posters have said that where distress/duress is present, there is no obligation to honor a financial promise - one can renege without ethical qualms.
I’m not concerned about the details of any particular financial promise. I’m asking how much distress/duress must be present in order that one can ethically renege on any promise made in those circumstances.
My hypo about the house was simply meant to be one where most people would agree that the level of distress/duress is low enough that the financial promise should be ethically binding. At the other extreme, in your hypo with the threat of imminent death, the level of distress/duress is high enough that (some say) the financial promise should not be ethically binding. But it’s a quantitative difference, and we could create other hypotheticals with intermediate levels of distress/duress in between — and there’s no bright line.
It’s not magically not duress just because someone’s a billionaire.
Freedom to refuse sex isn’t the root of any of my objection to the scenario. it’s entirely hinged on the duress of it all. Wouldn’t matter if it was “Give me your favourite teddy bear” or “be my prom date”, I would feel zero obligation to any promise made while my life is under threat.
There is no “obligation” to pay extortionists.
Yes, because it’s extortion.
A man’s life is more or less priceless, and that’s independent of the money he has to pay.
At no point in this entire convo have I said anything about “expecting” Sean to do anything.
Note at no point am I arguing that it wasn’t a lie, to promise Sean that you’d pay them. Just that it’s OK to lie to extortionists, just like it’s OK to lie to Nazis when you have Jews in the attic.
Sure you have. You say that it’s okay, in order to save your own life, to entice Sean into risking her life with a promise and then to break that promise. If Sean had demanded payment ahead of time – said “Give me your Rolex right now and I’ll keep trying to push this rubble off you” – and then skedaddled after taking it, you’d call her actions immoral, I"m sure. I don’t see how refusing to pay for a priceless service which you desperately needed, which Sean had no obligation to provide, and which put her in substantial dange, is any less immoral.
One of the variant has the person in jeopardy initiate the proposed exchange, offering to pay Sean to undertake the risk. Others have said they’re still okay with stiffing Sean in that circumstance as well. Are you?
Maybe it’s cause I’m old fashion, maybe it’s the soldier in me, but I personally think asking for anything in return for saving someone’s life as immoral. I also think the idea of leaving someone to die as cowardly.
The point I’m trying to make is that Sean is scum.
Two different times I’ve started to respond to your original hypothetical, but stopped because I found the topic too upsetting. I’m not blaming you for that; I don’t think it’s wrong to pose a disturbing hypothetical, and the thread title provides fair warning about the content.
However, what I find far more disturbing than the imaginary scenario in the OP is the way you keep trying to shame people for not wanting to submit to what is essentially (although I’d guess not legally) a rape. It may be that by “pay” above you meant to refer only to payment with money, but you started this thread to ask about payment with sex and it is impossible (for me, at least) to forget that.
I am telling you this because I usually enjoy your posts and believe that you probably do genuinely wish to have a discussion about keeping one’s word and do not mean to be defending rape even by analogy. But if that’s the case, I think you’re going about it very badly.
I think Sean should just ask for a kiss later first.
Then when the victim says yes, he ups it to sex. Now its just a matter of degree, not principle.
If you’re seriously claiming that the preposterous “Skald is a rape apologist” is a reasonable conclusion from his attempt to dissect and question the relevant ethical principles here, maybe you should stay away from hypotheticals.
If you promise sex for good and services…rape victim is not the label you are looking for.
But that’s too simplistic. The point is that you may be under duress, with the promise of sexual favors “extorted” from you, explicitly or implicitly. There is clearly some degree of duress - being held at gunpoint, for example - at which this would certainly constitute rape. Is there a qualitative difference in the hypo, or just one of degree?
Personally I don’t think promises of sexual favors are ever ethically binding, under any circumstances, under duress or otherwise, and anyone who ever attempts to extract them is at the very least an obnoxious asshole. But there’s clearly a stricter standard of duress at which you’d label that person a rapist or an attempted rapist - I’m not quite sure where the line is.
Sean asks for sex. You agree. Later YOU decide to keep the agreement.
IMO you were NOT raped. Sean may be a creep and you may or may not be a sucker…but rape victim…no.
PS. Getting late…gotta run and get shit done.
Yes, if you later choose to carry out your promise when the duress is clearly no longer present, out of some misguided sense of obligation, I agree. No actual rape occurred.
But perhaps Sean might still be deemed an attempted rapist, or at least a sex offender of some kind, for extracting the promise under duress in the first place?
If the only reason the person agreed was to avoid death (or disfigurement or some other heinous outcome) Sean is a rapist. Anything but voluntary consent is rape.
A enthusiast of capitalism and free markets 
Really gotta go.
I have aid multiple times that it is ethically okay to refuse to fuck Sean, becaue the right to decide not to have sex is absolute. I cannot imagine any real-world circumstances in which it can be abrogated.
What I am objecting to is reneging on the FINANCIAL promise. I think if onyou e agrees to pay Sean to risk her life to save yours, you have to pay up if you can. Pay FINANCIALLY. Because if it’s okay to renege on that promise, it seems to me that you’re saying that Sean had an obligation to risk her life to save another’s. That would be true if Sean were a a firefighter (and even then, Sean has the right to expect her salary to be paid,doesn’t she?) or if the person in danger were her child. But not otherwise.
To reiterate: Anyone has the right to refuse sex at any time, even if the sex was promised in return for life-saving. Doing so is not unethical.
People do NOT have the right to refuse to pay for life-saving services they have the reources to pay, particularly when the person promised payment endangered her own life to save the promiser’s life. The only exception I would make woul dbe if the life-saver was the one who created the peril in the first place or had a prior obligation to protect the promiser’s life.