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(justification to read my post here: at the end I argue richer people have higher moral value!) Many of us think its 'brave' and 'correct' to say "all lives ar

(justification to read my post here: at the end I argue richer people have higher moral value!) Many of us think its 'brave' and 'correct' to say "all lives are equal value" in the moral sense. Its a 'sexy' thought to have as it seems liberal and its simple, but it is ultimately wrong. Our actions are what define us, so a person who performs good/selfless actions that benefit others should be defined as higher value than a selfish murderer/rapist. If lives were equal value then taking the life of a child would be equally as bad as taking the life of an 80 year old - but most people do not think that way. Your value (in the moral sense) should simply be a function how much good you provide to the world. This leads to the difficult issue where because we can in fact buy "good" (by buying anti-malaria nets for children for £5 a pop) you find that those born into wealth have a higher capacity to perform "good" and therefore, on average, have a higher moral value by this definition.

Qwertious 14y ago
More than that, if all lives are worth something, some people are worth more than others, even if purely because some people can improve others' lives MORE.
digeridoo 14y ago
> If lives were equal value then taking the life of a child would be equally as bad as taking the life of an 80 year old - but most people do not think that way. ? So is murder of an 80-year old worse, or murder of a child? I'm confused, because I don't really think that way. I'm also not buying into this self-obsessed view of "value". Americans and Europeans do more damage to the world per capita than anyone else in terms of of energy consumption, pollution, and creating economic inequality. Their charitability does not really make up for it. For me the only distinction is that I value people I know more than people I don't know. However, everyone is someone I could get to know.
pron 14y ago
Your reasoning is pretty ridiculous. There are many things that cannot quantified. How would you quantify the contribution of a person who's done a lot of bad, say murdered some people, but whose actions inspire policy makers to change their policies for the better? Or how would you quantify the life of an african baby, dead at the age of 6 months, that inspires rich Americans to buy anti-malaria drugs? Or a horrendous event that results in a work of literature of such beauty that it lasts for centuries? Or some random, unknown person, dead for millennia, whose skeletal remains teaches us about human evolution? Some things require a completely different way of thinking from a data-driven, "rational" perspective, but to put it in your terms, "life" is such a complex, intractable, system, that quite often defies any kind of "left-brain" analysis.
zerostar07 14y ago
have to disagree: - life of youths is more valuable: ancient tribes will say the opposite: they routinely sacrificed their children to gods, not so their elders, who were considered valuable for their wisdom. - Money is a means to buy services and goods regardless of their moral value. You can buy hookers, drugs, murderers, malware and other life-wasters. I think you couldn't be more wrong about this. - "Good" has not been defined yet. Also, there is no rule that good people earn the most money; not even close
dromidas 14y ago
The reason nobody can agree on the 'value of life' is because the value changes per context. Life has no intrinsic value of its own except to the person who currently owns it. When anyone says 'all life has value' they are talking spiritually, or religiously, and that is something that is just feel good hippy speak to make themselves look and feel better. To truly speak of lifes value you have to break it down into contexts and agree that these contexts are necessary to be used in the comparisons: Economic, political, civic, leadership, educational, breeding value, looks, etc. Once a set of contexts are agreed upon you have to weigh them based on a common base, like say Economic, take that as a 1.0. Someone might say that 'looks' is a 0.6 based on economic value, where as leadership or engineering may be 1.2. Once these weights are set, apply values to the contexts, weigh them together to get an total value of the person's life. Then you can accurately judge their life value vs another. You could improve upon this by having negatives (murderous villains) that could affect total value, etc.

Qwertious 14y ago

More than that, if all lives are worth something, some people are worth more than others, even if purely because some people can improve others' lives MORE.

digeridoo 14y ago

> If lives were equal value then taking the life of a child would be equally as bad as taking the life of an 80 year old - but most people do not think that way. ? So is murder of an 80-year old worse, or murder of a child? I'm confused, because I don't really think that way. I'm also not buying into this self-obsessed view of "value". Americans and Europeans do more damage to the world per capita than anyone else in terms of of energy consumption, pollution, and creating economic inequality. Their charitability does not really make up for it. For me the only distinction is that I value people I know more than people I don't know. However, everyone is someone I could get to know.

pron 14y ago

Your reasoning is pretty ridiculous. There are many things that cannot quantified. How would you quantify the contribution of a person who's done a lot of bad, say murdered some people, but whose actions inspire policy makers to change their policies for the better? Or how would you quantify the life of an african baby, dead at the age of 6 months, that inspires rich Americans to buy anti-malaria drugs? Or a horrendous event that results in a work of literature of such beauty that it lasts for centuries? Or some random, unknown person, dead for millennia, whose skeletal remains teaches us about human evolution? Some things require a completely different way of thinking from a data-driven, "rational" perspective, but to put it in your terms, "life" is such a complex, intractable, system, that quite often defies any kind of "left-brain" analysis.

zerostar07 14y ago

have to disagree: - life of youths is more valuable: ancient tribes will say the opposite: they routinely sacrificed their children to gods, not so their elders, who were considered valuable for their wisdom. - Money is a means to buy services and goods regardless of their moral value. You can buy hookers, drugs, murderers, malware and other life-wasters. I think you couldn't be more wrong about this. - "Good" has not been defined yet. Also, there is no rule that good people earn the most money; not even close

dromidas 14y ago

The reason nobody can agree on the 'value of life' is because the value changes per context. Life has no intrinsic value of its own except to the person who currently owns it. When anyone says 'all life has value' they are talking spiritually, or religiously, and that is something that is just feel good hippy speak to make themselves look and feel better. To truly speak of lifes value you have to break it down into contexts and agree that these contexts are necessary to be used in the comparisons: Economic, political, civic, leadership, educational, breeding value, looks, etc. Once a set of contexts are agreed upon you have to weigh them based on a common base, like say Economic, take that as a 1.0. Someone might say that 'looks' is a 0.6 based on economic value, where as leadership or engineering may be 1.2. Once these weights are set, apply values to the contexts, weigh them together to get an total value of the person's life. Then you can accurately judge their life value vs another. You could improve upon this by having negatives (murderous villains) that could affect total value, etc.