The worth of a human life has always been one of the most interesting and taboo philosophical topics. Needless to say, the attitude towards it has changed dramatically throughout the history. During the Greek and Roman era, a life of an aristocrat was considerate infinitely more valuable than a life of a slave. Today, with the slavery long gone in most parts of the world, general trends, social norms, and political correctness are gearing towards valuing each human as equal or not valuing human life at all. However, it seems to me that, although it may sound “inhuman”, “ruthless” and “terrible”, the value of a human life can easily be estimated in many situations.
Before we go any deeper, it is important to differentiate a couple of points of view. There is a personal point of view – how much is my life worth to me? There is an individual point of view – how much is that person worth to me? Finally, there is also a collective point of view – how much is a person worth to, for example, his or her family, town, nation, the whole human race, or the whole life on the planet Earth.
Now, let’s start with an example. Imagine this: you are driving a car pretty fast, and all of the sudden you see that on the left side of your road track an old, very sick, barely moving lady appears, while on the right side of your road track a very young, healthy, smiling girl appears. You see clearly that you cannot pass between them and you know that don’t have enough time to break or to turn enough to avoid them both. The best what you can do is turn a bit to your left, which will result in hitting and killing the old lady, or turn a bit to your right, which will result in hitting and killing the young girl (for me, it would be senseless to say “Hey, I’m not god, I don’t want to choose between them” and continue straight to kill them both). I think that saving the very young, healthy, smiling girl and killing the old, very sick, barely moving lady is obviously the right choice. But why is it so? It’s because it’s more altruistic to save someone who has much more potential to enjoy his or her life. In other words, from the personal point of view, our value to ourselves is equal to the potential for enjoyment that we have. By the way, I consider enjoying life and leaving a positive impact as two main purposes of a human life.
Now, here’s an example of how a human value can completely change depending on a situation when estimated from the individual point of view. Imagine that you’re alone in a small mountain hut with one door and no windows, and you can choose to bring back to life a famous altruistic scientist with his inventions and blueprints or an infamous war criminal with his AK-47 and a bloody knife. The choice seems obvious, but is it? What if your mountain hut is about to be attacked by an armed madman who plans to kill everyone inside? What’s the point of bringing back to life the famous altruistic scientist with his inventions and blueprints if you will both get killed in a matter of seconds? Wouldn’t it be better to bring back the infamous war criminal who will probably fight off the armed madman and hopefully spare you (let’s say it’s a war criminal of your own nationality, who likes members of his own nationality)? What can we conclude from this? All human traits are good for some purposes and a worth of an individual to us depends highly on what we can get from that individual, which doesn’t have to be much in line with how good is that individual for the rest of the humanity.
For explaining the collective point of view, we should get back to “leaving a positive impact”. I consider that an individual is as worth to a certain formal or informal group (such as family, town, country, nation, the whole human race, or the whole life on the planet Earth) as much as he can positively impact it. For example, if you are a positive person with a great sense of humor that tends to help others, while also being highly productive in what you do for a living, you are very valuable to most of your groups as you will make life better for its members. On the other hand, if you are a violent, ill-mannered criminal, the world would generally be a better place without you and the only group that may benefit from you is your criminal gang. Collective point of view is what most people think about when they estimate someone’s worth, but we should not forget that it’s not the only important point of view.
I think I’ll stop here for now. Please let me know:
- Do you agree that we are not all worth the same?
- What do you think about my division on points of view?
- How do you feel about my examples?
- I would love to hear and discuss your examples!
- If you liked the post stay tuned as more similar posts are coming.
Have a wonderful day, week, and life!
Wow this really isn't a easy topic and I think there is no complete and correct answer. The first and spontaneous reaction I had was: of course all people are worth the same. But this thought shattered immediately.
I started to ask myself why should the worth of a person be determined by other people. This leads to a much deeper question with which humans deal since they exist. Why are we here? What is the purpose of live? Is there a God?
The world does not consist of black and white. But I don't deny it, who would not act like this in the given situations.
Humans are not perfect. We don't now every fact about a person or a given situation. We would act the way we thing would help us or the majority the most or would harm the less.
Nice and deep article! I thought about it a long time. Actually we discussed themes like that a lot back in school. In ethic class.
There was one thought experiment: A train is about to crash into 5 men who are working on a railway. You could pull a lever to change the direction of the train but then it would hit one men.
Most people would do it right?
What if the one man would be a child? Quality over quantity?
Or you change the circumstances: You are standing on a bridge. A fat person in front of you. You could push this person so that he or she would fell on the railway and stop the train. Where is the difference in pulling a lever or pushing a person either way just one person dies and 5 could survive?
Even though I don't have an answer on all of this I will never forget the questions...
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Thanks for a meaningful comment, I'm glad you like the article!
Nice thought experiment. Let me try to answer question by question.
The train example is more complex than it seems on the first thought, I really like it. : )
Yes, 5 lives are usually more valuable then 1, but: those 5 men are working on a part of the railway where a train is scheduled to pass by (I suppose), while that 1 isn't. So, it could be their mistake, or the mistake of someone who was planning their work schedule. Hell, I could even end up in jail if I would pull the lever and change the direction of the train to a non-planned direction, killing a man in the process! Thus, if I had enough time to think, I would probably not pull the lever. But, what if it was 100 vs 1, or 1000 vs 1, or whole human race except me and the 1 vs the 1...
Now let's focus on quality over quantity. It's impossible to accurately calculate, but if I would be able to choose without any legal consequences, I would try to save the life/lives that has/have the most total potential for enjoyment and positive impact on the world. : )
As per the bridge twist, I think that the difference is in the fact that it's harder to do something bad to someone more directly than more indirectly (pulling the lever while alone in a train cabin vs looking in the eyes and pushing off the bridge).
It's easy to estimate human value in very clear situations such as the ones that I provided in the article, but in reality the vast majority of the situations are probably much closer to your examples.
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Interesting approach, I think we are quite in agreement about it, people, like objects, have no intrinsic value, but this depends on who values it. If there are two people exactly the same but one is closer to us, the more likely it is that it is more important to me.
With regard to the sick old woman and the smiling young woman, it is a difficult case, not in the sense of valuing people themselves, but in the fact that one is directly responsible for the death of one of them.
I think that in this sense, and the way you expressed it, all people are selfish at some point, it is something evolutionary, since each one values people depending on their "usefulness".
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Exactly, we could maybe go even further and say that we like to help/save people not because we are truly altruists but because we, as social animals, need other people and often depend on them. In other words, people are generally useful to us, especially if they are close to us, as you pointed out, and thus we save/help them.
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Welcome to Steemit. Your writing is concise and clear and your questions intriguing. I think you'll do well here. This is exactly the type of quality content that I endorse. People need to think.
First off, I think it's a mistake to assign value to human life. At any given point in time, you cannot determine how the life in question will unfold.
In the car example, you could have offered a third option: drive off the road and be killed yourself, but you didn't.
Obviously, most of us would take out the old lady. You might be doing her a favor, quickly ending a painful life already lived that is destined to end soon anyway. That's the obvious choice. However, the girl might grow up to father a psychopathic dictator who kills many millions of people and the old woman might be a sage who hasn't yet disseminated her vast store of life experience, a Christ-like persona who would ultimately foster a kinder, gentler world. You just cannot know.
The second example deals with judgement. Few would argue that Albert Einstein was an evil man, but his contribution to knowledge ultimately led to the atom bomb which killed hundreds of thousands of people and will probably kill millions more.
Muammar Gaddafi was a brutal dictator who took Libya from the poorest nation in Africa to the richest, ending years of tribal warfare to foster peace and prosperity for his people his entire life, elevating the living standards of everyone within his sphere of influence. After his death, Libya has returned to perpetual war.
Even collectively, who are we to judge the value of any human life? That's a psychopathic trait. We cannot see the future. Neither can we avoid creating waves in the world. We're like pebbles dropped into a pond. There will be ripples that radiate outward from our landing point that will disappear over the horizon of our life's time span. It's the butterfly effect and we don't have much control over it.
Yes, we do what we can to make this a better world. I have a code of ethics that I rigidly adhere to. It's taken many years of trial and error to arrive at my code, but it's where I am now. My butterfly effect (hopefully) is to get people to stop reacting to their programming and to begin to think for themselves. I don't know if this will make the world a better place or a worse place or will have no effect whatsoever. I leave that to the people of the future who will reevaluate the past.
Followed, upvoted and resteemed. I'm looking forward to much more from you.
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Thanks a lot for the warm welcome, support and resteem!
I agree that in reality it's impossible (especially due to our inability to foresee the future, as you pointed out well) and unwise to determine the value of a human life, but in some hypothetical cases we would simply have to make some decisions that would show what human life we consciously or unconsciously consider more valuable, and that's intriguing to me both as a philosophical and as a psychological topic.
"In the car example, you could have offered a third option: drive off the road and be killed yourself, but you didn't." - Wow, nice note, that would be an interesting addition! (and now I wonder: maybe I'm not altruistic enough to even consider that option, and that's why I haven't remembered to include it :/)
One fun fact about the unintentional damage done by inventors to millions of people: Ethan Zuckerman, the man who discovered pop-up advertisement, has publicly apologized a number of times for his annoying discovery. : )
"We're like pebbles dropped into a pond. There will be ripples that radiate outward from our landing point that will disappear over the horizon of our life's time span." - Nicely put! I think that your (hopeful) butterfly effect is something that can leave a positive impact on the society, go for it!
Cheers!
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Using value to determine the worth of a human being's life is fundamentally flawed because value is highly subjective.
In addition, the weakest among us make us question what we stand for and who we are. With everything that is happening in the world today, this is value we cannot do without.
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Thanks for differentiating between worth and value - I have incorrectly used the two words interchangeably throughout the article, I should have used only value.
"the weakest among us make us question what we stand for and who we are" - could you elaborate a bit more on this please? : )
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I am most drawn to the idea that we are all individual parts of something larger and are here to learn and grow from our experiences.
We are all then likely to be at different points on this spiritual journey, giving the illusion of different levels of "worth" but at the same time, all having the same potential to grow. Its like comparing a 5 year old schoolchild to a 15 year old; the 15 year old has more intellectual knowledge, but this is not because they are "worth" more than the 5 year old, they have just had more time to learn than the 5 year old. In the same way, the more spiritually evolved people on earth, may seem to have more "worth" but may just have had more time to become who they are.
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Thanks for this perspective.
I was more focused on human worth as a potential to enjoy life and positively impact the society, but yes, I agree that we have all achieved a certain level of spirituality, which could be regarded as our spiritual value.
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i do think every mans life is important, even a slave has the right to live in freedom. To every man there is a purpose , something greater and bigger than themselves.
thanks for this insightful article
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You're welcome, thanks for the positive perspective!
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You welcome
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You can buy an american life for $2,000,000. Many for $1,000,000. Some will need to be purchased for $4,000,000.
In Nicaragua or the Philippines you can by a life for $100-200k.
Large companies do it every day.
How have I come to such specific numbers?
In America, many consider 50k a year a good income and very many are happy with 25k... 50k multiplied by the 40 years (lifetime of work) that they will be in the working class is $2,000,000.
When your company is worth millions or billions it is quite easy to see this from the perspective of buying a life.
Effectively you know that if you are to spend that $2,000,000 on 50 people, then the $100,000,000 profit your company made this year has just made enough to purchase these 50 people for their entire lives. You have bought their life.
Education can determine how much you will purchase a life for but the figures will remain similar.
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Thanks for this perspective and the calculation. It's true with one important note: those are the prices of life's work of people who work a standard job. Cheers!
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absolutely true.
Which also shows that if you are working for yourself that you are less likely to be bought.
In my personal opinion all human life is worth the same... dirt to feed plants (of course with our burial process that is not entirely acurate)
However from a mathematical or social perspective I do agree that people that contribute more seem to show themselves to be more valuable.
Yet again from a spiritual perspective equality comes back in because the worst person that society has to offer can often play the biggest role in world changing events for the positive.
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What you just said about the spiritual perspective adds up nicely to what @jackstokes commented above. I've completely missed the spiritual perspective in my post. Thanks!
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:)
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