JusticeMachine

Just a query, but do we a society in general value a life for the potential of what it can be (or could've been) or do we value a life for what it currently is at that moment in time?

I read an article on bio-ethics, and some of it is disturbing, so I wanted to bounce this question off some of you.

JusticeMachine

No takers on this one I guess.

JusticeMachine

Left me explain futher:

The comparison was made that a adult horse has a higher intellect than an infant child and is more valueable because of that fact, so if we kill horses for being lame, that we shouldn't have any moral problem with killing an infant because it is disformed or disabled.

I dissagree, but there is a sect of people who believe there is a moral equivalency here.

Vandrare

the way it appears to me, is that we value the potential when viewing children or younger people, but the older a person becomes, the more they are valued by their current life. for example, there's always more outrage when children are killed compared to when adults are killed. i guess this also has to do with the instinct in nature to protect the young, the next generation of the species.

:-D Anna

kctan

We value a life that is 'useful' to us. Whether be it potential or not is not the crux of the question.

If you need elaboration, let me know.

bd-from-kg

JusticeMachine:

This question deserves a little more attention than it's getting.

First let’s look at the horse/infant comparison:

This is so confused that it’s hard to know where to start. First off, the argument seems to be asserting that a horse is, as a matter of fact more valuable than a child. But this assumes that there is a “fact of the matter” – i.e., that a horse and an infant have some kind of inherent intrinsic value, and our job is to discover it – to determine what it is. But this is just nonsense. There is no such thing as “intrinsic value”. Determining the value of something is not a matter of discovering what its “true worth” is, but of deciding how much we value it.

Second, it’s highly unlikely that anyone uses “intellect” as the sole criterion of value. I value a great many things – my wife and family, my reputation, my health, a Mozart symphony. I don’t value any of them because of their intellect; in fact many of them can’t be said to have an intellect.

Third, we do not decide what legal treatment we will give something based solely, or even primarily, on how much someone values it. A cat-killer is not punished more than a baby-killer even if the cat’s owner valued it far more highly than the baby’s mother valued it. On the other hand, a person who kills a well-loved millionaire philanthropist is likely, in practice, to be punished more severely than the killer of a down-and-out bum who specialized in fleecing poor widows before he lost everything. The difference is that in the first case the victims are in different categories: human and nonhuman, whereas in the second they’re in the same category: both human. Category differences take priority over differences in valuations.

But the fourth point, perhaps the most important of all, is the one that you refer to in your original question:

To answer this we need only ask why we value the things we do. For example, why do I value my Honda? Well, basically because it works; it gets me from point A to point B. But this isn’t really valuing it for “what it currently is”; it’s valuing it for what it can do in the future – in other words, its future potential. The same can be said of any number of things that we value as “instrumental goods”: ovens, footballs, VCR’s, houses, etc.

But what about people? When we talk about valuing people, we surely aren’t referring to valuing them solely as instrumental goods – i.e., as means to ends - since people are the very entities doing the valuing. So, do we value a person for “what he is at the moment” or for his future potential?

Surely it’s obvious that, to a large extent at least, we value people based on their future potential. For example, consider a two-year-old boy and a 99-year-old woman riddled with cancer and near death. Although almost everyone agrees (rightly, IMO) that the woman should be treated humanely, it would be absurd to suggest that we value her life as much as the boy’s. And this is not mere selfishness; clearly the boy has far more to live for than the woman. Yet based on “what they currently are”, neither is of any value at all. We value the boy more than the woman because of his future potential.

It’s all very well to proclaim piously that we “really” treat the two as having the “same” value, since they’re both human beings, and who are we to “play God”? But clearly we don’t. For example, if push came to shove and we could save only one of them, what kind of person would choose to save the old woman? Wouldn’t almost all of us regard such an act as either criminal or insane? The woman has rights that should be respected simply by virtue of being in the category “human” (as pointed out above), but that’s not to say that she has significant value to anyone – even to herself.

Similarly, a person in a coma is currently pretty much worthless. If we were certain that he would remain “what he currently is” until he dies, we’d just pull the plug. He’s not only of no value to us, he’s of no value to himself since he’s never going to be conscious. We only value him because of the possibility that he might emerge from the coma eventually.

So it’s very clear that we do value things (including people) largely on the basis of future potential.

To return to the horse/infant comparison, the argument cannot be that we do assign greater value to horses than infants (since we obviously don’t), so the only possible interpretation is that we should. But no reason is given as to why this would be a good idea. In fact, it’s hard to see what kind of reasons could be given, on the basis of any plausible moral theory, for saying that we “should” value horses more than infants. On any “objective” moral theory that I know of infants come out ahead of horses. On a subjective or intersubjective theory the proposal is completely incoherent. A “social contract” theory would give infants priority for the simple reason that almost no one would agree to a social contract that gave priority to horses over infants. So what kind of moral theory is being appealed to here?

By the way, this looks like a somewhat oversimplified version of Peter Singer's ideas. I don't think they come off any better in their original form. Singer's arguments entail (though he never spells this out) that it's OK even to kill a perfectly healthy, happy two-year-old if no one (such as his parents) would be particularly upset by his death. A two-year-old's interests are of zero significance in his moral calculus.