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Does anyone else find it extremely disturbing that one of the examples they provide for "things you believe not because of logic [thus, it's objectively true],

by bruxis 10y ago

Does anyone else find it extremely disturbing that one of the examples they provide for "things you believe not because of logic [thus, it's objectively true], but because other people told you to" is "Human life is a precious thing"?

throwaway6556 10y ago
How so? I'm pretty sure Syrians had to unlearn that long ago. Now that realisation is (literally) coming here.
deadlyllama 10y ago
It follows from Christian theology (imago dei) but that's increasingly losing ground in the West. If we're just agglomerations of atoms why should I believe that all human agglomerations are equally precious?
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Post-enlightenment philosophy holds that these are two different domains [1], and conflating them is a category error. You believe we're agglomerations of atoms because the experimental evidence makes this the most likely explanation. You believe that human agglomerations are equally precious because you believe that human agglomerations are equally precious; no reason is needed, and indeed, no reason can logically be given. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction
  - cousin_it 10y ago
    Instrumental values can have arguments for and against them. Only terminal values are "protected". I'm not sure that considering all people precious is a 100% terminal value, it seems at least partly a game-theoretic convention.
- edko 10y ago
  > If we're just agglomerations of atoms why should I believe that all human agglomerations are equally precious? If we're just agglomerations of atoms, why would any agglomeration of atoms, human or not, be precious at all?
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    Because patterns are neat. (I mean that less flippantly than it reads.)
  - Gupie 10y ago
    For self-protection
- igk 10y ago
  Self interest. You can't control other people, but you can participate and propagate (hence strengthen) social norms. Unless you believe you and the ones you care about will always be in power, it's good insurance to propagate the belief "all human agglomerations are equally precious". (Same exercise as "which world do you want to live in as a rational being")
- blowski 10y ago
  Imago Dei is basically "I am precious because I am precious to God (as is all life, especially humans)". I could also say that I am precious because I am precious to my parents.
cgriswald 10y ago
Given the subjective nature of the statement I do not find it particularly disturbing to consider it may not be objectively true. Additionally, I disagree with the implication that because a conclusion is not reached through logic it is not objectively true. For one, there may still exist a logical argument whether I have made that argument or not. For another there is no guarantee that logic leads always to truth or that truth can only be found with logic. (Although I do find those two ideas rather disturbing...)
blowski 10y ago
How would you prove with logic that human life is precious? I agree that it is precious, but I'm not sure how I'd prove it.
- charlieflowers 10y ago
  How about: Human life is the most advanced creation of evolution; the pinnacle of billions of years of evolution. No other life is as advanced. Therefore, human life is precious. (I don't love the wording. But the idea is that, just as the greatest painting of a famous artist is precious, likewise the greatest production of evolution is precious. Not air tight, but maybe a start).
  - vectorpush 10y ago
    > Human life is the most advanced creation of evolution Arguable. It depends on how you define advanced. There are many organisms that live longer, are more numerous and can survive in more extreme environments than humans. It is also conceivable that humans might completely destroy all habitable environments, which would certainly disqualify us from the subjective qualification of "pinnacle of evolution". More importantly however, evolution has no pinnacle or direction. Even if we grant that humans are "the most advanced creation of evolution", it does not necessarily follow that this causes it to be inherently precious.
  - HelloNurse 10y ago
    From a strictly evolutionary point of view any other life, being our contemporary, is the pinnacle of the same billions of years of evolution and exactly as advanced as us. (Not that evolution is actually moving "forward", but it's fair to consider living organisms winners and extinct ones losers.) To consider human life superior, we need less objective and more problematic criteria, e.g. claiming that we are special because we are sentient.
  - blowski 10y ago
    Good attempt, so I'll try to counter it, just to be argumentative. As far as I know, the human body is no more complicated than most mammals. However, the human brain does appear to be unique in its capabilities. So for human life to be precious, does it need to have a fully-functioning brain? Would that make the life of someone with severe learning difficulties, or even someone in a permanently vegetative state, less precious?
Nadya 10y ago
Not at all. Logic doesn't need to be moral and, in fact, many logical conclusions are amoral. There are five people trapped in a snowstorm during the winter. They are out of food and have no means of going outside to gather more. They need to eat to survive or else they will all perish. The logical conclusion for survival is cannibalism. Then you have the varying moral scales of "kill someone and eat them", "draw sticks and the unlucky loser gets eaten", "wait for the first person to die, then eat what remains of their starved body", or "everyone chooses to die of starvation instead of eating one another". Among those choices - once again the logical conclusion for best chances of survival, namely "eating someone while they have enough meat to provide sustenance to the survivors" is typically considered amoral compared to the "everyone dies" or "eat the starved body and risk dying of starvation anyway" options. I'm sure there are plenty of in between options or other options I missed out on. But "logical" is not equivalent to "moral" except by chance.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  You oversimplified the problem by assuming no rescue from the get go. Logically it is probably most efficient to wait until your metabolism is at an absolute lowest. It also has the nice bit that you reduce harm if the rescue comes earlier.
mirimir 10y ago
My first thought was the exceptions. And so yes, you can't say "Human life is worthless." But if you look around, there's plenty of evidence that, in fact, it sometimes is. For people who value something else more. Such as victory, profit, or whatever. There's also the issue that in-group lives tend to matter far more, by orders of magnitude, than out-group lives. I've seen quotes from famous people using 10^3 or more.
theaeolist 10y ago
In his "History of Western Philosophy" Bertrand Russell writes about the non-humanist philosophy of Nietzsche that it is consistent but it does not describe the kind of world he would like to live in. So I think that humanism is a matter of social agreement.
nostrademons 10y ago
I thought it was an excellent example precisely because it's so disturbing. It's about as close to objectively true as you can get: "human life is a precious thing" is a value judgment, and you can't logically prove value judgments. It's also a value judgment that virtually everyone would agree with, which illustrates that many things that everybody believes cannot be objectively proven. Incidentally, you could make a logical argument that the reason everyone believes "human life is a precious thing" is because anyone who doesn't has long since killed themselves or been killed by people who wanted to preserve their precious life, and you can do so without passing any judgment on whether human life is in fact precious. One could easily imagine AI robots, for example, who don't believe that human life is precious because it doesn't matter to them whether we kill each other all off. But this separation between the object level ("here's what I value") and the meta level ("here's why I value it") is fundamental to making logical inferences.
- twiceaday 10y ago
  'Human life is precious' is not a truth in any sense of the word. It is a feel-good slogan, coined by humans for humans. You cannot possibly define it rigorously enough to start worrying about its trueness. The example is poor and is clearly reaching for shock value.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Neither my comment nor the article ever says 'Human life is precious' is true. What the article says is "'Human life is precious' is something you believe not because of logic, but because other people told you to", which I do believe to be true. It's up a meta-level from the level that you're discussing.
    - twiceaday 10y ago
      That is some meta-level nonsense. The article claims we all believe human life is precious for illogical reasons. Gasp! Comment section erupts in arm chair philosophy. All because they allowed the author to conflate formal system rigour with philosophical nonsense. That is, 'mathematically logical' and 'thinking rationally.' You cannot apply rigour to vague bumper-sticker slogans, they are trivially illogical. Almost nothing is completely logical in daily life. It's not a big shock. There is nothing profound about this. To assume otherwise is naive. You say "It's about as close to objectively true as you can get." If by 'objectively' you mean 'extremely subjective to the human experience' then I agree with you. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're on about.
Udik 10y ago
I actually took exception on the red light example. Of course, it's conventional that the red light means "stop"; but it's a measurable fact that the convention exists. And those who tell you that red means stop don't mean it as a universal rule- they'd be be perfectly fine if there were a country where red and green meaning are inverted. Whereas value of human life? As a prescriptive norm, it is certainly enforced in many countries. But as a universal truth? Poorly defined, highly questionable, totally subjective.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  You can still have observable facts that are social constructions. The key is that without human values, those observable facts would disappear. So for example, we assume that dinosaur fossils would still exist even if humans had never walked the earth, that our sun will turn into a red giant and then a white dwarf long after we can no longer observe it, and that all matter is made out of atoms even if those atoms don't form humans. (Ignore "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it..." arguments for the moment.) These are not socially constructed. But gender roles, for example, are very much observable and very much facts of life, yet gender is still considered a social construct. Money is a very necessary part of life and if you ignore it you won't have a happy one, but money is also a social construct. If all humans disappeared, these facts would cease to have any coherent meaning.
  - Udik 10y ago
    > But gender roles, for example, are very much observable and very much facts of life, yet gender is still considered a social construct. By some. IMHO, there's a lot of effort going on in believing and making believe that gender roles are social constructs in spite of all the evidence (evidence, not necessarily proof) of the contrary. Money is equivalent to red traffic lights. Its value is conventional, but the convention itself is objective. Ignore it at your peril (you'll be run over by somebody). If all humans disappeared, the existence of both gender roles (be them social or innate or, as very probable, a mix of the two) and money would still be as objective as dinosaur fossils are today. Our faith in the preciousness of human life would be on the same level (a fossil). The actual preciousness of human life, as a universal fact in itself, never existed in the first place.
lultimouomo 10y ago
The punchline immediately follows: > Lots of useful and totally true facts about the world are socially constructed. It's obviously not the only accepted position in ethics, but saying that moral rules don't follow from logic or some metaphysical fact is not saying that there is no moral.
- dom0 10y ago
  Ethics heavily relies on logic, but the axioms used might not all stem from there.
lacker 10y ago
I also found it extremely disturbing. If you are interested in a much deeper exploration of this, you might be interested in the book Sapiens, especially the part on human rights. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICN066A/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICN066A/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
Gupie 10y ago
I agree, my life is precious to me, I have no reason to believe the other people feel differently about theirs.
- ionised 10y ago
  Have you tried asking other people? It seems presumptuous (and perhaps even arrogant) to believe everyone thinks a certain way just because you do.
rukuu001 10y ago
I also think it's an excellent example. If this belief were based on logic we'd have nothing to discuss re abortion, murder, execution, genocide or euthanasia. For fun, you can compare it to the belief "Gold is a precious thing" and ask how often people destroy (not spend) gold, compared to how often they destroy human life.
pluma 10y ago
Well... "You shouldn't eat mud" actually felt like a bad example because it follows from some other widely agreed upon truths like "mud is indigestible" and "mud can contain things that can harm you". "Red light means stop" is obviously a social convention. There's nothing inherent about red light that means stop, it's just a visual language that's become somewhat ubiquitous. "Human life is a precious thing" is the most abstract of the three. It's usually treated as a basic axiom that doesn't need any further justification. The question isn't really "is it true" but "why do we treat it as if it were true". If you look closely the seams become apparent: what is life, what is a human, what follows from something being precious, etc. The three aren't really three examples of a kind but three different examples of different kinds of truths we generally believe "because we were told so".
- BugsJustFindMe 10y ago
  "You shouldn't eat mud" actually felt like a bad example because it follows from some other widely agreed upon truths like "mud is indigestible" and "mud can contain things that can harm you". Being indigestible or possibly containing things that can harm you do not mean that you shouldn't eat mud. They mean that eating mud might hurt you, which is not the same at all. If anything it's a bad example because it overlaps with the assumption that human life is precious.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    Is there any utility in eating mud? I think this is where most surviving philosophies and actions are based on. People who waste time on unproductive activities have lower fitness.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      "Is there any utility in eating mud?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia TL;DR: It may be a source of minerals and (possibly) vitamin B-12. There are also some risks to go along with the benefits.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
framp 10y ago
Why should it be disturbing? Being precious is a relationship between two entities, where one of the two must be sentient. Considering the phrasing "Human life is a precious thing", my assumption is that the reader (or myself) is the one who perceive human life as precious. To one self the only precious life is your own. This is baked in all of us by default, our genes make us value life. But what's the value of other people's lives? We can evaluate other people's lives value with the benefits they bring us. Therefore, the people closer to us will have more values - because the influence our reality. What they do and how they interact with us also influence their value. If you were to save someone for a fire, you would probably give more value to your son than some stranger. This maps to reality quite well - just think about how shocked are people for accidents happening in their own hometown and how little they care for people dying in a far away country. It's obvious that people close to use will be worth much more - but let's assume we want to get more granularity on strangers. How can we evaluate human life which is not related to us? We can rank them by the value they bring to society, as that value is something you're going to benefit from as well. Let's say you're about to run over some people with a car and you can't avoid this scenario. You can just pick which ones to kill. Would you prefer running over a man or a fat man? A man or a woman? A man or a kid? A man or an old man? I won't get into considerations but you can think in term of cost for the society (pensions vs taxes vs health), the ability to procreate, the ability to benefit from more advanced education in the future. But let's try to take a step further, let's say we want to employ people to solve a task. Let's become a business. Their value can be seen entirely related to how well they can solve this task. My view is that we're just really advanced machines without any will or possibility to stray from our predefined path. Genes are our codebase, the environment we live in is our continuos input, our actions are a continuos output which feed into the environment itself - feeding back in our input. We're just really complex processes running. When somebody dies is just like a process who was accomplishing some work that won't continue anymore. What could have that process done? If we had a state of all the particles (or strings, or whatever your smallest unit is) in the universe, we could theoretically calculate all the possible states, maybe changing the conditions which could have brought our process to die, calculating what it could have achieved. Creating machines as advanced as ourselves is just a matter of time and technological advancement. Once we are able to create trained life at will and in a faster timespan (because everybody can do that in 9 months + 30 years of training), the value of life itself would dramatically decrease. Let's call them robots. Why should I bother hiring free people when I can just create and kill some robots? And as an extension, why should I be able to kill robots but not people? What even is the difference at this point? This would essentially bring the value of all the people we don't care about to whatever the cost of creating an equivalent skilled robot is. Which, given robots can create value themselves, is probably going to quickly get to zero and crash the entire economy. It would be like having slavery with infinite slaves. Is human life a precious thing? Yes. For now.

by bruxis 10y ago

throwaway6556 10y ago

How so? I'm pretty sure Syrians had to unlearn that long ago. Now that realisation is (literally) coming here.

deadlyllama 10y ago

It follows from Christian theology (imago dei) but that's increasingly losing ground in the West. If we're just agglomerations of atoms why should I believe that all human agglomerations are equally precious?

nostrademons 10y ago
Post-enlightenment philosophy holds that these are two different domains [1], and conflating them is a category error. You believe we're agglomerations of atoms because the experimental evidence makes this the most likely explanation. You believe that human agglomerations are equally precious because you believe that human agglomerations are equally precious; no reason is needed, and indeed, no reason can logically be given. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction
- cousin_it 10y ago
  Instrumental values can have arguments for and against them. Only terminal values are "protected". I'm not sure that considering all people precious is a 100% terminal value, it seems at least partly a game-theoretic convention.
edko 10y ago
> If we're just agglomerations of atoms why should I believe that all human agglomerations are equally precious? If we're just agglomerations of atoms, why would any agglomeration of atoms, human or not, be precious at all?
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  Because patterns are neat. (I mean that less flippantly than it reads.)
- Gupie 10y ago
  For self-protection
igk 10y ago
Self interest. You can't control other people, but you can participate and propagate (hence strengthen) social norms. Unless you believe you and the ones you care about will always be in power, it's good insurance to propagate the belief "all human agglomerations are equally precious". (Same exercise as "which world do you want to live in as a rational being")
blowski 10y ago
Imago Dei is basically "I am precious because I am precious to God (as is all life, especially humans)". I could also say that I am precious because I am precious to my parents.

cgriswald 10y ago

Given the subjective nature of the statement I do not find it particularly disturbing to consider it may not be objectively true. Additionally, I disagree with the implication that because a conclusion is not reached through logic it is not objectively true. For one, there may still exist a logical argument whether I have made that argument or not. For another there is no guarantee that logic leads always to truth or that truth can only be found with logic. (Although I do find those two ideas rather disturbing...)

blowski 10y ago

How would you prove with logic that human life is precious? I agree that it is precious, but I'm not sure how I'd prove it.

charlieflowers 10y ago
How about: Human life is the most advanced creation of evolution; the pinnacle of billions of years of evolution. No other life is as advanced. Therefore, human life is precious. (I don't love the wording. But the idea is that, just as the greatest painting of a famous artist is precious, likewise the greatest production of evolution is precious. Not air tight, but maybe a start).
- vectorpush 10y ago
  > Human life is the most advanced creation of evolution Arguable. It depends on how you define advanced. There are many organisms that live longer, are more numerous and can survive in more extreme environments than humans. It is also conceivable that humans might completely destroy all habitable environments, which would certainly disqualify us from the subjective qualification of "pinnacle of evolution". More importantly however, evolution has no pinnacle or direction. Even if we grant that humans are "the most advanced creation of evolution", it does not necessarily follow that this causes it to be inherently precious.
- HelloNurse 10y ago
  From a strictly evolutionary point of view any other life, being our contemporary, is the pinnacle of the same billions of years of evolution and exactly as advanced as us. (Not that evolution is actually moving "forward", but it's fair to consider living organisms winners and extinct ones losers.) To consider human life superior, we need less objective and more problematic criteria, e.g. claiming that we are special because we are sentient.
- blowski 10y ago
  Good attempt, so I'll try to counter it, just to be argumentative. As far as I know, the human body is no more complicated than most mammals. However, the human brain does appear to be unique in its capabilities. So for human life to be precious, does it need to have a fully-functioning brain? Would that make the life of someone with severe learning difficulties, or even someone in a permanently vegetative state, less precious?

Nadya 10y ago

Not at all. Logic doesn't need to be moral and, in fact, many logical conclusions are amoral. There are five people trapped in a snowstorm during the winter. They are out of food and have no means of going outside to gather more. They need to eat to survive or else they will all perish. The logical conclusion for survival is cannibalism. Then you have the varying moral scales of "kill someone and eat them", "draw sticks and the unlucky loser gets eaten", "wait for the first person to die, then eat what remains of their starved body", or "everyone chooses to die of starvation instead of eating one another". Among those choices - once again the logical conclusion for best chances of survival, namely "eating someone while they have enough meat to provide sustenance to the survivors" is typically considered amoral compared to the "everyone dies" or "eat the starved body and risk dying of starvation anyway" options. I'm sure there are plenty of in between options or other options I missed out on. But "logical" is not equivalent to "moral" except by chance.

AstralStorm 10y ago
You oversimplified the problem by assuming no rescue from the get go. Logically it is probably most efficient to wait until your metabolism is at an absolute lowest. It also has the nice bit that you reduce harm if the rescue comes earlier.

mirimir 10y ago

My first thought was the exceptions. And so yes, you can't say "Human life is worthless." But if you look around, there's plenty of evidence that, in fact, it sometimes is. For people who value something else more. Such as victory, profit, or whatever. There's also the issue that in-group lives tend to matter far more, by orders of magnitude, than out-group lives. I've seen quotes from famous people using 10^3 or more.

theaeolist 10y ago

In his "History of Western Philosophy" Bertrand Russell writes about the non-humanist philosophy of Nietzsche that it is consistent but it does not describe the kind of world he would like to live in. So I think that humanism is a matter of social agreement.

nostrademons 10y ago

I thought it was an excellent example precisely because it's so disturbing. It's about as close to objectively true as you can get: "human life is a precious thing" is a value judgment, and you can't logically prove value judgments. It's also a value judgment that virtually everyone would agree with, which illustrates that many things that everybody believes cannot be objectively proven. Incidentally, you could make a logical argument that the reason everyone believes "human life is a precious thing" is because anyone who doesn't has long since killed themselves or been killed by people who wanted to preserve their precious life, and you can do so without passing any judgment on whether human life is in fact precious. One could easily imagine AI robots, for example, who don't believe that human life is precious because it doesn't matter to them whether we kill each other all off. But this separation between the object level ("here's what I value") and the meta level ("here's why I value it") is fundamental to making logical inferences.

twiceaday 10y ago
'Human life is precious' is not a truth in any sense of the word. It is a feel-good slogan, coined by humans for humans. You cannot possibly define it rigorously enough to start worrying about its trueness. The example is poor and is clearly reaching for shock value.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Neither my comment nor the article ever says 'Human life is precious' is true. What the article says is "'Human life is precious' is something you believe not because of logic, but because other people told you to", which I do believe to be true. It's up a meta-level from the level that you're discussing.
  - twiceaday 10y ago
    That is some meta-level nonsense. The article claims we all believe human life is precious for illogical reasons. Gasp! Comment section erupts in arm chair philosophy. All because they allowed the author to conflate formal system rigour with philosophical nonsense. That is, 'mathematically logical' and 'thinking rationally.' You cannot apply rigour to vague bumper-sticker slogans, they are trivially illogical. Almost nothing is completely logical in daily life. It's not a big shock. There is nothing profound about this. To assume otherwise is naive. You say "It's about as close to objectively true as you can get." If by 'objectively' you mean 'extremely subjective to the human experience' then I agree with you. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're on about.

Udik 10y ago

I actually took exception on the red light example. Of course, it's conventional that the red light means "stop"; but it's a measurable fact that the convention exists. And those who tell you that red means stop don't mean it as a universal rule- they'd be be perfectly fine if there were a country where red and green meaning are inverted. Whereas value of human life? As a prescriptive norm, it is certainly enforced in many countries. But as a universal truth? Poorly defined, highly questionable, totally subjective.

nostrademons 10y ago
You can still have observable facts that are social constructions. The key is that without human values, those observable facts would disappear. So for example, we assume that dinosaur fossils would still exist even if humans had never walked the earth, that our sun will turn into a red giant and then a white dwarf long after we can no longer observe it, and that all matter is made out of atoms even if those atoms don't form humans. (Ignore "if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it..." arguments for the moment.) These are not socially constructed. But gender roles, for example, are very much observable and very much facts of life, yet gender is still considered a social construct. Money is a very necessary part of life and if you ignore it you won't have a happy one, but money is also a social construct. If all humans disappeared, these facts would cease to have any coherent meaning.
- Udik 10y ago
  > But gender roles, for example, are very much observable and very much facts of life, yet gender is still considered a social construct. By some. IMHO, there's a lot of effort going on in believing and making believe that gender roles are social constructs in spite of all the evidence (evidence, not necessarily proof) of the contrary. Money is equivalent to red traffic lights. Its value is conventional, but the convention itself is objective. Ignore it at your peril (you'll be run over by somebody). If all humans disappeared, the existence of both gender roles (be them social or innate or, as very probable, a mix of the two) and money would still be as objective as dinosaur fossils are today. Our faith in the preciousness of human life would be on the same level (a fossil). The actual preciousness of human life, as a universal fact in itself, never existed in the first place.

lultimouomo 10y ago

The punchline immediately follows: > Lots of useful and totally true facts about the world are socially constructed. It's obviously not the only accepted position in ethics, but saying that moral rules don't follow from logic or some metaphysical fact is not saying that there is no moral.

dom0 10y ago
Ethics heavily relies on logic, but the axioms used might not all stem from there.

lacker 10y ago

I also found it extremely disturbing. If you are interested in a much deeper exploration of this, you might be interested in the book Sapiens, especially the part on human rights. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICN066A/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICN066A/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

Gupie 10y ago

I agree, my life is precious to me, I have no reason to believe the other people feel differently about theirs.

ionised 10y ago
Have you tried asking other people? It seems presumptuous (and perhaps even arrogant) to believe everyone thinks a certain way just because you do.

rukuu001 10y ago

I also think it's an excellent example. If this belief were based on logic we'd have nothing to discuss re abortion, murder, execution, genocide or euthanasia. For fun, you can compare it to the belief "Gold is a precious thing" and ask how often people destroy (not spend) gold, compared to how often they destroy human life.

pluma 10y ago

Well... "You shouldn't eat mud" actually felt like a bad example because it follows from some other widely agreed upon truths like "mud is indigestible" and "mud can contain things that can harm you". "Red light means stop" is obviously a social convention. There's nothing inherent about red light that means stop, it's just a visual language that's become somewhat ubiquitous. "Human life is a precious thing" is the most abstract of the three. It's usually treated as a basic axiom that doesn't need any further justification. The question isn't really "is it true" but "why do we treat it as if it were true". If you look closely the seams become apparent: what is life, what is a human, what follows from something being precious, etc. The three aren't really three examples of a kind but three different examples of different kinds of truths we generally believe "because we were told so".

BugsJustFindMe 10y ago
"You shouldn't eat mud" actually felt like a bad example because it follows from some other widely agreed upon truths like "mud is indigestible" and "mud can contain things that can harm you". Being indigestible or possibly containing things that can harm you do not mean that you shouldn't eat mud. They mean that eating mud might hurt you, which is not the same at all. If anything it's a bad example because it overlaps with the assumption that human life is precious.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Is there any utility in eating mud? I think this is where most surviving philosophies and actions are based on. People who waste time on unproductive activities have lower fitness.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    "Is there any utility in eating mud?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia TL;DR: It may be a source of minerals and (possibly) vitamin B-12. There are also some risks to go along with the benefits.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

framp 10y ago

Why should it be disturbing? Being precious is a relationship between two entities, where one of the two must be sentient. Considering the phrasing "Human life is a precious thing", my assumption is that the reader (or myself) is the one who perceive human life as precious. To one self the only precious life is your own. This is baked in all of us by default, our genes make us value life. But what's the value of other people's lives? We can evaluate other people's lives value with the benefits they bring us. Therefore, the people closer to us will have more values - because the influence our reality. What they do and how they interact with us also influence their value. If you were to save someone for a fire, you would probably give more value to your son than some stranger. This maps to reality quite well - just think about how shocked are people for accidents happening in their own hometown and how little they care for people dying in a far away country. It's obvious that people close to use will be worth much more - but let's assume we want to get more granularity on strangers. How can we evaluate human life which is not related to us? We can rank them by the value they bring to society, as that value is something you're going to benefit from as well. Let's say you're about to run over some people with a car and you can't avoid this scenario. You can just pick which ones to kill. Would you prefer running over a man or a fat man? A man or a woman? A man or a kid? A man or an old man? I won't get into considerations but you can think in term of cost for the society (pensions vs taxes vs health), the ability to procreate, the ability to benefit from more advanced education in the future. But let's try to take a step further, let's say we want to employ people to solve a task. Let's become a business. Their value can be seen entirely related to how well they can solve this task. My view is that we're just really advanced machines without any will or possibility to stray from our predefined path. Genes are our codebase, the environment we live in is our continuos input, our actions are a continuos output which feed into the environment itself - feeding back in our input. We're just really complex processes running. When somebody dies is just like a process who was accomplishing some work that won't continue anymore. What could have that process done? If we had a state of all the particles (or strings, or whatever your smallest unit is) in the universe, we could theoretically calculate all the possible states, maybe changing the conditions which could have brought our process to die, calculating what it could have achieved. Creating machines as advanced as ourselves is just a matter of time and technological advancement. Once we are able to create trained life at will and in a faster timespan (because everybody can do that in 9 months + 30 years of training), the value of life itself would dramatically decrease. Let's call them robots. Why should I bother hiring free people when I can just create and kill some robots? And as an extension, why should I be able to kill robots but not people? What even is the difference at this point? This would essentially bring the value of all the people we don't care about to whatever the cost of creating an equivalent skilled robot is. Which, given robots can create value themselves, is probably going to quickly get to zero and crash the entire economy. It would be like having slavery with infinite slaves. Is human life a precious thing? Yes. For now.