Does anyone else find it extremely disturbing that one of the examples they provide for "things you believe not because of logic [thus, it's objectively true], but because other people told you to" is "Human life is a precious thing"?
Incidentally, you could make a logical argument that the reason everyone believes "human life is a precious thing" is because anyone who doesn't has long since killed themselves or been killed by people who wanted to preserve their precious life, and you can do so without passing any judgment on whether human life is in fact precious. One could easily imagine AI robots, for example, who don't believe that human life is precious because it doesn't matter to them whether we kill each other all off. But this separation between the object level ("here's what I value") and the meta level ("here's why I value it") is fundamental to making logical inferences.
The interpretation of this judgment has varied a lot across the times. Historically, in less individualistic societies, I think that the loss of human lives for the good of the group was considered less taboo than today. There were also different interpretations of what "human" meant, obviously, with the life of slaves, strangers, women, different-looking people, etc., being less precious.
People from the future could find that they disagree a lot with our current interpretation of "human life is precious". Western societies today don't seem to care much about the fact that human life in most of the world nowadays isn't "precious" in the Western sense, so this might be a shock to someone from the future. More generally, we are fine today with the fact that everyone dies eventually, whereas a futuristic society having achieved practical immortality would perhaps see each individual death as a catastrophe.
I don't see how it follows that if you don't see human life as precious you should kill yourself.
We can go deeper and ask: Why is life precious? You, me and everyone else got their lives for free.
Nobody ever paid anything to be born into this world and nobody gave consent to be born into this world.
"In order for someone to have a belief, they must exist. In order for them to continue to exist, they must not have taken any action in the past that would lead to their death. People who believe that human life is not precious are significantly more likely to take actions that will lead to their death. Therefore, people who believe that human life is not precious remove themselves from existence at a higher rate than those who believe human life is precious, and so the vast majority of people will believe human life is precious."
You can quibble with the premises and I won't defend them, but you would agree that this argument takes the form of a syllogism and hence is a logical (if possibly false) argument. My overall point is not about whether human life is or isn't precious, it's about the distinction between object-level and meta-level. On the meta level you can make a logical argument, from falsifiable premises, about why people might believe the statement "Human life is precious". But on the object level, that statement is a value judgment, and so that statement can't be approached with logic in any coherent way. You can argue about the truth or falsity of whether & why people hold certain values, but you can't argue with the values themselves. (Logically, at least; you can always argue using various fallacies like argumentum ad auctoritatem or argumentum ad baculum. Indeed, applying the results of your analysis of why people hold beliefs to whether the beliefs are right is an example of the ad hominem fallacy.)
The article claims we all believe human life is precious for illogical reasons. Gasp! Comment section erupts in arm chair philosophy. All because they allowed the author to conflate formal system rigour with philosophical nonsense. That is, 'mathematically logical' and 'thinking rationally.' You cannot apply rigour to vague bumper-sticker slogans, they are trivially illogical. Almost nothing is completely logical in daily life. It's not a big shock. There is nothing profound about this. To assume otherwise is naive.
You say "It's about as close to objectively true as you can get." If by 'objectively' you mean 'extremely subjective to the human experience' then I agree with you. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're on about.
What other experience other than human experience is out there?
I read that as you saying that "Human life is precious" is true, though maybe I have misunderstood. (Don't take this as that I agree with the other guy though).
> Lots of useful and totally true facts about the world are socially constructed.
It's obviously not the only accepted position in ethics, but saying that moral rules don't follow from logic or some metaphysical fact is not saying that there is no moral.
There are five people trapped in a snowstorm during the winter. They are out of food and have no means of going outside to gather more. They need to eat to survive or else they will all perish. The logical conclusion for survival is cannibalism. Then you have the varying moral scales of "kill someone and eat them", "draw sticks and the unlucky loser gets eaten", "wait for the first person to die, then eat what remains of their starved body", or "everyone chooses to die of starvation instead of eating one another".
Among those choices - once again the logical conclusion for best chances of survival, namely "eating someone while they have enough meat to provide sustenance to the survivors" is typically considered amoral compared to the "everyone dies" or "eat the starved body and risk dying of starvation anyway" options.
I'm sure there are plenty of in between options or other options I missed out on. But "logical" is not equivalent to "moral" except by chance.
"You shouldn't eat mud" actually felt like a bad example because it follows from some other widely agreed upon truths like "mud is indigestible" and "mud can contain things that can harm you".
"Red light means stop" is obviously a social convention. There's nothing inherent about red light that means stop, it's just a visual language that's become somewhat ubiquitous.
"Human life is a precious thing" is the most abstract of the three. It's usually treated as a basic axiom that doesn't need any further justification. The question isn't really "is it true" but "why do we treat it as if it were true". If you look closely the seams become apparent: what is life, what is a human, what follows from something being precious, etc.
The three aren't really three examples of a kind but three different examples of different kinds of truths we generally believe "because we were told so".
Being indigestible or possibly containing things that can harm you do not mean that you shouldn't eat mud. They mean that eating mud might hurt you, which is not the same at all. If anything it's a bad example because it overlaps with the assumption that human life is precious.
I think this is where most surviving philosophies and actions are based on. People who waste time on unproductive activities have lower fitness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagia
TL;DR: It may be a source of minerals and (possibly) vitamin B-12. There are also some risks to go along with the benefits.
Whereas value of human life? As a prescriptive norm, it is certainly enforced in many countries. But as a universal truth? Poorly defined, highly questionable, totally subjective.
By some. IMHO, there's a lot of effort going on in believing and making believe that gender roles are social constructs in spite of all the evidence (evidence, not necessarily proof) of the contrary.
Money is equivalent to red traffic lights. Its value is conventional, but the convention itself is objective. Ignore it at your peril (you'll be run over by somebody).
If all humans disappeared, the existence of both gender roles (be them social or innate or, as very probable, a mix of the two) and money would still be as objective as dinosaur fossils are today. Our faith in the preciousness of human life would be on the same level (a fossil). The actual preciousness of human life, as a universal fact in itself, never existed in the first place.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICN066A/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
(I don't love the wording. But the idea is that, just as the greatest painting of a famous artist is precious, likewise the greatest production of evolution is precious. Not air tight, but maybe a start).
As far as I know, the human body is no more complicated than most mammals. However, the human brain does appear to be unique in its capabilities.
So for human life to be precious, does it need to have a fully-functioning brain? Would that make the life of someone with severe learning difficulties, or even someone in a permanently vegetative state, less precious?
Warfare and dealing pain is about dehumanizing. Now those are constructed much harder to defend.
Otherwise you presume either hard equality between everyone (easy to rebuke) and/or omniscience.
Or you revert to consequentialist ethic where only consequences matter. (Not essentialist.) From that place, going from basic utilitarian ethics you can show what sort of value certain human lives had.
For example, someone in a truly blind rage might go ahead and recklessly kill someone with complete and total disregard for his own life. While observing this act we might say that he does not believe his life to be precious because he acts as if it's not, yet he can nevertheless still be fighting and killing someone because he's driven by dark emotions.
However, the logic should be consistent for any bounded cutoff.
You could construct a system where everyone with lower than given value is subjected to some action. Given your (or societal) bounded knowledge you then cannot generalise because you are not omniscient. This means you get to evaluate everyone on their terms. This view is incompatible with stereotypes.
Alternatively you just assign values by axiom, which will likely end up with a big and likely inconsistent philosophy, unreliable guide.
Indeed egoism like this is a valid strategy but not an optimal one in absolute terms. (Tit for tat is stable instead over time.) A philosophy or strategy should be viable in the presence of a mixture of them.
Survival instinct is powerful, it doesn't necessarily follow that exercising it means that you consider your own life precious.
If you have a red cube and a blue cube and a green cube, only one of the cubes is red. It is the reddest cube. Does being the most red make it precious? Is the blue cube precious because it is the most blue? The green cube? If you have a million cubes of all different hues, is each and every one precious because it is the most its-hue of all of the cubes? If each of the cubes is only mostly a cube, but actually deviates from being a cube in some way, is each one precious for being the most its-shape? But this one is the most pumpkin and the most missing-some-atoms-right-there! Ok, great. So what? So now everything is precious, because everything is the most of something? Let's congratulate ourselves and sing along with Monty Python, "Eeevery sperm is saaaacred....".
Or maybe being the most of something doesn't objectively carry any inherent value other than what we decide to put into it.
Arguable. It depends on how you define advanced. There are many organisms that live longer, are more numerous and can survive in more extreme environments than humans. It is also conceivable that humans might completely destroy all habitable environments, which would certainly disqualify us from the subjective qualification of "pinnacle of evolution". More importantly however, evolution has no pinnacle or direction.
Even if we grant that humans are "the most advanced creation of evolution", it does not necessarily follow that this causes it to be inherently precious.
To consider human life superior, we need less objective and more problematic criteria, e.g. claiming that we are special because we are sentient.
This is a biased view of evolution. All species today are "the pinnacle of billions of years of evolution". Humans are not especially advanced, at least not in evolutionary terms.
There may be some argument to make about humans being especially intelligent, or something like that, but it has little to do with evolution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction
If we're just agglomerations of atoms, why would any agglomeration of atoms, human or not, be precious at all?
(I mean that less flippantly than it reads.)
For fun, you can compare it to the belief "Gold is a precious thing" and ask how often people destroy (not spend) gold, compared to how often they destroy human life.
Being precious is a relationship between two entities, where one of the two must be sentient. Considering the phrasing "Human life is a precious thing", my assumption is that the reader (or myself) is the one who perceive human life as precious.
To one self the only precious life is your own. This is baked in all of us by default, our genes make us value life. But what's the value of other people's lives?
We can evaluate other people's lives value with the benefits they bring us. Therefore, the people closer to us will have more values - because the influence our reality. What they do and how they interact with us also influence their value. If you were to save someone for a fire, you would probably give more value to your son than some stranger.
This maps to reality quite well - just think about how shocked are people for accidents happening in their own hometown and how little they care for people dying in a far away country.
It's obvious that people close to use will be worth much more - but let's assume we want to get more granularity on strangers. How can we evaluate human life which is not related to us? We can rank them by the value they bring to society, as that value is something you're going to benefit from as well. Let's say you're about to run over some people with a car and you can't avoid this scenario. You can just pick which ones to kill. Would you prefer running over a man or a fat man? A man or a woman? A man or a kid? A man or an old man? I won't get into considerations but you can think in term of cost for the society (pensions vs taxes vs health), the ability to procreate, the ability to benefit from more advanced education in the future.
But let's try to take a step further, let's say we want to employ people to solve a task. Let's become a business. Their value can be seen entirely related to how well they can solve this task.
My view is that we're just really advanced machines without any will or possibility to stray from our predefined path. Genes are our codebase, the environment we live in is our continuos input, our actions are a continuos output which feed into the environment itself - feeding back in our input.
We're just really complex processes running. When somebody dies is just like a process who was accomplishing some work that won't continue anymore. What could have that process done? If we had a state of all the particles (or strings, or whatever your smallest unit is) in the universe, we could theoretically calculate all the possible states, maybe changing the conditions which could have brought our process to die, calculating what it could have achieved.
Creating machines as advanced as ourselves is just a matter of time and technological advancement. Once we are able to create trained life at will and in a faster timespan (because everybody can do that in 9 months + 30 years of training), the value of life itself would dramatically decrease. Let's call them robots.
Why should I bother hiring free people when I can just create and kill some robots? And as an extension, why should I be able to kill robots but not people? What even is the difference at this point?
This would essentially bring the value of all the people we don't care about to whatever the cost of creating an equivalent skilled robot is. Which, given robots can create value themselves, is probably going to quickly get to zero and crash the entire economy. It would be like having slavery with infinite slaves.
Is human life a precious thing? Yes. For now.