The "Value" of Life

Alright, so here's one for thought. Let's spend a minute thinking about "the value of life". Does life have an inherent value? Is a newborn baby as valuable as a serving member of society? Does an unborn? Is society an acceptable benchmark/context to judge worth or is it simply an artificial creation, a facet of the true value of human life? Let's just say I'm glad I'm not President, but here's a theory I've been thinking about the past couple days.

Based off of the problems of discerning at what point in development the fetus becomes a human, or rather gains the 'value of life', I say the following. Imagine that one's value is not inherent in them being human, or even alive. Instead, one extracts value from how much they can serve others, and how much others value their existence. A newborn baby has value to the parents, and members of its family, but it has no friends and contributes nothing to society (i.e., nothing to the betterment of the collective human race or Earth). Therefore, this is markedly different from a worker in a manufacturing company, whose products go on to better the lives of people all across the globe who use them, his friends, AND his family.

Let's examine this under several contexts. First, the unborn child. It betters the mother and father, to whom the idea of having a child gives them meaning in their lives, and possibly the grandparents for the longing of having a grandchild. It affects other family members, and friends of the parents, who are happy to see the joy of the parents which in turn gives them some sort of fulfillment. As this progresses throughout family and friends of those who become joyed, it becomes diluted and eventually lost in the positive energy of the human collective and world. However, this is not yet to suggest that the child befits all, because in practicality, the visible effect does end a couple generations out (positive energy being a theoretical I am not ready to go into) and the unborn child obviously does no benefit society in its actions. If it were to die, the negative impact would also be contained several generations out. Keep in mind, this all goes under the assumption that humans do not have inherently any value, and all value is derived from how much they affect others.

Next example, the remote family. Suppose a family of four live in the wilderness. They grow their own food, consume it all, are entirely self-reliant, and have no contact with 'the outside world'. If the mother was to die, the family would be affected so she obvious has some worth. But say the entire family was to die. There would be nobody to miss them, nobody they have affected by their demise, etc. How can we say, then, that the collective family unit has any value outside of their own four selves? Their deaths would mean absolutely nothing to anyone else, nobody would be around to grieve, and many people would be unable to call this a tragedy for lack of affected to empathize with.

Now, let us vary this a little bit. Let's take the persecuted Darfurian. He has a family, but has no job, and his whole existence is running away from people who want to kill him. This man gives nothing to society, seperating him from the investment banker in New York, whose effects trickle down (again in the theoretical) through the entire economic world. Suppose the persecutors were able to wipe out the entire chain of connection that this person is a part of (similar to the four person family). Suppose the genocide wiped out the entire community, enough so that there is nobody to mourn for them because all of their connections have lost. This is hard to say, however, because we are so connected in this global age, but suppose that this race of people simply only interacted and affected members of the same race and its existence would affect the outside world in no way. Obviously, the biggest criticism would be to say that this is irrelevant because human life has an inherent value, but let me criticize that in a few ways:

First, the problems of inherent value of human life. How can we end the lives of others, if there are going to be people in the same position that will empathize with the deaths of their loved ones? How can we justify being a position to end the life of anyone? Which, is of course, inevitable through the clash of natural resources, territory, and outside aggression. Situations can be manipulated to justify the killing of individual people (such as home-intruders), but we should feel incredibly guilty about treating people any way outside of the Golden Rule, which we obviously do not. We are selfish creatures and we put the value of our lives above the value of others, proving that we manipulate the value (at least self-perceptually) of life itself outside of our own.

Second, the problems of living in an ideal world. We DO NOT live in a world where absolute truth can be attained on a pragmatic level. Absolutely, things have no inherent value. Nothing 'matters', and every life is equal to another for inability to make these arbitrary judgment calls. And I'm not disagreeing with this, but every day in order to survive on planet earth we are forced to make these arbitrations and view things as fragmentations of the Truth (arguably, enough so to warrant it taking a place into our own philosophy and truth) - but still, it is simply not an attainable feat to making our life livable if we were to go around living in this 'truth'. Every day we live is an exercise in hypocrisy to the "truth", and rationally we should simply end our lives to return to that divine and perfect oblivion from whence we came. But we don't, and nobody's asking you to. Instead, I simply ask you realize that we do not live in an ideal world. Therfore, it is very hard and I discourage acting on the view that every life is equal and we modify it to what actually makes sense under certain criteria. And those are:

- Improve the quality of life for as many people at the least impact to ones own life.
- Condition oneself to take pleasure in the pleasure of others, and constantly strive to eliminate unnecessary selfish actions.

While at the same time realizing the futility of life, and all that holy truth.

Now, getting back to my first point, about this community of affect. The criteria for judging value of life should not be value to self (as everyone has infinite value to their own self), nor should it be inherent value (because of the ramifications of taking this view, especially the impact on ones own life), therefore I propose it is how much we affect the collective humanity. Ideally, of course, if everyone were to work unselfishly to take care of others, that person's individual needs would be taken care by others, something I'm sure you've heard before so I need not bore you with my own advocation. However, under my proposition, examine the case of abortion, justified in two ways:

First off, the mother and father, the two people principally affected by the child stand to not be affected by the loss of the child. Those surrounding the parents who empathize with them would support them because they are achieving what they want (in an absence of a world where people have this inherent-value perspective). Therefore, the child has acheived nothing of worth to others, an infinite self-worth (for argument's sake), and his demise would be missed by nobody, save perhaps for the grandparents who wanted a grandchild before they died. For this, see my second point.

As a quick interjection, I recognize that many people will take issue with my casual acknowledgement of the child's self worth and dismissal. To that, I reply keep in mind my previous argument! If we were to grant that perspective to our rational decisions, think of what horrors we latently approve of. We can no longer make selfish decisions that negatively impact others because we would not want the same happening to us (empathy to the self of others being the drive here). In order to maintain some modicum of ego and self-interest, we must practically disregard this belief (something people do every day without acknowledging it to their mental declarations).

For my second point, in the vein of what I was getting at with comparing circles of affect, some are more valuable than others. In the interest of self-preservation we must be able to make arbitrary calls of judgment against issues that should not be theoretically compared. What I mean by this is the benefit to the parents by not having to prematurely raise a child should be compared to the negative impact of the grandparents who will never see their grandchildren. And since it is the parents making the decision, they should not have compunctions about making a rational decision in their interest (a la Ayn Rand's defense of selfishness). To put it another way, yes the grandparents will suffer, but the benefit to their parents outweighs their suffering to the people making the actual decision. Is George Bush hurt by their decision to have an abortion? Will he ever even meet the child? I'm sure his biggest regret is loss of a potential conscript for his next war.