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> I feel like it might be a cause of being a bit older but my (single) mother always said that women and men were equal in worth not aptitude. I actually like

> I feel like it might be a cause of being a bit older but my (single) mother always said that women and men were equal in worth not aptitude. I actually like this line a lot, because it points to several of the problems in modern society. It makes you ask the question: "on what grounds is worth judged?" And then you realize that, without a clear way of thinking about "worth" (which is something organized religions provided), we, at least in the US, fall back on "economic value", which is determined by "aptitude". So we can pretty quickly see the philosophical pit we've fallen into: if "worth" and "aptitude" are intertwined, then the statement admits women are indeed "worth less". I want to agree with that statement. But, there's a problem: how can we come up with a method of judging worth that doesn't rely on some sort of "over-human validator" (e.g. God)? Or alternatively, how can we come up with a broadly acceptable method of judging human worth, without falling into the pitfalls of Abrahamic religious practices?

davrosthedalek 7y ago
I'm not so sure if human being should have the attribute of "worth" (I formulate it like this because "have no worth" has a different meaning). If they do, you can make ugly calculations: It's worth to kill 300 PAX to save 1000s in the skyscraper the plane is going to fly into. It's worth to kill one prisoner in interrogation because he knows where his partner might have the hostage (or two?).
- Nav_Panel 7y ago
  Worth doesn't have to be absolute nor quantifiable. To use a mathematics analogy, you can have an ordered set without addition and subtraction, and it could even be roughly ordered so you can't tell the difference between two adjacent elements.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Worth doesn't even have to be one measure. In math you can have two different ordering functions which give different results on the same input.
everdrive 7y ago
> I want to agree with that statement. But, there's a problem: how can we come up with a method of judging worth that doesn't rely on some sort of "over-human validator" (e.g. God)? Our brains are pretty well built for this. Are you sure that requiring human-type validation is even avoidable at all?

davrosthedalek 7y ago

I'm not so sure if human being should have the attribute of "worth" (I formulate it like this because "have no worth" has a different meaning). If they do, you can make ugly calculations: It's worth to kill 300 PAX to save 1000s in the skyscraper the plane is going to fly into. It's worth to kill one prisoner in interrogation because he knows where his partner might have the hostage (or two?).

Nav_Panel 7y ago
Worth doesn't have to be absolute nor quantifiable. To use a mathematics analogy, you can have an ordered set without addition and subtraction, and it could even be roughly ordered so you can't tell the difference between two adjacent elements.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Worth doesn't even have to be one measure. In math you can have two different ordering functions which give different results on the same input.

everdrive 7y ago

> I want to agree with that statement. But, there's a problem: how can we come up with a method of judging worth that doesn't rely on some sort of "over-human validator" (e.g. God)? Our brains are pretty well built for this. Are you sure that requiring human-type validation is even avoidable at all?