Is life over-valued?

Sleepy

Can it actually said that a human life is priceless?

Many people seem to think so, though I have to say I disagree. I can think of many public figures who's death would be to the overall benefit of the country and many more who's death I would personally find it hard not to smile at... Now, maybe that makes me a sick individual, or maybe I'm onto something: that human lives have defineable values.

When put into comparative questions it is often easy to see who should be chosen to live and who should die. For example: ask yourself, would you rather see Ian Paisley in a coffin or a new-born baby? Gerry Adams or Adi Roche? Simon Cowell or Bono?

If we accept that human lives have different values, then we must also accept that human life can't be priceless (as if both lives are priceless, they are equal in value). This leads us to a quantative question: how do we place a value on a human life?

DadaKopf

How many €'s are you worth?

omnicorp

can we buy life with money?

monster_fighter

Monetary values are placed on life all the time.

The county council will weigh the benifit of say, a known number of lives that will be saved by improving road X vs. new laptops for the councilers.

Airlines graph aeroplane airspace cost against cost of accident, with (as far as I remember) $250,000 the figure placed on a human life.

Hospital doctors decide on whether patient X in need of a new heart is worth more (% chance of sucess, insurance cover, PR etc) than patient Y who needs new lungs.

I'm sure Dadakopf will be back once he's had his dinner.

monster

simu

Every human is unique, once their consciousness is wiped out, it's gone forever.

That's probably what people mean when they say "priceless".

monster_fighter

simu wrote:

Every human is unique, once their consciousness is wiped out, it's gone forever.

That's probably what people mean when they say "priceless".

Yeah, you're unique, just like everybody else.

Stark

monster_fighter wrote:

Monetary values are placed on life all the time.

The county council will weigh the benifit of say, a known number of lives that will be saved by improving road X vs. new laptops for the councilers.

Airlines graph aeroplane airspace cost against cost of accident, with (as far as I remember) $250,000 the figure placed on a human life.

Hospital doctors decide on whether patient X in need of a new heart is worth more (% chance of sucess, insurance cover, PR etc) than patient Y who needs new lungs.

I'm sure Dadakopf will be back once he's had his dinner.

monster

That's what you get when modern society provides perfect opportunities for psychopaths to gain power. If one of them loses their life then the rest of society will benefit.

simu

monster_fighter wrote:

Yeah, you're unique, just like everybody else.

Trite but true.

It's weird - we're so passionate about our own lives and our history and yet, who knows what great struggles are being fought by ants under the building I'm in as we speak!

All the same, from my human point of view, the uniqueness of a person ranks slightly above the uniqueness of a pile of sand or an insect colony!

monster_fighter

simu wrote:

Trite but true.

All the same, from my human point of view, the uniqueness of a person ranks slightly above the uniqueness of a pile of sand or an insect colony!

Don't mind me, I'm just a cynical veggie who doesn't rate humans above animals (the day I kill an animal is the same day I waste a clip on Grafton St.)

joseph brand

You're value of the life of the Reverent Evil Ian paisley is probably lower than some bigoted slimeball from the North who loves the very ground he walks on.

My parents are priceless to my brother and I, whereas you don't know them, nor need to.

Priceless means 'irreplaceable', oul' Iano the Paisleymeister is irreplaceable as it would be hard to find someone with such an angry manner who just won't die, noe even from stress.

A human life's value is only here and now and not in 200yrs when no one misses ya!

We ARE priceless wether we are 'Good' or not, for we are Irreplaceable.


@Monster Fighter
Yeah, that's a new one:

Yeah, you're unique, just like everybody else

Everybody IS unique, so what's your point??

DadaKopf

What, then, if people are considered 'replaceable'? What are the implications?

Sleepy

Cold logic dictates that some lives are worth more than others to society at large than others (e.g. it's safe to say that Michael O' Leary's death would have far worse consequences for the country than Charles Haughey's). For the purposes of a conversation on this topic we must factor out the emotional attachment which we relatively feel towards people and instead focus on what that person's value to society is.

In the example of the airlines that monster_fighter gives, I assume the figure they place on a human life is the estimated cost of any resulting court case taken by the survivor's families. But how can we measure someone's value to society? An estimate of how much tax they'd have paid if they'd lived til 65? Doesn't really take account of the fact that the person could donate large amounts of their time/money to charity work or that they could be murdering scumbags that are a net drain on society does it?

So, if you accept that human life cannot be priceless (as one life can be worth more than another) and that the definition of life being priceless due to our individuality is a nonsense, how do we go about placing a value on it? I'm curious to see how other people's minds answer this question.

DadaKopf

One bioethicist, I can't remember his name, says that considering every life 'priceless' is a philosophical cop out because it's a stance that deliberately avoids asking questions about how we value some people's lives more than others. The reality is that people make these decisions every day, but they dress them up in comfortable moral language that derogates responsibility. He examines, particularly, the area of ethics in medicine.

He's a radical utilitarian. The only way to make the morally correct decision is to do whatever maximises the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The life of the individual on the life-support machine who has been in a coma, quite simply, has less of a right to live, and in fact causes more damage to society, than many more who need life-support machines for the short-term while in critical condition. So, according to utilitarianism, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

But there's a contradiction in utilitarianism: for a philosophy based on an individualistic Liberal/Libertarian worldview, it places all its moral emphasis on the collective. It's also a philosophy that attempts to measure 'happiness', which economists are well aware is impossible to measure with any accuracy. They talk about measuting 'utils', but they're flummoxed as to what utils actually are.

So utilitarian arguments suffer serious philosophical and methodological problems. Humans are very bad at predicting the future, and social sciences are extremely bad at predicting anything. What if that coma patient, predicted by doctors never to wake up, does actually wake up after 19 years? How many lives might those life-support machines have saved in the meantime? Or, how many coma patients who would have recovered would have been killed compared with those saved over a longer timeframe if such a utilitarian policy was standard medical practise? Does it make more sense to keep coma patients on life-support or not? A further consequence could be that people wouldn't seek medical assistance because they'd be afraid of being murdered, which would cause further illness and death.

This is just an example, and hard cases don't make for the best arguments. You're better off looking at the grey areas.

Anyway, the question should be: is it morally defensible to make life or death decisions on the basis of a philosophy that's contradictory and on methodologies that are treated as ironclad natural laws but are frequently incorrect and methodologically suspect?

But back to the original point, we still make such judgements to justify particular moral or political stances, we we're left looking for another way to explain this conundrum.

omnicorp

omnicorp wrote:

can we buy life with money?

Sure you can. Go to any third-world country, and you'll find someone willing to sell their children, or sell someone else's child. Slavery still exists, and is unlikely to go away.

As for the actual worth of a person, I don't know. What i do know is that most westerners believe that they're better, more civilised than their third-world neighbours. therefore they value themselves more, which in turns places a higher price.

Life is cheap. Hence the thousands dying in dozens of countries around the world due to warfare, murder, and genocide. Drug usage worldwide also suggests that people in the main don't value life. Their own maybe, but others? Nah.

Sangre

Deleted User wrote:

Drug usage worldwide also suggests that people in the main don't value life. Their own maybe, but others? Nah.

You're right. Anyone who is reckless enough to use antibiotics or pain relief medicine should be shot on the spot.

omnicorp

What about surgery to dave someone's life.

liamo

Interesting questions.

Is a human life priceless?
What is the value of a human life?
How do we place a value on a human life?

Value is completely subjective. What is totally priceless to me may be utterly worthless to you. Items have no intrinsic value per se. Their value is measured by what others are prepared to pay for them.

The issue of the sale of children was brought up by an earlier poster. While a child may be worth a certain amount of money to a slave-trader, that child is probably priceless to his/her parents (well, at least I would hope it is). Is the slave-trader's valuation any more or less correct than that of the child's parents?

If the chairman of a board of directors of a large company has a heart attack and dies, I'm sure his wife and children would be grief-stricken at the loss of their father and husband. The shareholders of the company might also be upset, but probably only to the extent that their returns on their investment might be affected. A new chairman would be duly appointed, thereby easing the concerns of the shareholders and proving that the chairman is, indeed, replaceable. A belief not, I'm sure, shared by the grieving widow and children.

Kidnappers share one thing in common. They believe that a human life does, indeed, have a value. Who is to say that they're wrong. Some of them make a good living from their activities.

Liam

WhiteWashMan

name_less wrote:

human's don't deserve life. we are poisoning everything that provides for us. and we are condemning all other life to disintigrate along with us. human life is worthless. because when we dissapear nothing will miss us. not even dogs. that's if anything can survive in the world we leave behind.

and if you committed suicide, would anyone turn up to your funeral yadda yadda yadda.

i am unsure why there needs to be an x v's y analogy here.

you are talking about the value of a single life, you are not comparing the effects of individuals, because quite frankly, the variables would be too large to calculate.

the question is, do we put a value on a single life, or is it too precious?

seamus

name_less wrote:

human's don't deserve life. we are poisoning everything that provides for us. and we are condemning all other life to disintigrate along with us. human life is worthless. because when we dissapear nothing will miss us. not even dogs. that's if anything can survive in the world we leave behind.

If there's anything certain, it's that nature can do a hell of a lot more damage to us than we can do to it. Even if we do completely **** up the ecosystem, we'll all die off, and in two million years nature will generate another few thousand species with one or two dominant ones, who look nothing like we do, and do nothing like we do.

Our immediate concern with the ecosystem should deal with self preservation. We're lucky to be here at all, and it's quite likely that in a few millenia (a fraction of a nanosecond in terms of how long the earth has existed and will exist), we won't be here any longer. Our impact on the planet will be astrologically insignificant (save if we manage to actually break the planet in two or something). It's not for the sake of nature that we should be concerned about the planet, but for the sake of our own survival.

We are just another form of life, and this is what we do. The earth's history is choc full of the emergence of new species that make a huge impact on the planet in the short-term. The reason we have oxygen to breath at all is because of an emergence of bacteria millions of years ago who slowly turned a poisonous atmosphere (to us) into a very oxygenated atmosphere. In terms of every other thing which was enjoying the earth at the time, these bacteria were super-polluters, destroying the delicate ecosystem that the rest of the world had flourished upon.

Now we're getting into philosophy....

liamo

name_less wrote:

human's don't deserve life. we are poisoning everything that provides for us. and we are condemning all other life to disintigrate along with us. human life is worthless. because when we dissapear nothing will miss us. not even dogs. that's if anything can survive in the world we leave behind.

human's don't deserve life.
In the sense that, as a species, we have no cosmic right to life - you are correct. However I believe the point you're making is that humans, as a species, don't deserve to live. That's just silly!

we are poisoning everything that provides for us. and we are condemning all other life to disintigrate along with us
We are polluting our environment. A lot of people are aware of this and are working very hard to correct it. This is a long way short of your rather stark assertions.

human life is worthless. because when we dissapear nothing will miss us. not even dogs.
Aw, diddums. Did someone not get enough hugs as a wickle boy?

that's if anything can survive in the world we leave behind.
I, for one, welcome the rise to power of our insect overlords.

bonkey

Sleepy wrote:

If we accept that human lives have different values, then we must also accept that human life can't be priceless (as if both lives are priceless, they are equal in value).

Not necessarily.

Firstly, if we take a mathematical slant, one could rephrase this to say :

If we accept that human lives have different values, then we must also accept that human life can't be infinite in value (as if both lives are infinite in value, they are equal in value).

This doesn't necessarily hold. Two infinities are not necessarily equal (there are different "orders" of infinity). So why should we not take "priceless" in a similar light?

Alternately - to allow even more flexibility - one would have to question whether or not you are comparing like with like. If we somehow measure someone's contributions to the world and from this somehow determine their worth, is this the same scale on which we declare life to be priceless? Would that not be in itself inherently flawed? How can you define a calculation system without first deciding that life is not priceless and therefore has calculable worth? So we are not concluding that life is not priceless because it is calculable in worth...rather we are defining an alternate measure and then saying that because it exists, the first measure - arrived at differently - cannot also.

I'm not necessarily saying that life is, or is not, priceless....I'm just questioning the logic by which you are questioning the belief, although I see the underlying point you're making (i.e. I'm being somewhat pedantic)

jc

jc

You're right. Anyone who is reckless enough to use antibiotics or pain relief medicine should be shot on the spot.

Actually I was pointing to substance abuse. Bit of a difference.

omnicorp

human's don't deserve life. we are poisoning everything that provides for us. and we are condemning all other life to disintigrate along with us. human life is worthless. because when we dissapear nothing will miss us. not even dogs. that's if anything can survive in the world we leave behind.

But we are the only species who Can willingly do any of these things, not all humans are responsible for this though.

And a cow releases as much green-house gas as a car in 1 year.

Cremmer

But...what do you mean by "priceless"?

If you're going to argue this out you've got to define your premises!

Moriarty

seamus wrote:

Even if we do completely **** up the ecosystem, we'll all die off, and in two million years nature will generate another few thousand species with one or two dominant ones, who look nothing like we do, and do nothing like we do.

Just on this, there's a theory that's gaining supporters over the past few years going along the lines of if life was to evolve totally seperate from us on this planet again, it's reckoned that what would eventually come out of it at a certain point would be remarkably similar to us. We're well designed for our environment and there's only so many ways that life as we know it can adapt to the conditions on earth in an advantageous way.


On the original question.. human life in and of itself carrys no more value for me than any other animal. It's the person that counts, not the walking bag of chemicals and minerals they're made of.

We're well designed for our environment and there's only so many ways that life as we know it can adapt to the conditions on earth in an advantageous way.

it makes sense in a way. Any carbon based lifeform will advance in a similiar format as we did, through an industrial age, and with technological advances along the same lines. The only exception would be if they discovered safer energy from the start, but we're entering sci-fi territory here.

Regardless, we're here, and until we kill or are completely wiped out, we're on this planet. Time to deal with our mistakes ourselves rather than passing the buck by saying that we're self-destructive.

seamus

Moriarty wrote:

Just on this, there's a theory that's gaining supporters over the past few years going along the lines of if life was to evolve totally seperate from us on this planet again, it's reckoned that what would eventually come out of it at a certain point would be remarkably similar to us. We're well designed for our environment and there's only so many ways that life as we know it can adapt to the conditions on earth in an advantageous way.

Well, I think this much is possibly true, but it's more likely that once we're gone, the chances of another lifeform like us emerging is quite slim. The chances of *us* being here is slim enough, we've just had a good run in terms of stability of the planet, atmosphere, etc.

omnicorp

it would take millions of years for something like that to happen, and it would only happen if it Could happen, or if the animals needed to evolve, monkeys needed to stand on two feet in the desert cos of the hot sand, they lost their hair cos of the haet and their brain evolved to make up for their lost physical abilities