That human life is expendable as a matter of course, that we are mortal, that life comes thus blighted as a matter of fact, as a matter of hideously brutal fact, is antithetical to any ethics putting the highest value of all on the preserving of life. An ethics that fails to take a stand against what counters it must be seen to have been subverted by it. It is illogical (and arguably unethical) for an ethical system that values life not to see mortality as fundamentally unethical. In thus arguing it would seem that you wish to make a mockery of our ethics, a critic might reply. There is death and then there is death. That life must not be extinguished, yes, that is our teaching. But when it comes to mortality itself, to try to uphold that standard would be equivalent to trying to stop a flood with a finger in the dam. No, no, one must give up on that score. And so, most ethical codes simply put to one side the issue of mortality and proceed to go on, we put it to you, quite unrealistically from there, starting off on the thither side of the crucial fact, and so, going along always to one side of the facts as they stand.

An ethics that permits no category of event, not even mortality, to be set apart for special treatment, and that considers there to be nothing more unethical than that we are required to be mortal shall be called a crisis ethics.