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Is killing a human being...

From my point of view, if you say human and rabbit life are equally valuable, you're giving value arbitrarily to something without any reason to do so. The only thing of value is intelligence, which happens to be the only thing that separates a man from a rabbit from a cockroach from a tree.
 
nAON said:
Oh yeah, and to elaborate - for a human, of course, killing a human is gonna be worse than killing a cockroach, because we feel more empathy for a human than we do a cockroach, and the worth is pretty much assigned on a sliding scale as to how closely we relate to them (ie., a social mammal is gonna be have more worth than some insect, particularly if that insect is deemed a pest or harmful).

From the cockroaches perspective, I assume that they would regard cockroach life as the most valuable, with humans as just being some marauding nuisance which should be disrupted whenever possible.
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OMG! You have just found a system to put a value to life. The last one who could figure out one that worked was.. hmm.. Hitler?
Now, seriously, you can't say one life is more important than the other because you can't put a price tag on life. Life is something that exceeds our ever subjective points of view. It's just bigger than we are.
 
Biovail said:
From my point of view, if you say human and rabbit life are equally valuable, you're giving value arbitrarily to something without any reason to do so. The only thing of value is intelligence, which happens to be the only thing that separates a man from a rabbit from a cockroach from a tree.
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Arn't I assigning value to something arbitrarily when I choose between the rabbit and the human. Intelligence can be used for both things that are helpful and things that are detrimental. I don't think intelligence what makes humans more valuable than a rabbit, I don't know if anything about humans necessarily does. And we don't neccisarily know the level of conciousness of anything including plants. Plants could be more in tune with whats happening around us then we are. My friends and family mean more to me than any thing else, but a random person I dont know if they are valuable or not. Sure everything has potential, including that rabbit.

You are automatically assigning a greater value to the human. Thats what you think I am doing with the rabbit. But i am actually saying it could be either or. You just don't know.

Cockroaches, perfect. Evolution will take it's own course, with or without humans.
 
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max_ said:
OMG! You have just found a system to put a value to life. The last one who could figure out one that worked was.. hmm.. Hitler?
Now, seriously, you can't say one life is more important than the other because you can't put a price tag on life. Life is something that exceeds our ever subjective points of view. It's just bigger than we are.
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I disagree. Symbiotic life is a great example of when this isn't true. Take for example the fish that attach to and eat microscopic organisms off the bellies of sharks. If they're capable of empathy, they surely feel more empathy for their fellow fish than they do the shark. But they likely value the shark's life over that of their fellow fish.
 
max_ said:
OMG! You have just found a system to put a value to life. The last one who could figure out one that worked was.. hmm.. Hitler?
Now, seriously, you can't say one life is more important than the other because you can't put a price tag on life. Life is something that exceeds our ever subjective points of view. It's just bigger than we are.
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Exactly. Empathy has nothing to do with it. They could feel something which is similar but different. The goal when thinking about this question is to get outside the box and you cant JUST look at it from your perspective. Think about it from the cockroaches too, we are all just trying to survive, right?
 
Biovail said:
From my point of view, if you say human and rabbit life are equally valuable, you're giving value arbitrarily to something without any reason to do so. The only thing of value is intelligence, which happens to be the only thing that separates a man from a rabbit from a cockroach from a tree.
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Why should we value intelligence?
 
hiphophippy said:
Why should we value intelligence?
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Exactly!

Biovail said:
I disagree. Symbiotic life is a great example of when this isn't true. Take for example the fish that attach to and eat microscopic organisms off the bellies of sharks. If they're capable of empathy, they surely feel more empathy for their fellow fish than they do the shark. But they likely value the shark's life over that of their fellow fish.
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I know what you mean, but this is still seen from the point of view of the fish. Of course that my brother's life is more important than a cockroach's life. But for a frog who needs to eat the cockroach the cockroach will be far more important. Life is bigger than any living thing, so nothing that lives can ever tell how important a life really is, it's opinion would be subjective and therefore meaningless.

In nature you have different levels of organization, every higher level carries new features and characteristics that are not found in the lower level: Atoms (carbon atoms, sodium atoms,..) have several features, a boiling point, a fusion point. Then come the molecules, like ADN or water, the characteristics and behaviour of molecules cannot be explained putting together the features of the atoms that they contain. New things come out. Now after the molecules comes the cell. Life. You can't explain how life works just knowing how the molecules that form it work, because there are a lot of new processes that take place. In that same way you can't explain how a life is better than other life because you are only a living entity and there is stuff at work which you will never be able to understand because it's on a higher level of organization.
If you are given Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen alone (CHON = the basics elements for life as we know it), you could never guess that together they could form a living entity, there is no way that you (anybody) could predict that life could come from these elements. In the same way you can't predict (say) how a life is better than other life. It just exceeds you.
 
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Because I'm selfish? If I didn't think I was above every other living thing, how would I justify killing anything and eating it? We live at the expense of other living things, so how could we justify living if we didn't, on some level, believe we were better than everything we live at the expense of?
 
hiphophippy said:
Why?
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Because it thinks therefore it is....IMO......
Bioavail will always choose humanity because he will attribute human traits to everything his grimy hands can touch. Take the shark fish relationship, hes thinking about it in a totally human manner, but who in this mother fucking world knows how a fish's sense of self/others would evolve overtime(meaning that lil'avil has no clue in its little head how the fish would react in any scenario, he just wishes or actually deludes himself into thinking he does). We may like to think we know, but we human so of course we assume we know everything. Its just how it goes. Should we save the being with the intelligence to do right but will most likely do wrong or save the being with no intellect who just does what it always does? One scars the earth much more deeply in my mind than the other, its only the human trait of thinking humanity is the pinnacle that causes us to choose ourselves IMO. Either that or delusion like "Ahh shit bro, we cool. We smart enough to fix all the shit we fucked way back when!". I wonder which one is better...I mean sadder?

Biovail said:
Because I'm selfish? If I didn't think I was above every other living thing, how would I justify killing anything and eating it? We live at the expense of other living things, so how could we justify living if we didn't, on some level, believe we were better than everything we live at the expense of?
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Its simple survival. There is no more thought than this, if there was than we would be dead most likely. It doesn't make much sense to me that you need to dominate your meal in order to be worthy of eating it, the fact its in your hand ATM is somewhat already domination(yeah yeah so some guy at a slaughterhouse did it in, your the one eating it, not the other way around)IMO. Your thought process is terribly flawed to me, I have actually most times thought I was the lesser than food i'm consuming(not in a simple shit this bitch could kill me! but a shit this guy was probably way better to the Earth than I was or will ever be most likely leaving less damage/etc/etc).
 
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Help?!?! said:
Because it thinks therefore it is....IMO......
Bioavail will always choose humanity because he will attribute human traits to everything his grimy hands can touch. Take the shark fish relationship, hes thinking about it in a totally human manner, but who in this mother fucking world knows how a fish's sense of self/others would evolve overtime(meaning that lil'avil has no clue in its little head how the fish would react in any scenario, he just wishes or actually deludes himself into thinking he does). We may like to think we know, but we human so of course we assume we know everything. Its just how it goes. Should we save the being with the intelligence to do right but will most likely do wrong or save the being with no intellect who just does what it always does? One scars the earth much more deeply in my mind than the other, its only the human trait of thinking humanity is the pinnacle that causes us to choose ourselves IMO. Either that or delusion like "Ahh shit bro, we cool. We smart enough to fix all the shit we fucked way back when!". I wonder which one is better...I mean sadder?
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Fish are simple creatures. You feed them, they feel "happy". The water is too cold and they feel "sad". Happy and sad are just two opposite feelings here, and who knows what the fuck a fish would call them if he could. But there is always the good/bad, right/wrong, content/discontent. That is how the fish knows to eat and knows when to swim elsewhere. If the fish didn't have these basic feelings, it would starve or freeze because it had no reason to change anything. This is also why drugs are bad. For most people, being hungry is a bad feeling and eating makes them feel good. But if your good feeling comes from a drug (meth, heroin, etc) what reason do you have to eat? Go outside? Talk to people? Your'e content with shooting up and your mind tells you you don't need anything else, even if your body actually does.

We developed a sense of empathy because it was advantageous (somehow) evolutionarily. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that there are animals that never developed this sense.

Value is a selfish concept that we invented to justify actions, and applying it here to life, attempting to give life a value is silly. What is the value of life? Well first we have to define life. I tried defining life as intelligence, but I guess some people disagree. A tree is as much alive as a person. Well then what traits are we assigning value to? Life is the sum of it's traits, so which of those traits are we ranking? Ability to breathe? Reproduce? Communicate? Think? We have to answer these questions before we can assign value to anything. And then we have to define value, which we haven't done. Does value vary from person to person? If so, from whose perspective are we assigning value? A human? Me? A monkey? A fish? Some tree in the Amazon? If value is independent from what is assigning it (not sure how that would work), who defines it?


We're trying to answer a question we don't even understand.
 
Biovail said:
Because I'm selfish? If I didn't think I was above every other living thing, how would I justify killing anything and eating it? We live at the expense of other living things, so how could we justify living if we didn't, on some level, believe we were better than everything we live at the expense of?
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Why do you need to justify it?
 
Thats where your thinking is different than mine. I don't look at things as wrong or right. It just is. From a moral standpoint you can develop your own spectrum of these things but they are not universal to everything in this universe. They are just your thoughts.

People value the food they eat. Do you think native americans thought they were better than all the buffalo and other animals they used for food? Probably not, I bet they worshipped them and held very high levels of respect for all of those animals.

They justification is you are hungry, it has nothing to do with superiority of different life forms. It's eat and be eaten web. Not a pyramid.
 
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spinoutofcontrol said:
thats where your thinking is different than mine. I don't look at things as wrong or right. It just is. From a moral standpoint you can develop your own spectrum of these things but they are not universal to everything in this universe. They are just your thoughts.

People value the food they eat. Do you think native americans thought they were better than all the buffalo and other animals they used for food? Probably not, i bet they worshipped them and held very high levels of respect for all of those animals.

They justification is you are hungry, it has nothing to do with superiority of different life forms. It's eat and be eaten web. Not a pyramid.
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qft
 
Lifes have been taken lightly since the dawn of time and the world doesn't inherit any natural law about the value of life. You can kill or let live, it is all up to you. Every ethic, moral, law is artificial. It is a rule constructed to give humans some rules of game. So is the worth or meaning of sth or so. It doesn't exist in nature, only in the human mind.
And the cultures I've heard of all value the life of a human being higher than that of a cockroach.
As observed in this thread, the reasons may differ, but history has shown that this is a functional law within a society. Considering the relation between cultures, societies, nations etc. is another chapter.
 
hiphophippy said:
What If I like to do things that are "wrong" purely because I enjoy doing so?
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You (your brain, that is) believe the reward (your enjoyment/satisfaction) is more important than any possible consequences. I guess saying right/wrong was sort of confusing. I was simply referring to the logical yes/no response to every choice in life. The response to everything is no until it isn't. You don't move until your brain tells you it's necessary, ie the "yes" state (I mislead you by calling it "good" earlier). Movement requires electrical impulses that originate from the brain, and the default state is to not send them. If you sit in your chair rather than stand up and eat, it's because your brain hasn't received sufficient stimulation to release chemicals that tell you you're hungry. This is "no". If you do things you know are "wrong" morally but you enjoy, your brain has received enough "yes" stimulation to overcome the inhibition threshold presented by morals. Everything in life is risk/reward, but obviously you don't consciously think in these terms. However, if the reward doesn't outweigh the risk, subconsciously, you don't act.
 
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