How much am I bid??

Metropolitan Cathedral, Panama City

I remember hearing long ago that a human was worth $11.50. The astoundingly audacious pronouncement rested on the assumption that some marketable chemicals could be extracted from a cadaver. 

A horse, one guesses, would be worth much more.

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Dismissing that absurd evaluation, we could consider how much we individually are paid for our skills and labour. By that measure, a surgeon is worth about ten times as much as a McDonald’s employee.

Strident anti-abortionists—I’m guessing—would argue that a living human is of immeasurable worth, and that a fetus is a human being. 

The indiscriminate bombing of Eastern Aleppo this week by Russian and Syrian militaries demonstrated again that to some persons, various of our fellow humans are considered immeasurably valuable while others are discarded as less than worthless.

In a capitalist economy, people are inevitably layered into levels of worth by at least some standards. Adherence to a religion or cult divides by definition; people within are accorded more worth than people without.

In some cultures, the language gives away an assessment of worth; the word Minderwertiger in German translates as, literally, those of diminished worth. It’s generally been applied to persons with reduced capacity for learning. Retarded in English is a similarly-loaded designation.

The question arises naturally: is it human life itself or the endowment, character and behaviour of the person possessing it that carries worth? Attitudes toward race, birth control, euthanasia, the death penalty, abortion, assisted dying all hinge on the understanding of the value of life itself . . . separate from the being that possesses it. (For some, animal life would fall naturally into any such discussion as well: does a reverence/disdain for life extend to all life?)

There is a branch of philosophy (and religion too, for that matter) commonly called humanism. In short, humanism leans toward considering human well-being (including health, shelter, nourishment and freedom from fear and suffering) to be the ultimate moral, ethical measure. Seen as potentially in opposition to a morality and ethics based on God's will and transmitted through scriptures, some religions have rejected humanistic world views. Humanism has many definitions, but in principle it throws the responsibility of working toward the goals of human well-being onto humans themselves, not supernatural forces or beings.

Other religions have seen humanism as support for “the work of God.”

It’s hard to speak for the animals, but where humanity is concerned, life is not important, not desirable, not negotiable: life, and with it consciousness, are the everything and the only thing. There is nothing else. Before I was born, before a consciousness developed in me, the universe, it’s animals, it’s people, it’s ideas of its origins and its demise, its religions and philosophies DIDN’T EXIST. And they will cease to exist as consciousness is returned to wherever it came from.

That life and human consciousness should even exist in this cold, impersonal universe is, for me, the first miracle worthy of amazement and wonder. And because it is—in effect—the miracle without which none others are possible, it must lie at the foundation of all that is good, all that is humane, all that humans strive after. All that religions have striven toward for so long, and have so fundamentally missed.

 

And finally, is our tendency to see long life as worth more than short life not a false consciousness? This perception has certainly coloured our discussion of assisted dying; by humanistic standards of ethics and morality, quality of life should trump length as the key consideration.

Also, the ability to choose is—by most any standard—an essential component of life quality.