Human life has intrinsic value?

[Yahweh]

I generally don't hold that human life has any intrinsic value whatsoever. It seems that if we accept that human life can be taken under certain circumstances, and that these circumstances have an impact on the moral consequences of taking human life, than almost certainly human life has conditional value. As soon as we accept this claim, then we are forced to accept the human lives have relative value with respect to one another.

Here's a contrived comparison to demonstrate both claims: Hitler's life has negative value and is not value enough to preserve, Ghandi's life has positive value and ought to preserved.


So, I'd like some feedback from others: am I on the right track? Is this sound philosophy?

If so, what conditions does a human need to have to be valuable in the first place?

If not, how is the claim that human life have intrinsic value justified in the first place?

[skyfire]

My personal belief is that while human life is indeed something precious, there are indeed certain situations wherein a person may either:

*forfeit their right to continued existence (such as serial killers)

or

*find themselves in a situation where fate or their actions have set them on a course towards their own demise (such as a drunk driver or an armed robber).

While in either case the loss of life is tragic, in the former the loss of the person's life is for the betterment of the lives of others; in the latter, the person's demise is a consequence of choices and actions made by themselves or by others.

[Old Viking]

Your life is precious to you. My life is precious to me. As an all-encompassing generality? No way! From what I've witnessed in 76 years I'd say human life is one of the cheapest commodities on earth.

[Napoleon the Clown]

Humans are more valuable to human society than dogs, usually. It's just basic human nature to value fellow humans more than other animals. And to value countrymen over the world at-large. With family and close friends usually taking the highest priority, next to self.

That isn't to say that it is right or wrong. It's simply the way it is. The universe doesn't give a flying fuck about humans. Or gorillas. Or any other organism. From the perspective of the universe, morals are entirely irrelevant. Same with a planetary perspective. No matter how bad we fuck things up, the planet will recover.


All that being said, the relative value of a human life can be changed by actions, yes. If someone's freedom or continued existence if a net harm to society, it is in society's best interests to remove them from the equation, either by killing them or locking them up in isolation for life. Neither option is entirely humane.




And, in the end, morals often have little actual logic behind them. Very few things that are considered morally wrong come down to looking at it logically. It's typically an emotional response situation. Whether that emotional response is an innate, evolved, instinctual thing or one that society has adopted isn't really important, since the reason for believing something to be wrong ultimately boils down to something that you've been told since birth is wrong. The thought process can be changed, yeah. Really, morality is, by definition, behaviors that society at large has decided shouldn't occur.

[Lady Renae]

I keep trying to come up with an answer to this, but I keep hitting the roadblock that when someone dies they stop being a person in my mind. To me, a dead baby equates a dead adult equates a dead murderer equates a dead philanthropist equates a dead cat equates a dead [insert any animal here].

Dead is dead. Alive is alive. Alive should do its best to stay alive until dead, but once you're dead there really isn't any use quibbling about the fact. You're dead.

My philosophy isn't to place value on life so much as value on what people do with that life.

[shiftyeyes]

In my attempt to have some consistency in my beliefs, I've tried to figure out this problem. Life in and of itself, isn't particularly impressive. It involves metabolism and respiration. Big deal. Having a sense of self, seems to be inherently valuable. To kill a someone aware of their existence seems to be problematic, as it deprives the world of a unique perspective, and (this is hard to explain) deprives the individual of his selfhood (yes I know he won't be aware of it after the fact.)

[Yahweh]

Jun 1, 2009 18:48:30 GMT -5 Napoleon the Clown said:

Really, morality is, by definition, behaviors that society at large has decided shouldn't occur.

This is an attitude I really loathe, its just lazy. At a bare minimum, even if we conceded that morals were a convenient fiction to keep people in line, moral principles need to be internally consistent to be useful at all. The whole point of morality is to constrain people to a set of behaviors which, by and large, keep them out of the state of nature. Without the constraint that principles should be consistent, then its not possible for any moral principle to constrain anyones behavior, even in principle. Hence, we can deduce that all morals must be consistent before even making any statements that they are true or false; we can dismiss all internally inconsistent moral principles as necessarily false.

The very second we concede that moral principles can be logically false, then we have to accept that morality (whatever its nature) can be discussed in terms of reason. So, we have grounds for arguing that some moral systems are provably false and some are actually plausible. Welcome to the town of pragmatism; population: you. And William James.

[Yahweh]

Jun 1, 2009 18:57:49 GMT -5 shiftyeyes said:

In my attempt to have some consistency in my beliefs, I've tried to figure out this problem. Life in and of itself, isn't particularly impressive. It involves metabolism and respiration. Big deal. Having a sense of self, seems to be inherently valuable. To kill a someone aware of their existence seems to be problematic, as it deprives the world of a unique perspective, and (this is hard to explain) deprives the individual of his selfhood (yes I know he won't be aware of it after the fact.)

For all the reasons there are for protecting rational people, it always seems like non-rational infants get the short end of the stick. They don't have a sense of self, aren't especially aware of their own existence, they can't even make moral decisions.

Almost everyone believes human infants are valuable. Why?

[Art Vandelay]

I don't think human life is really anything special, the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable, I think is just a side effect of our self-preservation instincts and the fact that we evolved as a communal species. There's also the fact that all values are just concepts assigned by humans, so it's essentially impossible to say anything has an intrinsic or objective value.

Also, there are a lot of people who I think should just be lined up and shot, and to hell with all this "but hoomans are pwecious!!1!" bullcrap.

[lumberjackninja]

Jun 1, 2009 19:24:47 GMT -5 Yahweh said:

Jun 1, 2009 18:57:49 GMT -5 shiftyeyes said:

In my attempt to have some consistency in my beliefs, I've tried to figure out this problem. Life in and of itself, isn't particularly impressive. It involves metabolism and respiration. Big deal. Having a sense of self, seems to be inherently valuable. To kill a someone aware of their existence seems to be problematic, as it deprives the world of a unique perspective, and (this is hard to explain) deprives the individual of his selfhood (yes I know he won't be aware of it after the fact.)

For all the reasons there are for protecting rational people, it always seems like non-rational infants get the short end of the stick. They don't have a sense of self, aren't especially aware of their own existence, they can't even make moral decisions.

Almost everyone believes human infants are valuable. Why?

Human infant lives are valuable compared to all other non-human life on the planet. If one makes the reasonable assumption that your only biological imperative is to pass on the genes of your parents- which I would say is entirely reasonable- then it makes sense that this value of infants is programmed into (most) of us.

In situations like these, it's often times informative (to me, it's fun, but for others it reveals a little too much about themselves than they'd like to know) to consider lifeboat ethics, and the logic you would use to decide them.

Consider the following problem: suppose you had two children. One aged, say, eight years old, and the other an 8-month infant. Both are in fairly good health and would most likely go on to lead productive lives as fully-functioning human beings.

Unfortunately, one of them has to die. It's your choice; there's no getting around it. Saying you wouldn't make the choice is irrelevant, you have to. Let's say that if you throw your hands up and say "I don't wanna!", they both die.

Which one do you choose to die, and which to live?

EDIT: I forgot to add my choice; if I were having this conversation in real life, I'd wait for the other party to respond before voicing my opinion. Since we don't have that convenience, I'll just say that I would choose the older child; more has been invested into their development, and they are closer to reproductive and mental maturity than the infant. If you lose the infant, it would take a year and half to make a new one, which would be almost identical to the eight year old; on the other hand, the eight year old is not easily replaceable, and even if you did take the time to make a new one, the variables contributing to the eight-year-olds personality are far harder to duplicate than would the variables for the infant.

When you think about it, this was a fairly common situation back in the day (minus the choice aspect); babies died all the time. While few would admit it, I'm fairly certain the parents were more distraught over the death of their older children than the almost inevitable death of an infant.

I am not trying t devalue human life here. Unfortunately, to understand that value fully, we have to probe into situations that are generally uncomfortable. I like to think it makes one a better person for thinking about this than for refusing too on the grounds of emotional discomfort.

[Nutcase]

I think human life should be treated as if it has intrinsic value, whether it actually does or not. That stems directly from the ethic of reciprocity: My life has value to me, and so I’ll treat your life as valuable in hope of receiving the same courtesy.

It’s a dangerous course to proclaim that some human life is, by the very nature of it, worth more than other human life – for example, that the life of a poor retiree is of less value than that of her working, childbearing granddaughter.

Or is worth determined by lifetime achievement, as opposed to current output? Is there some formula by which “the worth of a life” can be objectively calculated?

Certainly, a person’s impact on the world, regardless of her abilities or disabilities (etc.), would be impossible to determine ahead of time; and so too would her ability to make a quantifiable net contribution to the common good.

It doesn’t matter if human life has an intrinsic value outside our collective agreement that it does. It’s in our best interests as individuals who value our own survival to treat other people as worthy of preservation.

[Sigmaleph]

Jun 1, 2009 19:24:47 GMT -5 Yahweh said:

Jun 1, 2009 18:57:49 GMT -5 shiftyeyes said:

In my attempt to have some consistency in my beliefs, I've tried to figure out this problem. Life in and of itself, isn't particularly impressive. It involves metabolism and respiration. Big deal. Having a sense of self, seems to be inherently valuable. To kill a someone aware of their existence seems to be problematic, as it deprives the world of a unique perspective, and (this is hard to explain) deprives the individual of his selfhood (yes I know he won't be aware of it after the fact.)

For all the reasons there are for protecting rational people, it always seems like non-rational infants get the short end of the stick. They don't have a sense of self, aren't especially aware of their own existence, they can't even make moral decisions.

Almost everyone believes human infants are valuable. Why?

I know you are going to hate this argument, but as I see it, it's might be because they have the potential to become rational beings. That's not to say potential X gets the same value as X, but that potential to have value grants value in itself, although not equal to the one they might eventually have. I might not be expressing myself clearly here, if so sorry about that.

It could also be that for most or every infant, there's one or more rational humans that have an emotional attachment to it, and would suffer harm were the infant to die. Therefore, under the principle of not harming a valuable rational being, we also not harm the infants they are emotionally attached to.

[Yahweh]

Jun 1, 2009 19:44:57 GMT -5 lumberjackninja said:

Jun 1, 2009 19:24:47 GMT -5 Yahweh said:

Human infant lives are valuable compared to all other non-human life on the planet. If one makes the reasonable assumption that your only biological imperative is to pass on the genes of your parents- which I would say is entirely reasonable- then it makes sense that this value of infants is programmed into (most) of us.

I wouldn't say that "you only biological imperative is to pass on the genes of your parents" is reasonable at all, namely because evolution is descriptive, not prescriptive. Last time I checked one of the silliest arguments fundies have against evolution is that its a moral theory.

(I personally find the idea that "you're wired to do something, therefore you should" is particular scary. Too easy to justify anything with those principles.)

[Yahweh]

Jun 1, 2009 19:56:33 GMT -5 Sigmaleph said:

I know you are going to hate this argument, but as I see it, it's might be because they have the potential to become rational beings. That's not to say potential X gets the same value as X, but that potential to have value grants value in itself, although not equal to the one they might eventually have. I might not be expressing myself clearly here, if so sorry about that.

I come across this claim so often that I created a blog post which describes in detail what it is and why its wrong:
depravity.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/potential-person-arguments/

To make a long story short, potential person arguments say "X is a potential Y, therefore X should be treated the same as Y". It sounds good at face value, but its just bad philosophy. Case in point: you're a potential corpse, but its wrong to bury you; infants are potential child bearers, but its wrong to have sex with them. Why? Evidently its wrong to bury you because you're not dead, and its wrong to have sex with infants because they aren't capable of consenting to sexual relationships with others; it turns out that, in the end, we make moral decisions based on exactly the characteristics people have right now, not the ones they might have 20 years from now.

More than that, potential person arguments don't account for why we value infants who have no capacity to attain rational personhood at all, which include the severely mentally handicapped and terminally ill.

Potential person arguments can also be turned on their head to make an argument for rather than against killing babies. After all, potential person arguments state that infants have no value in and of themselves, only rational people have value; if you kill an infant, have you harmed a rational person? No. You've only prevented one from coming into existence. You can't harm a person by preventing them from existing because (not that it needs an explanation) there's no person to harm in the first place! So, by the principles underlying the potential person argument, killing babies harms neither the baby nor a rational person, it harms precisely no one at all.

It could also be that for most or every infant, there's one or more rational humans that have an emotional attachment to it, and would suffer harm were the infant to die. Therefore, under the principle of not harming a valuable rational being, we also not harm the infants they are emotionally attached to.

I find this a more plausible reason against killing infants, although it seems really odd that the wrongness of killing babies has nothing to do with the harm caused to the baby, but the harm caused to someone else. Still, there are lots of arguments to the effect of "what if the parents just don't like their kids" which aren't explained by this ethic and "is Sally's abortion wrong because her neighbor would be really sad?" which doesn't seem right either.

[tygerarmy]

All life is equally valuable. Even the serial killers. People being good or bad people does not affect the value of their life any more than a person having a disability. As long as we are alive we have the power to change. Ourselves and the world around us.

"..No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee