[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I think the “value” of a life is completely subjective. For example, a female in Afghanistan who is an illiterate Muslim and will never amount to anything other than raising some terrorists to hate Jews and America, then I feel that life is worth SIGNIFICANTLY less than that of a person raised with values of tolerance and passed those values on to their children. Is the “life” in question “worth” living? Do they move the world in a positive direction or a negative direction? The world would be a better place if the former were to be killed in a drone strike vs. the latter.
I’d like to drill down on the concept of “stewardship” that JB brought up because I feel that’s a VERY significant aspect of value, as it will strongly contribute to that person’s potential. If one is born into a family of loving people with good judgement, than I feel that life is worth more than if one is born into a life of a 16 year old single mother who can’t fend for herself, much less a child. All things being equal, the child born into the family has a life of FAR greater potential, and hence, more value, than that of the child born into the single mother scenario. I’m sure that argument would be, “but it’s not the BABY’S fault where it’s born”. And while I agree that it’s no one’s FAULT, we are determining VALUE, here - not assigning responsibility. Life isn’t fair. And there are of course exceptions.
I also believe that life becomes more valuable the longer it has been invested in. So an unborn fetus, in my book is FAR less valuable than a three year old who has parents that have invested in him. Because, let’s face it, a fetus doesn’t really have a life. I doesn’t even know what life is. A COW has more awareness than a fetus and we kill cows all day long. Like several people pointed out in the other abortion thread, when the woman has a miscarriage after three months, it’s a FAR LESS traumatic experience than if it died during delivery at nine months. Why? Because it had less potential and not as much was invested.
I would also bring up the point of economics. Supply and demand. The Greater the supply, the less the value. And humans are multiplying at a pretty fucking unsustainable rate. I was born in 1974. In MY LIFETIME, the human population has DOUBLED. See the attached chart. For nearly all of human history there were less than 500 million humans on the planet. Then, in the 1700’s, humans begin multiplying EXPONENTIALLY. In a hundred years there wont be enough resources on the planet to feed everyone. Assuming we make it that far with out a Malthusian event.
Think about the future where instead of 8 Billion people, there are 35 Billion people. That’s where we are headed. China’s “one child policy” is just the beginning. If the world population continues to skyrocket the way it is currently trending, I assure you a few abortions will the the LAST thing people are worried about. It will be forced sterilization for the “have nots” coupled with some kind of “culling” of the herd. Sounds kind of “Biblical”, doesn’t it? There is simply no way this will NOT happen in a hundred years. Human life will be worth LESS than nothing at that point. So all the arguing about “every life is sacred” is kind of juvenile and only serves to move the planet FASTER toward a time when “every life is expendable”. I do not look forward to those times and I am preparing MY children accordingly.
Speaking of MY children, I hold their lives to have more value than any of yours. Not trying to be a dick by writing that, but it’s true. I value MY offspring over just about anything else. And I’m sure if you are honest, every one of you who is a parent will agree with me. Call me a selfish asshole if you want. I’m just keeping it real.[/quote]
Good. Very good. This is what I was hoping to see. A completely rational and honest assessment, unclouded by sentimentality and idealism.
People often associate rising technology with “dehumanization” or a devaluing of human life. I would argue the opposite: that technology has been the only thing that has managed to keep a complete devaluation of life from occurring. Without it, the resources our species would be able to exploit would be completely insufficient to support a population of eight billion at anything above basic subsistence level.
Our country was able to build a govenment around quasi-religious principles of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness precisely because it had the immense good fortune to have established itself on a vast and rich virgin continent that was sparsely peopled, and whose resources had never been extracted by an industrial society.
But liberty in a Jeffersonian sense can never survive the constant packing-in of more people, and sooner or later the exponential rise of the population of this country, and indeed this planet, will outstrip the technological means to support it.
Oh, certainly there will always be those who will be able to carve out comfortable niches for themselves and their families, just as the most desperately impoverished and overpopulated countries today have their tiny enclaves of the privileged classes, but these will be fewer and farther between: tiny islands of wealth, comfort and “liberty” in a roiling sea of misery, famine, internecine warfare and abject poverty.
The ruling classes will expend less and less of the dwindling resources that they control to alleviate the misery of the teeming masses yearning not to “be free”, but simply to survive another day. The value of life in such a society will be evaluated far lower than it is today, and the contentious issue of the day will not be the moral implications of abortion, but rather the moral implications of recycling human corpses to use as fertilizer to keep the barren soil able to support crops.
China and India have a population exceeding a billion people each. The United States has a population only about a quarter that size, and Indonesia, which has much less land area, is catching up. Imagine, if you will, this country, the same size as it presently is, with the same population of India. It is not an impossibility, or even an improbability.
The country with the highest population density is Singapore, at over 2500 people per square mile. The entire country is one big city, which survives only by importing 100 percent of its food and water, a GDP of over 60,000 dollars per person, massive investment in technological advancement, and a benevolent totalitarian government. Abortion is a right protected by law, and small families are strongly encouraged, to say the least.
There is no way the United States will ever approach the population density of Singapore: we would need a population of 68 billion to do that. However, by way of comparison, New York City, with a land area slightly larger than that of Singapore, has a population density over ten times greater. New York is an extremely rich city…or an extremely poor city, depending on where you look, and the gap between rich and poor bears more resemblance to Calcutta than to Singapore.
The penny analogy I talked about earlier is relevant here. The more pennies you mint, the less each penny is worth. They may all have equivalent face value, but eventually only a few rare ones will be worth anything at all.
