What about if it was me or Toto? (Dare I ask…)

The symmetry breaks down in an interesting way in the cases you describe.

The cases you imagine involve moral equals of a sort that do not figure in Luno’s Sophie-type case and this leveling of other considerations brings out sex differences with a vengeance.

In your first case, the sister would not have to save her brother before her sister, but a brother in similar straits would have to forfeit his brother to save his sister.

For the choosing sister her sister is not a surrogate (as the daughter is for the mother). The “hapless” sister is a genuine other on a par with her brother. Her obligations to them are equal, other things being equal. She has a primary obligation to preserve relationship where she can and in this case she will fail equally either way. She may flip a coin.

For the choosing brother, however, preserving relationship is not, before all else, a fundamental principle. His first obligation is to serve others and his sister is more of an “other” than his brother.

Earlier I said, Luno “conceives of morality as a first constraint against a human impulse to save the self and what mirrors it” and that is still true until sex differences kick in. In at least one of your cases, they do.

Something similar happens in your second example. The husband is bound to serve others even at the price of his life. He really has no moral latitude in the matter. If it’s him or his wife, it will be him: no ifs, ands, or buts. She may sacrifice herself for him but if she doesn’t, she cannot be morally blamed.

Also, keep in mind, the fact she is his wife (or sister or daughter or mother, etc.) is beside the point. If she were a complete stranger, he would still be bound to the same decision. The fact that she is his wife (one would hope) merely adds emotional emphasis to an already morally determined outcome. All that matters to the latter is that she is female.

I mean, suppose a sister had to choose between the death of another sister or a brother? Extending the present moral logic, if I follow it correctly, it would seem that the choosing sister should allow her hapless sister to die before her brother? Is that right?

And what about a wife and husband? If one has to decide which has to go, I gather each is bound to sacrifice her- or himself? No?

From the standpoint of the sex-based moral theory he is developing, a mother, if she has to make such a horrible choice, is bound to save her son before her daughter. And, of course, if it was a father in this predicament, the reverse would hold: he would be required to sacrifice his son, all other things being equal. (The biblical story of Abraham and his son, Luno might insist, was no accident. Abraham and his daughter would not have worked.)

The point Luno is trying to make is that the framework that undergirds moral obligation is determined by the sex of the agent. He conceives of morality as a first constraint against a human impulse to save the self and what mirrors it. In choosing to sacrifice her daughter she is sacrificing herself for her son, the other, the one who is not like her.

The openness to doing this is the foundation of all morality. But how it gets translated into moral behavior in a given individual will depend on sex.

Luno keeps hammering this home in many other contexts as well. For example, the injunction not to kill is not the same for a man as for a woman. A woman has a different moral relation to her unborn and even born children than a man to his. Abortion is the taking of another human life. But the taking of certain other human lives is permitted mothers in circumstances where the same could not be said for a father. And this has nothing to do with the personhood of the fetus (let alone its rights) or a woman’s right to her body—these are all misapplied analogies.

See also Luno’s post, “Mommy has a license to kill, Kant said so”.

Sophie chooses the younger one to die, doesn’t she (the girl, I think)?

Should abortion be illegal? I think not. Is abortion to be encouraged? I don’t think so.

There is a more intimate correspondence between these two problems, pornography and abortion, than one might think. I will probably explore it later, but this much should give you a hint as to how it might proceed…

But there is something wrong here. Do we really take the opinions of children—even and perhaps especially grown children—as authoritative on questions of this kind? How many hem and haw when asked about whether they are “happy” even in their own relationships? Let alone those of others, even those we think we ought to know quite well. Beyond someone in patent distress or elation, it is a desperate question whether someone else is happy or not. I think we should assume, unless we have incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that someone else is only as happy or unhappy as we are, that is to say, “they are hanging in there.” (I am not addressing the very common “aspirational happiness” or what we might say to someone we don’t know or don’t want to get into a long conversation with.)

I think we are on firmer ground to trust people to tell us about whether they felt themselves loved by their parents than we are to trust their judgment on the tangle of emotions that comprise an intimate relationship that they themselves were never party to. No doubt there must have been severe strain between Adelheid and Leopold, given the latter’s, perhaps eccentric, principledness. But if there was no love in the face of unhappiness we should have expected far worse consequences for all the children of this union.

There are three relationships involved: the one between his parents, and the one between Otto and his mother, Adelheid, and the one with his father, Leopold.

Commentators all seem to agree that Otto “worshipped” his father. But I find no where in his own writings where Otto says anything to suggest that he had any but a healthy honor and respect for his father, for his moral steadfastness especially in a Vienna at the time famous for everything but. There is nothing exactly excessive about his regard. Otto could very well deeply admire something about his father while entertaining reservations about him. His brother, Richard, writes in his memoir that Leopold was quite upset by what Otto said about Jews, though Leopold, a secular Jew, was hardly a philosemite. Otto was not afraid to cross his father. If an argument took him where not even his own father would be spared, he was prepared to go there.

As for his mother, we know precious little of how she felt about all this. But none of her children, the ones we have some record of, Rosa, Otto, and Richard, had anything negative to say about her. We are led to believe she was devoted and selfless, despite her ill health. I think there is room for speculation that Otto thought she was a bit too selfless. It is scarcely unusual for a son, still in the shadow of a strong father figure, to be reticent about directly expressing his feelings about his mother.

Moreover, there are passages in Sex and Character and in On Last Things where he says things that are not quite consistent with one who did not prize his mother’s love. He writes, for example, that “love-children” even those born out of wedlock are more likely to be healthier and to thrive than those who enter the world almost as a formality in established unions. The strength of a woman’s devotion to her chosen object of desire, and then to its issue, can override inauspicious circumstances. Indeed, it may be her chief or only resource against them.

But it is not my purpose to put forth any but a plausible domestic setting for the thesis that Weininger himself announces in the preface to Sex and Character, “…that the investigation finally turns against Man, placing the largest, and indeed the real, share of the blame on him in a deeper sense than the feminist can imagine” (Löb trans, p. 4)—even as he despairs that women will ever grasp this. I simply find Weininger’s family situation anything but a hotbed of hatred for anyone. The real support for this lies in a philosophical analysis of Weininger ideas both internally and in their relation to moral theory before and since. For this I refer you to Luno’s writings…