In "A Tale of Two Cities", a man confesses to a capital crime he did not commit so that another, the true love of the woman HE loves, might go free. He gave his life so that she could be happy. He says on his way to the guiotine "It is a far, far, better thing I do than I have ever done before".
Only humans can think like that, and it is absolutely the WORST thing you can do to spread your genes around. True Alturism is the opposite of what would be expected to exist if humans evolved from animals. Yet it does.
This is an important issue, and evolutionists know it.
I've never read Tale of Two Cities, but from the SparkNotes summary it seems to say that we live in a world where one can't do the right thing without self-immolation. Dickens had a vision of the world as fundamentally a malevolent zero-sum game. Rand observed something similar about Victor Hugo's "78" (IIRC), also about the French Revolution in fact. You can't do the right thing without dying in the process. What a sick sense of life to have!
If Carton really trades places with Darnay soley to ensure the happiness of the woman he loves (by saving her true love at the expense of his own death), then that was a very bad decision. I'd call it an immoral act. Of course, Dickens makes it more interesting by having Darnay be sentenced to death for an unjust reason: The murders committed by his father & uncle which he apparently had nothing to do with.
In that case, Darnay's death would clearly be a terrible miscarriage of justice - one that Carton should have tried to prevent. But still, at the expense of his own death? No, I don't think so. Notice that Dickens had to make Carton into a "drunk, good-for-nothing" person whom is apparently shown by Lucie what he might have been if he hadn't wasted his life. This is the only way he could make Carton's eventual decision even approach believability.
Would numbers make any difference? In other words, what if one innocent person chose to die so that 1,000+ others could have a chance to live- Would that person have made a moral or immoral decision?
I am curious as to your opinion on these questions.
There are some people who argue that all interactions involve a net benefit to the individual. Applied to this case, who's to say that Carton didn't consider giving his life as the greatest gain for himself? That the blissful moments walking to the guillotine weren't for him the nirvana he had searched for all his life? That he didn't reach maximum benefit for himself and for those he loved?
It seems to me, however, that there is a transition from a direct value interaction, the straightforward Randian human interaction, to one of expected value, a switch from certain value to one of probability with a time lag. This would properly fall in the range of cooperation or reciprocal altruism. There is a further transition from cooperation to altruism where there is no value inherent in the interaction because there is no expectation of return. One example of this is raising children. Carton also falls into this group. Thus, those who argue that this is still self-interest do so on the basis that the perceived benefit in such a transaction is an affective or psychological gain. This may or may not be valid, it is still a non-value transaction and isn't governed by the marketplace.