5 ms·

What does the value of a human come from, then?

by marknutter 10y ago

aleksei 10y ago
From their interactions with other people.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  So introverts are less valuable? This is just substituting one kind of contribution for another. What if someone wants to live in the mountains by themselves, away from people? Google Carthusian monks.
Frondo 10y ago
If that could be answered satisfactorily on a message board...we'd have had a very different human history for the last 5,000 years ;) I mean, there's no provable source for the value of a human. Nothing in nature you can point to and say "that's it, that's why a human has value". I say, and my politics reflect this, that all people have intrinsic value. They're born with it, they have it til they die. Because of that, they should have access to food, shelter, medical care. No matter how much work they do or how much stuff they make. Other people say a person is only as valuable as how much they work. (and I respond, screw that, it leads to a lot of suffering!)
- marknutter 10y ago
  I agree that humans have intrinsic value, but I don't see how providing them with free food, shelter, and medical care follows from that presupposition. Would that not require other humans to provide those things for free? Are their lives not as intrinsically valuable, or are you comfortable with enslaving a portion of the population to ensure these needs are taken care of?
  - Frondo 10y ago
    I don't consider it enslavement, any more than I consider a parent's obligation to feed and clothe their child enslavement. I understand that the libertarian perspective says it is OK to let your offspring starve to death (Thank you, Mises, for clearing that up for us!), but I don't think that system of thinking is a valid or useful way to arrange society. (Neither, it seems, does any society on earth, since no one has ever attempted such a thing.) I think we're all obligated to one another, and slavery is something quite different from that. I also don't like the libertarian attempt at redefining common words to make ordinary things sound baaaaad, like "taxation is theft!!" (it isn't) or "taking care of others is slavery!!" (it isn't). I think that's a cheap rhetorical trick, and doesn't get us any farther in any kind of discussion.
    - marknutter 10y ago
      > I don't consider it enslavement, any more than I consider a parent's obligation to feed and clothe their child enslavement. So you think adults should be treated like children? Very telling. Your thinking is fallacious, though. If you bring children into the world, you are of course responsible for providing for them. But you are also responsible for helping them become self-sufficient. Perhaps you think children should be coddled by their parents for the rest of their lives? > I understand that the libertarian perspective says it is OK to let your offspring starve to death Who said anything about libertarianism? A bit of a non sequitur, wouldn't you say. And I don't think you understand libertarianism anyways. If you do, then I sure as hell don't agree with it. > I think we're all obligated to one another, and slavery is something quite different from that. I think we should help one another, but I don't think we should be forced to help one another. Big difference. > I also don't like the libertarian attempt at redefining common words to make ordinary things sound baaaaad, like "taxation is theft!!" (it isn't) or "taking care of others is slavery!!" (it isn't). I think that's a cheap rhetorical trick, and doesn't get us any farther in any kind of discussion. Again with the libertarianism. I'll indulge you because you seem to want to fight against a perceived ideology. How is taxation not theft exactly? How is forcing people to take care of others not slaver, exactly? It's not a rhetorical trick, these are objective facts.
  - ue_ 10y ago
    >or are you comfortable with enslaving a portion of the population to ensure these needs are taken care of I'm not, which is why I'm not okay with Capitalism. Being forced to sell your labour in order to avoid poverty, destitution or death or, in the case of the modern welfare state, the degrading feeling of having to live a poor life from charity of the State is one of the ultimate forms of slavery. The idea that Capitalism promotes human value is ridiculous. Within the capitalist mode of production, human labour-time is like any other quantity; the spinning loom, the silk, etc. Sugar is bought by the kilogram, human labour-time by the hour. Human labour-time is another commodity within capitalism, and like every other commodity in Capitalism, it is maximised for exchange-value over use-value. Market interactions, at least within Capitalism, have the quality of being fetishised, so that rather than seeing the obscured web of interactions between people, we merely see prices and figures. If anything is dehumanising, I'd say that working to make things you don't want (usually causing alienation) is the most dehumanising of them all.
    - marknutter 10y ago
      > I'm not, which is why I'm not okay with Capitalism. Being forced to sell your labour in order to avoid poverty, destitution or death or, in the case of the modern welfare state, the degrading feeling of having to live a poor life from charity of the State is one of the ultimate forms of slavery. Capitalism is perfectly fine with you detaching yourself from the system and surviving off the land. > The idea that Capitalism promotes human value is ridiculous. Capitalism helps us quantify human productivity. That's about it. Humans have transcendent value. Capitalism defends everyone's right not to be forced into slavery by threat of force. There are no other systems that can make that claim.
      - ionised 10y ago
        > Capitalism is perfectly fine with you detaching yourself from the system and surviving off the land. You can't, a billionaire already bought that land.
        marknutter 10y ago
  - ch4s3 10y ago
    It's a bit far fetched to equate taxing capital with enslavement.
    - marknutter 10y ago
      How are you going to collect taxes if nobody works?
      - ch4s3 10y ago
        I assume you're you meant that to be a rhetorical question, but... By taxing capital instead of income. Or by taxing value added, or by taxing sales or profits, or maybe something esoteric like a robot tax.
        ionised 10y ago
        Tax land. Heavily.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Would you rather they beat the crap out of you and take your wealth? Cause let's be honest, that's the alternative. When it comes down to it, if the masses are not having their basic needs met, they will turn to crime and violence to meet them. And no one, anywhere, is talking about enslaving people.
  - baursak 10y ago
    An alternative to UBI as you describe it is simply that people provide their own food, shelter, and medical care. As an example, current shareholders of Chipotle, Pulte Group, and Hospital Corporation of America are not anywhere near physically providing people with food, shelter and medical care.
    - marknutter 10y ago
      Worked well enough for humans for the past few million years or so.
      - baursak 10y ago
        It's literally what's happening now too. Unless you think that, for example, Mr. Thomas F. Frist Jr., the largest individual shareholder of HCA, is personally providing healthcare to people.
  - nikdaheratik 10y ago
    Slavery is taking someone's labor for free. Even an Anarcho-Capitalist would have trouble equating taxation with slavery. The person being taxed gets the benefit of living in a country not plagued by uneducated, sick, hungry citizens. All for the low price of a certain percentage of their income.
    - marknutter 10y ago
      I'm not saying taxation is slavery. I'm saying that you cannot have a system in which a portion of the population does zero work and receives resources for free without requiring that the other portion to do the work producing those resources. If the productive portion simply stopped working, or only worked enough to barely survive themselves, the nonproductive portion of the population would perish unless they enslaved the productive portion and forced them to produce surpluses.
ue_ 10y ago
The value of human life needn't come from being forced to sell one's labour, rather it can come from voluntarily usage of your own labour-time, not for the need to survive.
maxerickson 10y ago
Where does it come from now?
c0nducktr 10y ago
Do you seriously only see a person's value as the amount of dollars that can be extracted from their labor?
- marknutter 10y ago
  No, I see a person's value as being transcendent and equivalent to all other persons.
ken47 10y ago
Broadly speaking, it comes from the value they provide to other humans, aka a person's value to society. At this point in human history, career is generally a proxy for this metric. E.g. doctors have high social value because they save other people's lives. Wealthy people have high social value because they have the potential to make those around them wealthier, etc. This value derives from the average person's lack of the things that the other people provide. Suppose AI could provide all those things. Once AI becomes self-maintaining, the only value that humans could provide each other would be entirely social.

What does the value of a human come from, then?

aleksei 10y ago

From their interactions with other people.

Godel_unicode 10y ago
So introverts are less valuable? This is just substituting one kind of contribution for another. What if someone wants to live in the mountains by themselves, away from people? Google Carthusian monks.

Frondo 10y ago

If that could be answered satisfactorily on a message board...we'd have had a very different human history for the last 5,000 years ;) I mean, there's no provable source for the value of a human. Nothing in nature you can point to and say "that's it, that's why a human has value". I say, and my politics reflect this, that all people have intrinsic value. They're born with it, they have it til they die. Because of that, they should have access to food, shelter, medical care. No matter how much work they do or how much stuff they make. Other people say a person is only as valuable as how much they work. (and I respond, screw that, it leads to a lot of suffering!)

marknutter 10y ago
I agree that humans have intrinsic value, but I don't see how providing them with free food, shelter, and medical care follows from that presupposition. Would that not require other humans to provide those things for free? Are their lives not as intrinsically valuable, or are you comfortable with enslaving a portion of the population to ensure these needs are taken care of?
- Frondo 10y ago
  I don't consider it enslavement, any more than I consider a parent's obligation to feed and clothe their child enslavement. I understand that the libertarian perspective says it is OK to let your offspring starve to death (Thank you, Mises, for clearing that up for us!), but I don't think that system of thinking is a valid or useful way to arrange society. (Neither, it seems, does any society on earth, since no one has ever attempted such a thing.) I think we're all obligated to one another, and slavery is something quite different from that. I also don't like the libertarian attempt at redefining common words to make ordinary things sound baaaaad, like "taxation is theft!!" (it isn't) or "taking care of others is slavery!!" (it isn't). I think that's a cheap rhetorical trick, and doesn't get us any farther in any kind of discussion.
  - marknutter 10y ago
    > I don't consider it enslavement, any more than I consider a parent's obligation to feed and clothe their child enslavement. So you think adults should be treated like children? Very telling. Your thinking is fallacious, though. If you bring children into the world, you are of course responsible for providing for them. But you are also responsible for helping them become self-sufficient. Perhaps you think children should be coddled by their parents for the rest of their lives? > I understand that the libertarian perspective says it is OK to let your offspring starve to death Who said anything about libertarianism? A bit of a non sequitur, wouldn't you say. And I don't think you understand libertarianism anyways. If you do, then I sure as hell don't agree with it. > I think we're all obligated to one another, and slavery is something quite different from that. I think we should help one another, but I don't think we should be forced to help one another. Big difference. > I also don't like the libertarian attempt at redefining common words to make ordinary things sound baaaaad, like "taxation is theft!!" (it isn't) or "taking care of others is slavery!!" (it isn't). I think that's a cheap rhetorical trick, and doesn't get us any farther in any kind of discussion. Again with the libertarianism. I'll indulge you because you seem to want to fight against a perceived ideology. How is taxation not theft exactly? How is forcing people to take care of others not slaver, exactly? It's not a rhetorical trick, these are objective facts.
- ue_ 10y ago
  >or are you comfortable with enslaving a portion of the population to ensure these needs are taken care of I'm not, which is why I'm not okay with Capitalism. Being forced to sell your labour in order to avoid poverty, destitution or death or, in the case of the modern welfare state, the degrading feeling of having to live a poor life from charity of the State is one of the ultimate forms of slavery. The idea that Capitalism promotes human value is ridiculous. Within the capitalist mode of production, human labour-time is like any other quantity; the spinning loom, the silk, etc. Sugar is bought by the kilogram, human labour-time by the hour. Human labour-time is another commodity within capitalism, and like every other commodity in Capitalism, it is maximised for exchange-value over use-value. Market interactions, at least within Capitalism, have the quality of being fetishised, so that rather than seeing the obscured web of interactions between people, we merely see prices and figures. If anything is dehumanising, I'd say that working to make things you don't want (usually causing alienation) is the most dehumanising of them all.
  - marknutter 10y ago
    > I'm not, which is why I'm not okay with Capitalism. Being forced to sell your labour in order to avoid poverty, destitution or death or, in the case of the modern welfare state, the degrading feeling of having to live a poor life from charity of the State is one of the ultimate forms of slavery. Capitalism is perfectly fine with you detaching yourself from the system and surviving off the land. > The idea that Capitalism promotes human value is ridiculous. Capitalism helps us quantify human productivity. That's about it. Humans have transcendent value. Capitalism defends everyone's right not to be forced into slavery by threat of force. There are no other systems that can make that claim.
    - ionised 10y ago
      > Capitalism is perfectly fine with you detaching yourself from the system and surviving off the land. You can't, a billionaire already bought that land.
      - marknutter 10y ago
- ch4s3 10y ago
  It's a bit far fetched to equate taxing capital with enslavement.
  - marknutter 10y ago
    How are you going to collect taxes if nobody works?
    - ch4s3 10y ago
      I assume you're you meant that to be a rhetorical question, but... By taxing capital instead of income. Or by taxing value added, or by taxing sales or profits, or maybe something esoteric like a robot tax.
      - ionised 10y ago
        Tax land. Heavily.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Would you rather they beat the crap out of you and take your wealth? Cause let's be honest, that's the alternative. When it comes down to it, if the masses are not having their basic needs met, they will turn to crime and violence to meet them. And no one, anywhere, is talking about enslaving people.
- baursak 10y ago
  An alternative to UBI as you describe it is simply that people provide their own food, shelter, and medical care. As an example, current shareholders of Chipotle, Pulte Group, and Hospital Corporation of America are not anywhere near physically providing people with food, shelter and medical care.
  - marknutter 10y ago
    Worked well enough for humans for the past few million years or so.
    - baursak 10y ago
      It's literally what's happening now too. Unless you think that, for example, Mr. Thomas F. Frist Jr., the largest individual shareholder of HCA, is personally providing healthcare to people.
- nikdaheratik 10y ago
  Slavery is taking someone's labor for free. Even an Anarcho-Capitalist would have trouble equating taxation with slavery. The person being taxed gets the benefit of living in a country not plagued by uneducated, sick, hungry citizens. All for the low price of a certain percentage of their income.
  - marknutter 10y ago
    I'm not saying taxation is slavery. I'm saying that you cannot have a system in which a portion of the population does zero work and receives resources for free without requiring that the other portion to do the work producing those resources. If the productive portion simply stopped working, or only worked enough to barely survive themselves, the nonproductive portion of the population would perish unless they enslaved the productive portion and forced them to produce surpluses.

ue_ 10y ago

The value of human life needn't come from being forced to sell one's labour, rather it can come from voluntarily usage of your own labour-time, not for the need to survive.

maxerickson 10y ago

Where does it come from now?

c0nducktr 10y ago

Do you seriously only see a person's value as the amount of dollars that can be extracted from their labor?

marknutter 10y ago
No, I see a person's value as being transcendent and equivalent to all other persons.

ken47 10y ago

Broadly speaking, it comes from the value they provide to other humans, aka a person's value to society. At this point in human history, career is generally a proxy for this metric. E.g. doctors have high social value because they save other people's lives. Wealthy people have high social value because they have the potential to make those around them wealthier, etc. This value derives from the average person's lack of the things that the other people provide. Suppose AI could provide all those things. Once AI becomes self-maintaining, the only value that humans could provide each other would be entirely social.