Thanks. I’m glad I was following in the footsteps of people greater than me.

But the distinction itself needs explanation. Could you expand a bit? Do you see any connection to the reasoning about “a forced sale is still a valid sale” brought in the Talmud?

One has to remember that Maimonides’ distinction is only regarding punishment, not the prohibition. In both situations he violated a prohibition, so clearly there is culpability here. The question is whether he is liable to punishment or not.
There is a close connection to the Talmudic passages about “they forced him” and “a forced sale is still a sale.” There too, he does it in order to escape the coercion, and that is considered willful consent (since every person’s will comes from something. A person sells something because he needs money, or because he wants to get rid of it, and so on). So too in illness: the person commits the transgression in order to escape the illness, and therefore it is considered an act of will.
However, one can ask why, when someone threatens him, we do not say that he acts in order to escape the threat, and that this too should count as his will. There are several formulations of this among the later authorities (Acharonim): some wrote that this is the act of the one making the threat, not of the one being threatened, and therefore the threatened person who acted is exempt. Another formulation is that when there is a threat rather than illness, the threat is the product of a person’s initiative and not a natural condition that arose on its own. Therefore it should not be treated as a person’s own will to deal with circumstances in which he finds himself. But in the case of “they forced him and he sold,” that too is the situation, and there it is considered will even though it is a human threat.
It seems to me that the more successful formulation depends on an analogy to another contradiction in Maimonides. In the Laws of One Who Injures Person or Property, Maimonides exempts someone who throws property off a ship so that it will not sink, whereas in the Laws of Robbery, chapter 12, he obligates someone who threw property overboard during a storm in order to save himself. The commentators there and there already noted this, and in Maggid Mishneh and Kesef Mishneh they wrote that the distinction is as follows: in the Laws of Injury, the storm threatens to sink the ship, and the property is only a means of rescue. Therefore, if you threw out the property, you are liable to pay. But in the Laws of Robbery, the case is that the burden of the property is what threatens to sink the ship (and not a storm), and in such a case the property is pursuing him to kill him, so it is permitted to harm it, and therefore there he is exempt. This is very similar to the distinction between the law of a pursuer, where one may kill one person (the pursuer) in order to save the other (the pursued), and “let him be killed rather than transgress” in murder, where they forbade killing one person in order to save another (“who says your blood is redder?!”)—except that here it is about property and not lives. Now you can see that a similar distinction can be made between a threat and illness, except that here the thing being harmed is a transgression rather than property or life. When there is a threat forcing him to commit a transgression, then committing the transgression is what is forced upon him. The transgression is what is pursuing him and causing his danger (because of it he is threatened). Therefore, when he “harms it” in order to save himself, he is exempt. It is still forbidden, because he should have given up his life, since this is a case of “let him be killed rather than transgress,” but there is no punishment. By contrast, when he is ill, the transgression is unrelated to the matter. It is not the transgression that threatens him, but the illness. He “harms” the transgression in order to save himself from the illness. That is forbidden, and therefore in that case he is liable.

That’s convincing as a decoding of Maimonides’ intuition. But does it seem reasonable to you in its own right, in the ship case and in the case of illnesses? (A shocked face and several question marks were omitted here due to lack of time.)

It doesn’t seem far-fetched to me. I’m not a consequentialist like you.

When will you be? 🙂

I said I’m not a consequentialist, so how could I predict an outcome? I can only say that I don’t want to be a consequentialist; I only want to want what is good.

I’ll note in passing that for fanatical consequentialists it’s very hard to learn Talmud and the analytic style of Torah study. Anti-consequentialism is embedded there all the way down, and it creates a very oppressive dissonance. Sometimes because of that I feel like a minor outside researcher rather than someone trying to integrate and identify with it. In many cases the Talmud doesn’t awaken some hidden intuition in me, but coldly presses exactly where it hurts, and doesn’t let up.

What is a consequentialist?

In general, judging action-decisions only by their expected results, without giving weight to the action itself (the process). See “Consequentialism” on Wikipedia.

In other words, the end justifies the means / necessity knows no law? Meaning, for a consequentialist, as long as you reach the goal, you don’t care how?

Yes. But sometimes the path also has consequences, and those too have to be taken into account.
The best example is the classic trolley question. A train is moving and is about to run over two people tied to the tracks. You can quickly run to the nearby store, grab someone from there, and throw him (or yourself) onto the train, thereby diverting it from its track. That person will die, but the two will be saved. So from the standpoint of the result, here one dies and there two die. But from the standpoint of the process, here you killed with your own hands someone who bears no guilt whatsoever, and there two died on their own (and they too bear no guilt whatsoever).
The notorious distinction between positive action and passive omission is, in my view, perhaps the essence of the dispute between consequentialism and deontology.

By the way, this distinction appears very often in everyday life. I’ve asked many people who told me that for them there is a difference between stealing from the supermarket and not correcting a cashier’s mistake when he charged them too little, even though they agree that both are morally and halakhically forbidden. Or a person who does not want to hurt someone else directly (for example, at different stages of a relationship) and therefore lets the other person understand it through a drip-drip of signals and actions, even though overall that drip is more painful than hearing it directly. From a consequentialist perspective, these differences between action and refraining are only psychological differences in feeling and have no moral weight.