The Road (I didn't see it some random dude was commenting on it)

Warning: rambling alert =P

In terms of situation presented in The Road, I think what is troubling the author is the fact that in the isolated case of a dying man in a post-apocalyptic world, it maybe hard to see the value in helping him (as opposed to eating him). As a result, the author uses it to argue for subjective ethics. However, this is a misunderstanding of ethics in general.

Ethics gives us a system of rules that can help us choose how to act, but we still must do the choosing, and the act of choosing isn't costless (time, effort, estimation error, etc). As a result, ethics must be based on virtues rather than analyzing individual actions in isolation.

Even Objectivism, which is the most extreme in arguing for self-interest, is no exception. A straw man argument against Objectivism is set up thus: If you see an old lady crossing the street, do you help her? An Objectivist answer is usually "yes" because helping an old lady cross the street takes very little effort/time, and offering her help sets a good example for other that in turn helps create a better community etc. At this point then the questioner will set up stricter and stricter constraints, like "what if no one is watching so you can't set an example?" and "what if it's in a totally different neighborhood that you won't ever go to again", etc etc. This line of questioning is intended to setup an isolated case where it would be hard/impossible to argue for helping the old lady from a self-interest perspective.

But this again, is a failure to see the cost of choosing. It takes a lot of time and effort to ask all the follow up questions that lead to the isolated case. Instead, we could always help and use the extra time and effort to do something else. So value, in terms of ethics, should be measured at the level of patterns of behavior in addition to individual actions. A virtue then, is a pattern of behavior that offers positive value over the entire domain (vs not obeying a pattern and choosing actions individually based on isolated cases).

Getting back to The Road, the basic virtue of human behavior that makes society possible is the recognition that humans have more value to each other as equals than as slaves or as food. And while many people in their post-apocalyptic world have forgotten that, the boy and his father are still following this fundamental virtue that, I would argue, is the most fundamental distinction between humans and other animals.