What is it? Now this can be defined in various ways. Life insurance companies will quote you the money they pay on your death.
What is the minimum amount of money I would have to pay you to kill someone?
Is one life worth more, less, or the same as a million. If less, then why does the death of a single 101 year old woman in London send the nation’s media into emotional tailspin, while thousands dying in the third world goes largely ignored?
If more, the why is the murder of millions of innocents in Hiroshima and nagasaki justified as preventing many more casualties if WW2 had continued?
If I offered to bring one person out of abject poverty forever, but I had to kill you to do it, would you accept. What if I helped 10 people, or 100, or 1,000,000?
How much should the family of an innocent shot by a soldier or policeman be compensated?
I would love to hear your views on this subject.
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Does sign language have silent letters?
When coloured people shower, is that ethnic cleansing?
Life has no inherantly value, and any value you may ascribe to it is relative. I might kill someone for nothing (e.g. Bush), or not take any concievable ammount no matter what for someone I care about.
Life is beyond commerce, but like everything, from wagner to food, it is unfortunately subject to it.
In our secular world, the queen mum was seen by many (not me, personally) as something of a religious object. Somebody who captured the ‘character’ of the nation. The nation that we ‘love’ so much. We’ve been lucky not to be caught up in a claustrophobic media bubble over her death, like with lady di. We can thank the Ariel/Yasser duologue for that!
Your question concerning the atomic bombs at the end of WW2 is one I’ve asked myself before. It’s as if the morality you could apply to such a question is a morality born out of a highly imperfect world. I’ve never been able to answer it.
Do you think those bombs were justified? in light of the fact that the nuclear detrent has provided a relative lull in military activity since WW2. And that this has somehow allowed a better platform for peace. I dunno…
Justified, or unjustified? I wouldn’t mind knowing.
the reason for dropping two bombs was to make it appear as if the americans had many more, they were dropped over only a few days to give that impression. as for wanton descruction they caused, they were infact less deadly than the Tokoy fire storms. i feel they were totally justified and also showed the world what nuclear weapons can really do, not just some numbers on a page.
I wouldn’t agree to be killed for bringing one person out of abject poverty. If you asked if to save one of my family or friend’s lives you had to kill me then that would be a different matter. My rational mind tells me to always save my own life, but my emotional side says otherwise.
With regards to the media coverage of the queen mother, that is just a socio-political quirk. All respected companies need to be seen doing “their bit” for the monarchy. My father used to work for ITN and he said that when the Queen came to open the first news story, the head boss said that every region must wait for her to push the button and not start until she does so. Anyone who did go early was likely to get the sack. This is because bosses of companies most likely want to get a knighthood or an honour etc. Obviously, that’s only one example…
With regards to the public, I think a lot of it is psychological. People see the coverage of the queen mums death on tv and think it has some sort of significance in their life, and they have a perverse pang of nationalistic pride and go and put flowers at buckingham palace. You see them in interviews saying “she was such a wonderful women, witty, good sense of humour, she’ll be really missed tears”. Most likely that person was standing in a street crowd, 20 people thick, while the queen mother drove past in her queenmum-mobile and that was the only contact they had. People don’t mourn over third world countries and the people dying their because a) they don’t care and b) life would be too depressing if every life was considered. Things like the atomic bombs in Japan are put into the back of peoples minds because it is too disturbing to consider for too long. People will say “yes it is a tragedy” but if you just think about the enormity of the event and how many people’s lives were destroyed in an instant, it’s enough to bring you to tears and to throw out any hope for the human race. Utterly depressing stuff I feel.
Personally I think people who mourn the loss of a person they didn’t know in the same way as a person they did know, is doing it for other reasons than actual sorrow. That’s my terribly cynical view of course.
Like Pangloss I would agree that “life is beyond commerce,” and it is exactly this that Dickens was criticising in his deeply satirical novel “Hard Times.” As an economist, you are forced to put monetary values onto things that cannot be fairly calculated in monetary terms. A worker is referred to as a “factor of production.” But this is just another way of looking at the depersonalisation of our modern age. Is economics therefore immoral to take this stance? I don’t personally think it is a matter of morality, but more a distressing matter that indicates perhaps a soulless age.
One cannot put a value on ‘a unit of human life’, even a non-monetary one, because there is no generic human life. Of course the death of someone close to you affects you more than the death of someone you have no sort of connection with. So perhaps we can ‘evaluate’ people at least in a relative manner - surely we all do this all the time. i.e. this person’s ok and I quite enjoy some light conversation with him’her Vs. this person’s my soulmate and I would literally do anything for him/her.
HVD, (so stupid calling you that but just to maintain annonymity as if you haven’t already lost it) I don’t quite follow your logic when you write:
“Is one life worth more, less, or the same as a million. If less, then why does the death of a single 101 year old woman in London send the nation’s media into emotional tailspin, while thousands dying in the third world goes largely ignored?
If more, the why is the murder of millions of innocents in Hiroshima and nagasaki justified as preventing many more casualties if WW2 had continued?”
What you have done and which therefore renders your logic inaccurate is to talk of “one life” and then go on to specifics from this general case. No, one life is not worth more than other TO AN OBJECTIVE PERSON. But if the person is subjective i.e. feels a connection with/ has an interest in one of the persons, then of course the balance will be tipped. Hence, newspapers are interested in the world’s oldest person because people are interested in this person who was one of the closest to reaching immortality around. We are not objective, we can put values on lives, because we are affected by our emotions/intellects and our interests.
Just to add a religious/ Jewish spin to his. The Torah says that he who saves one life saves the world over. Not entirely sure what that means but I think it implies that there is no difference between ‘one unit of human life’ and ‘all units of human life.’ How could an economist explain that?
Fuck the torah! alex. Can people have the courage to leave religion doctrine out of questions of morality? Especially when the doctrine is incoherent. Why follow the crowd? Your own rulebook is always far more important than that of religion. The religion’s laws promote a monoethnicity and ignorance which flatly contradicts the idea of an individual beefing up its intellect to determine their own perfection, and sense of value. Admittedly a person can find see perfection in a religion’s philosophy (e.g.Buddhism) and can use the following and study of this philosophy to find there own personal value. Admittedly, I’ve gone off the topic as well. I don’t even hate religion. Its just late-ish, and I’m tired. Sorry. G’nite.
ps. what i wrote at the end of my last post on the ‘perfect world’ topic might explain what i’m talking about.
[This message has been edited by Pangloss (edited 03 April 2002).]
In fact, fuck any religous text that’s over 500 years old. Why? Because they’re not relevant. I don’t have to respect people who believe in the pixies that live at the end of their garden, and I don’t have to respect the dogma people who believe in a Judeo-Christain god (or Allah. or Ganesh).
I’m not saying there might be nice principles behind the ideas contained in them, but they are not, in and of themselves, justification for the view.
[This message has been edited by Archie (edited 04 April 2002).]
Yet again, I apologise for my comments. I suppose a combination of fatigue and my instinct for shock-dramatics! got the better of me, and I am truly sorry to any jew or otherwise that i may have offended.
The idea of there being a religious object for an individual or for a nation is important to me. And I am aware that the torah is the holy symbol of such perfection for many people. I completely respect these people, even if I see perfection elsewhere. It is important not to have your holy symbol reduced to an insult. I apologise, yet again.
I recommend Don Cupitt’s ‘the new religion of life in everyday speech’, where he notes the democratic shift of the religious object away from god and towards ‘life’ itself, and how this shift has infiltrated into many phrases of everyday speech.
back to the topic ~
[This message has been edited by Pangloss (edited 04 April 2002).]
“A worker is referred to as a “factor of production.” But this is just another way of looking at the depersonalisation of our modern age. Is economics therefore immoral to take this stance? I don’t personally think it is a matter of morality, but more a distressing matter that indicates perhaps a soulless age.” says alex.
Do we accept this as the given standard now? Or do you identify a missing link between a state which has ultimate control over its economic system, and the people of this ‘soulless’ age. Though it would seem to be quite the opposite, in lib. democracies like our own, the further right an economic system becomes, the more its people feel like consumers, and not citizens. Why should they feel any responsibilty, if their own state, which is there to iron the externalities wont do it.
The ‘soulless’ age is what someone seemed to be advocating (though it was debate, where points mean credit) at the FCO, when they said that culture and the arts should be treated like any other product, subject to market conditions.
Personally, I have very few problems with this “souless age”. I don’t find the need for the existance of a soul. I don’t think life has an inherant meaning, though this isn’t the same as saying you might as well all go kill yourselves.
The state is the people. If the state makes us feel like consumers it is because the people have created a state in which they are treated like consumers.
[This message has been edited by Archie (edited 04 April 2002).]
I suppose I’d be wrong to criticise Archie for accepting the way of the world, even if it is as ‘soulless’ and imperfect as some pessimists have said.
Life is ultimately material, and therefore cannot have a meaning, but that is not to say that humanity hasn’t been and won’t continue to strive for perfection.
‘The state is the people. If the state makes us feel like consumers it is because the people have created a state in which they are treated like consumers.’ :
is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard. A ‘small’ state is not the people. The people do not create the state in its own image. If anything, the state creates the people in its own image. In the UK, the state is too paranoid of its own image to act in the way we direct it to. And in the US, democracy is even weaker.
I don’t want to come across as a spoilt brat. I know I’m lucky to be able to talk about this in public without having my hands chopped off.
The state must always take the initiative to iron out society’s externalities. This is why Thatcher is hated so passionately by many on the left.
But the state cannot have just “come into being”. Humanity creates states. It may not be in it’s own image, but you can’t argue a state has any meaning without people.
Of course there is a feedback loop going on here, the people create the state, and the state shapes the people, and so on. Since humans first started practising agriculture the “state” we are in has affected everyone.
I think my point is simply there is no dividing line between the state and the people, certainly if you accept that the state moulds people in it’s own image as well as the other way round.
And trust me, I hate Thatcher with a passion you could only imagine.
“I don’t have to respect the dogma people who believe in a Judeo-Christain god (or Allah. or Ganesh).”
In the comfort of you own home, maybe, but as long as you wish to take part in these boards you will show some respect and not post such offensive remarks which add nothing to the discussion.
Would you have had any problems with my post had I replaced “fuck” with “ignore”?
I accept that they may cause offense. Within the context of the earlier comment “fuck the Torah” I was simply pointing out it was not a racist statement.
I still see no need to show respect for the beliefs, however, just be less antagonistic.
Be moderate. Don’t try to justify yourself AFTER you have offended. Grovel like an orphan for forgiveness, especially if you’ve said something which goes against your own beliefs.
The Bible is one of the greatest works of literature and I am deeply offended by your attempts to justify your view. O yes, I am.
It’s like saying f*** Ulysses, or f*** Dorian Gray.
