What Is Worth Dying For?

Addressing a question I'd rather not think about.

As of December 2024, the military death toll in Ukraine since Russia’s full scale 2022 invasion was somewhere between 43 and 70 thousand, depending on whether you believe Ukrainian or American claims. On top of that, we can add roughly 12,500 civilian deaths, as well as over 350,000 wounded, and 35,000 missing.

Sitting here in the U.S., it is hard for many to understand why Ukraine is willing to continue fighting against a much larger nation, with a populace which has no choice but to be sent to slaughter by a dictator who has shown no sign of squeamishness about condemning broad swaths of his population to slaughter in return for negligible territorial gains. When it comes up, the U.S. President invariably starts rambling about the scale of the carnage, consistently blaming Ukraine for refusing to stop fighting, and going so far as to say it “started a war” by, presumably, choosing to fight back against its Russian invaders. To resist foreign aggression, apparently, is itself aggression. This is the kind of upside-down Orwellian thinking that the American people voted for in November.

It is somewhat heartening that a plurality of Americans still think America is not doing enough to help Ukraine. But for many of us, it seems hard to comprehend why Ukrainians are willing to lay down their lives to defend their country. This is particularly concerning as it appears we are living under a regime which is, in all likelihood, preparing to send dissidents to foreign concentration camps.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they merely want to deprive undocumented immigrants and violent American citizens of their right to due process. “Merely.” If that’s consoling enough for you to look the other way, then you are part of the problem.

In my more recent writing, I’ve stressed the superiority of liberal values. I do so because, fundamentally, I believe liberalism best understands human nature and generates a political project to the greatest benefit to humans as a result. And the chief doctrine of human nature that liberalism has to offer is that people are fundamentally selfish.

It is this cynical, but plainly accurate doctrine upon which Alexander Hamilton and James Madison premised the entire scheme of checks and balances—to turn human selfishness in upon itself, and to generate, through institutions that could harness that selfishness, a system that was both self-sustaining and mutually beneficial to all parties within it. That system has worked exceptionally well, with some alterations along the way, for over two centuries. It is now being dismantled before our eyes for reasons that would be entirely predictable to its authors.

But if we accept the premise that humans are necessarily self-interested, we must then ask why, and under what circumstances, they would consciously and thoughtfully sacrifice their lives. When is death not desirable (for death is in itself surely never desirable), but nonetheless preferable to its alternatives?

We find in Spinoza the most interesting philosophical argument for death of which I’m aware. Spinoza believes that all being, in itself, is God, absolutely infinite and self-sufficient.

But what follows from God’s absolute infinity are his modes-infinite delineations which can be applied to God, the adequate conception of which constitutes a conception of some fragment of God’s power. It is through these modes that our minds, being of finite capacity, comprehend an infinite and absolute God.

For Spinoza, all things of which nature is composed are little expressions of God, and being expressions of God, whose action is His very existence, all strive to persist in their Being (in Spinoza’s terms, Conatus). All nature is, for Spinoza, a symphony of the infinite expressions of God’s power, all striving, some increasing in power by virtue of their interaction, others diminishing, all determined by a rigid and necessary series of causes and effects.

It is by the conatus of any given mode that Spinoza can explain human nature. Indeed, Darwinian evolution would be an entirely logical consequence of the striving of life to persist, and of any individual organism to persist without regard to any other (one thing that makes Spinoza’s view so compelling is that it fits so neatly into scientific theories which were not generated until centuries after his death).

But it is here that Spinoza’s reasoning becomes less obvious. To Spinoza, it does not follow, as might seem obvious, that the aim of life therefore is simply to survive. This excessively identifies the individual with the life of the body, an identification Spinoza is careful to eschew, specifying that “The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal.” The aim of life is to expand one’s power of acting, and one’s power of acting is virtue, which is nothing but the capacity to obey reason and not be affected by passions of the mind which unduly dictate one’s behavior. The joy we feel when we think about our virtue is self-esteem—“really the highest thing we can hope for.”

So, for Spinoza, human power, human virtue, and human freedom are all one and the same thing—the action of the mind, affected by things outside it only insofar as those things increase its power of acting.

Thus, Spinoza’s moral exemplar, the homo liber or “free man” (an archetypal person who is completely unimpeded by the passions of the mind), possesses power of the kind sought by Stoic philosophers—power over his own mind, and the ability to act in the world without regard to external forces, but through his own reason (note a remarkable consonance here with the self-directed thought extolled in Kant’s extraordinary essay What Is Enlightenment?). The ability to accept death—when such a death is rationally preferable to life—is a powerful demonstration of virtue.

To Spinoza, death in itself is of course always undesirable—it is a distortion of our bodies owing to the influence of an external power, which is the very definition of evil in Spinoza’s thought. But it does not follow that the decrease in power that follows from death, chosen rationally and without regard to fear, is greater than a decrease in power that could follow from persisting in a life whose freedom has been negated. There can, in other words, be fates worse than death, wherein the mind doesn’t simply cease to exist, but is so ruled by passions that it has no hope of freedom. A life under the rule of an autocratic regime, provided it is sufficiently toxic to human freedom, is one such circumstance. Spinoza thus points to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who opened his veins “at the command of a Tyrant” as someone who elected “to avoid a greater evil [by submitting to] a lesser.” To die when faced with the alternative of an unfree life, in other words, is in some circumstances the rational choice, and to avoid such a death out of fear shows an insufficiency of virtue.

We in the U.S. like to repeat the old mantra, originally of the French Revolution, “Live Free or Die.” It’s now mainly known from the New Hampshire license plate. The Revolutionary War general John Stark delivered the phrase as a toast to fellow New Hampshire veterans of the war in 1809, along with the phrase “death is not the worst of evils” (Stark turns out to have been a crypto-Spinozist, I suppose). It became the state motto. The Ukrainians have reminded us, through three years of bloody struggle, that the phrase is not empty, but reflects a deep truth that follows from the deepest impulse of human nature—that death as a free person, while it is not preferable to life as a free person, is nonetheless preferable to life as a subject.

The power of an autocracy lies principly in the fear and disorganization of its subject population. I believe all Americans who believe in the principles of our founding must now think deeply about what freedoms we are willing to lose.

Are we willing to lose our freedom of speech? Are we willing to lose free and fair elections? Are we willing to lose the right to property? Are we willing to lose the right to due process? And what are we willing to withstand if and when the consequences of speaking out are no longer just missed time at work and angry family members?

Think about it.