I was wondering today about what precisely makes a person’s life worth anything. What defines the sanctity of human existence. We’re a rather arrogant species for sure, but it isn’t too much of a stretch to realize that outside the scope of this planet, what we do or whether we live or die is wholly irrelevant. We’re just specs on a pale blue dot, with our wars and our victories and our defeats and our triumphs going unnoticed by anything or anyone else. If you take the stance that there is nothing else even out there, or at least nothing else that is aware of our presence, then really our very existence has absolutely no meaning. We are a blip on the timeline of the history of this planet, let alone the universe.
It is only when you come down to the scope of this planet do things begin to have worth. If we wanted to define, just for fun, exactly what makes our lives worth something, what would you say? Why can I not shoot you down in the middle of the street? Whether you live or die has no intrinsic implications. If you’re dead, you’re dead. If you’re not, so be it. The universe doesn’t care one way or another.
So, of course, the answer then is that we have worth in relation to the other living things around us. Any person that is aware of your presence and would be affected by your absence, gives you meaning. Who would care if you died, indeed? Well first off, I’m sure *you* yourself would care. Then you might say your wife or your friends, your coworkers, your family, your goldfish. Your neighbors, even if they’ve never met you, probably would be upset about seeing you executed in the middle of the street. Indeed, most people would be upset by that, and when asked if they would care if an innocent person was executed in front of them, would they care? People generally say, yes of course. Human life is sacred, you can’t just go around murdering people.
So an important distinction to make at this point is that it isn’t just the simple fact that you’re alive that matters. Its your relationship with other people that matters. Life itself, it seems, is not a requirement for being worth anything. We commit bovine holocausts on a weekly basis. Slaughterhouses are well oiled machines of death. Chickens live their entire lives in a 1′x1′ cage, ruthlessly having their eggs sucked from their body, eventually to be slaughtered themselves. Their lives are meaningless to us, we care not whether they live or die; they’re just animals, and steaks taste good, right? Extend it further and the value of life becomes even more empty. Trees are alive; do we care that a tree dies? When a plant on our porch does not get enough water and shrivels up, do we weep for days and mourn its loss? Of course not. Hell, every single breath you take into your lungs mercilessly slaughters hundreds of thousands of living single celled organisms, and no one gives a crap about that. So simply being *alive* in no way implies any kind of worth, or meaning. The point here is that just killing something that is alive doesn’t necessarily mean its bad. It’s only when you kill something that matters, something that has meaning, that we use the word “murder”.
I would propose then, that the definition of what makes us worth something, is that someone, anyone (including yourself), would be upset about us being killed. Indeed, we could then measure your worth by how many people would care that you were dead. When JFK was shot, lots of people cared. JFK was worth a lot. If, instead, one of JFK’s nameless body guards had taken the bullet, fewer people would have cared. The bodyguard isn’t worth as much as the president. Thats not to say *no one* would have cared, just fewer. It’s a comparison. Certainly someone, somewhere would have cared that the bodyguard was shot, such as his family, his friends, JFK himself. So the bodyguard still had worth.
So what, then, would be someone literally without worth? Who could you kill, and it wouldn’t matter? Who could you kill and it would be equivalent to killing a tree, or a salmon, or a bacteria? You could be callous and say “a homeless person”. Who cares about a homeless person? Well based on the way society takes care of homeless people, not very many people. But you still can’t just shoot a homeless person and expect people to react as if you’d killed a rabbit. Even if literally no one knew that homeless man, he is still aware of himself — HE cares about not being killed, so thus we have met our definition of worth. Someone, anyone at all, cares whether he lives or dies. In this case, its himself. And thats perfectly valid, he has worth, if you kill him, its murder.
There’s something to be said here then, about the fact that the farther away and removed someone is from you, the less you care. Someone flies a couple planes into some skyscrapers in your country? I bet you’ll care a fucking lot. You knew 100’s of people personally who were at work that day and died? I bet you’ll care even more.
Remove yourself from the sphere of association, and most people begin to care less. For example, 600,000 Iraqi’s have died in Iraq. 3,000 died in the 9/11 attacks, and that was an unspeakable tragedy. 600,000 people die on the other side of the world though, and largely most americans don’t particularly care. Oh sure, we all say its awful, tsk tsk, but we go about eating our Frosted Mini Wheats and our cup of coffee over the morning paper, and turn over to the stocks page to see how our 401k did.
So to be able to end the life of an organism without it being regarded as murder and without anyone really caring, such as we do to animals and plants on a daily basis, we have to remove the elements that make something have worth, which was defined above. Can it still be a person, though? Say we have a chronically brain dead person in a hospital bed. Zero electrical brain activity. No one knows who he is, or where he came from. In fact, lets say no one knew him, ever. If the hospital pulled the plug … who would care? If you yourself saw in a headline “Nameless, unknown comatose brain dead patient has life support turned off”, would you weep, would you mourn, would you damn the heavens for this injustice to human life? Likely, not. In this case, that shell of a person had no worth as a human being. Sure they are technically alive as an organism, but being alive isn’t sufficient to have worth. You have to BE someone. You have to, at the very minimum be aware of your own existence. That shell of a human body isn’t a person, its just a body. There’s no one there, the lights inside have permanently been turned off, the “person”, whoever he was, is long dead and gone. You would care about that person dying even less than you care about the 600,000 dead Iraqis, likely. At least those were conscious, functioning adult human beings who had memories and feelings and experiences and relationships and cared about and were cared by other people.
Indeed, one need not even limit this to the human species. Take for instance a family pet dog. Lets say it grew up with the kids, became a part of the family. No one would argue that if that dog got hit by a car, the family wouldn’t be devastated. People get very close to their pets and form strong relationships. So by the definition, a pet family dog certainly has much more worth than an unconscious, brain dead, comatose, nameless, unknown human body.
So the end point is that if an organism isn’t conscious of its own existence, if an organism has no relationships with anyone else, then it has no worth. What defines our worth is how other people care about us, and how we care about ourselves. If those other people don’t exist, and neither do you, then your life has as much worth as the life of a tree or a lobster or a cow or a bacteria. Which, just like ALL life outside the scope of our human existence, are all equally meaningless.
Have a good day 
