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Comment by kaptain | Hacker News Reader

Melinda Gates wasn't talking about economic value. I find it difficult to believe that most HN'rs take her statement to mean economic value since, as most people have been pointing out, all lives don't have equivalent financial worth.

The rest of your point, I think, is a very interesting way to look at the value of human life, but it is a crude way of evaluating the worth of humanity purely in the context of financial value.

At the risk of getting touch-feely amongst an audience that is very rational and analytical, there is something sacred and indescribable of all life (not just human) simply because it's not something that we can create from artificial means. This fact, I think, is what makes it hard to say one life is more valuable than another (again, just to be clear, I'm using 'value' as in financial value).

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(justification to read my post here: at the end I argue richer people have higher moral value!)

Many of us think its 'brave' and 'correct' to say "all lives are equal value" in the moral sense. Its a 'sexy' thought to have as it seems liberal and its simple, but it is ultimately wrong.

Our actions are what define us, so a person who performs good/selfless actions that benefit others should be defined as higher value than a selfish murderer/rapist.

If lives were equal value then taking the life of a child would be equally as bad as taking the life of an 80 year old - but most people do not think that way.

Your value (in the moral sense) should simply be a function how much good you provide to the world. This leads to the difficult issue where because we can in fact buy "good" (by buying anti-malaria nets for children for £5 a pop) you find that those born into wealth have a higher capacity to perform "good" and therefore, on average, have a higher moral value by this definition.

> If lives were equal value then taking the life of a child would be equally as bad as taking the life of an 80 year old - but most people do not think that way.

So is murder of an 80-year old worse, or murder of a child? I'm confused, because I don't really think that way.

I'm also not buying into this self-obsessed view of "value". Americans and Europeans do more damage to the world per capita than anyone else in terms of of energy consumption, pollution, and creating economic inequality. Their charitability does not really make up for it.

For me the only distinction is that I value people I know more than people I don't know. However, everyone is someone I could get to know.

Your reasoning is pretty ridiculous. There are many things that cannot quantified. How would you quantify the contribution of a person who's done a lot of bad, say murdered some people, but whose actions inspire policy makers to change their policies for the better? Or how would you quantify the life of an african baby, dead at the age of 6 months, that inspires rich Americans to buy anti-malaria drugs? Or a horrendous event that results in a work of literature of such beauty that it lasts for centuries? Or some random, unknown person, dead for millennia, whose skeletal remains teaches us about human evolution? Some things require a completely different way of thinking from a data-driven, "rational" perspective, but to put it in your terms, "life" is such a complex, intractable, system, that quite often defies any kind of "left-brain" analysis.

The reason nobody can agree on the 'value of life' is because the value changes per context. Life has no intrinsic value of its own except to the person who currently owns it. When anyone says 'all life has value' they are talking spiritually, or religiously, and that is something that is just feel good hippy speak to make themselves look and feel better.

To truly speak of lifes value you have to break it down into contexts and agree that these contexts are necessary to be used in the comparisons: Economic, political, civic, leadership, educational, breeding value, looks, etc.

Once a set of contexts are agreed upon you have to weigh them based on a common base, like say Economic, take that as a 1.0. Someone might say that 'looks' is a 0.6 based on economic value, where as leadership or engineering may be 1.2.

Once these weights are set, apply values to the contexts, weigh them together to get an total value of the person's life. Then you can accurately judge their life value vs another. You could improve upon this by having negatives (murderous villains) that could affect total value, etc.

More than that, if all lives are worth something, some people are worth more than others, even if purely because some people can improve others' lives MORE.

have to disagree:

- life of youths is more valuable: ancient tribes will say the opposite: they routinely sacrificed their children to gods, not so their elders, who were considered valuable for their wisdom.

- Money is a means to buy services and goods regardless of their moral value. You can buy hookers, drugs, murderers, malware and other life-wasters. I think you couldn't be more wrong about this.

- "Good" has not been defined yet. Also, there is no rule that good people earn the most money; not even close

... there is something sacred and indescribable of all life (not just human) simply because it's not something that we can create from artificial means...

In the future, people may find ways to create life from artificial means, and that does not make life any less sacred. So please don't try too hard to find a reason behind holding life sacred.

This fact, I think, is what makes it hard to say one life is more valuable than another

Just last night I said "those Brussels sprouts are worth less than me" by eating them. I don't find it hard at all.

What is the value of life? Clearly we find the idea of financial value just a tad too cynical.

Do we have any other measures? Something we can use to establish that all lives are in fact equally valuable?

Also, as soon as we start claiming all life to be equally valuable we get into the moral issue of comparing somebody like Mother Theresa to someone like Ted Bundy and saying they were both equal in terms of value. I doubt many people would agree.

Why would you need to establish that at all? It is not a matter of fact, but a statement that serves as the basis of a moral standpoint. You can either choose to believe it, or not.

As for Ted Bundy vs. Mother Theresa - ignoring the extremely complex philosophical question of the value of life - do you seriously think that's what Ms. Gates was implying? A philanthropist working to save lives in the third world says "all lives are equal", and your response is, "why are you comparing Ted Bundy to Mother Theresa"? Don't take everything so literally. This isn't math class.

> Why would you need to establish that at all?

Because otherwise the phrase has no meaning? So I'm going to decide I both believe it and think it's completely wrong. Now what?

Moral standpoints with no meaning are really weird, I might as well say "Potato" and claim it's something deep and philosophical that everyone should rally behind to liberate Africa from whatever is ailing it.

For instance, by donating potatoes.

The thing is, what does a graph with unlabeled axes tell you? Nothing, right? It's the same with undefined moral standpoints.

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