Is a human being's life worth more than a head of cattle or even a Cockroach?

[Day_N_Night]

Do you think the life of a human being is inherently as valuable or more valuable than that of another living creature?

If you do, what makes a persons' life more valuable?

[torcher]

what i think makes peoples lives valuable is our connection with each other. just as any pack of dogs mourns when one dies, as do humans.

[odin_dax]

Depends on the person and the animal's relationship to the person making the choice.

[7eleven mafia]

our lifes arent as important as any other living creature but we as humans have the ability to make it more important and save each others lives before we save any other kind of living creature.

[Æhµ]

but let's say you had to choose between saving the life of a human and that of the matriarch of an endangered species, without whom the species might go extinct - which would you choose?

My choice isn't a given that it would always be on the side of a human, to be honest I would save the life of a microbe of the bubonic plague over the life of some people I know.

How about this scenario - choose the life of Koko the gorilla OR the life of Dick Cheney? Ehh? Not so easy now, is it?

[darkangel]

it all depends on the perspective.
for the monkey Chaney thing i don't know ,i have a grizzly lined trench coat but i don't have ex-vice president slippers, tough call.
but to put in more of a perspective ,you have a dickhead cop ,and your dog you can only save one,which do you choose?

[7eleven mafia]

Originally Posted by ?h?

but let's say you had to choose between saving the life of a human and that of the matriarch of an endangered species, without whom the species might go extinct - which would you choose?

My choice isn't a given that it would always be on the side of a human, to be honest I would save the life of a microbe of the bubonic plague over the life of some people I know.

How about this scenario - choose the life of Koko the gorilla OR the life of Dick Cheney? Ehh? Not so easy now, is it?

no its very easy, preserve your own kind, then try and help save other species, at least thats the way i see it

[DangerousLuck]

I see this in two ways. First, humans have the power, more than any other species by far, to change their environment for the good. We have the capacity and the responsibility to take care of the Earth and its many creatures. The argument of technology, the arts, etc aside, our advancement could be seen as more significant than other species.

On the other side, there are way, way too many humans for the earth to sustain our current rates of growth. As much as we could be doing to advance the planet and other species, we are surely destroying both the actual planet and untold numbers of species. It may actually serve nature as a whole that a human life is taken over an animal's.

HOWEVER, my personal viewpoint is that a human life is almost always intrinsically more valuable than any animal's, even considering my own views on the need for population limitation, etc. There are many reasons for this, many instinctual, right or wrong. It's actually quite a moral dilemma for me in that of course I am human and I have sympathy for human life, but I strongly believe there are just too many of this species. That in no way stilts me to condoning things like murder, but it does make me angry when someone has more than two children.

Let's use a scenario before I completely escape the question here. If a tiger was going to eat a person, irregardless of other factors, I would value the human even to the point of eliminating the tiger.

[Cheetah]

The trouble is, nature shows no mercy to you any more than it does to a cockroach. So what if you get cancer or a disease, mother nature doesn't give a fuck. In fact, you're likely to be improving the gene pool if you die from an illness.

Scientific evidence tells us that humans are just animals who accidentally developed intelligence. So in the context of the universe, the holocaust isn't any different to the daily slaughter of cows and chicken.

If I had to choose between saving a human and a bug, I would do so based on personal consequences or benefits. I also believe in reincarnation, so that would influence my decision.

[Tricho]

Originally Posted by Cheetah

Scientific evidence tells us that humans are just animals who accidentally developed intelligence. So in the context of the universe, the holocaust isn't any different to the daily slaughter of cows and chicken.

Truer words haven't been spoken on a forum before. In the end we are all animals most people fail to see this in their daily lives and live in what I call delusional land.

[Micro]

Originally Posted by Cheetah

Scientific evidence tells us that humans are just animals who accidentally developed intelligence. So in the context of the universe, the holocaust isn't any different to the daily slaughter of cows and chicken.

Yeah, but we dont eat jews.

[Abrazaderas]

Originally Posted by Micro

Yeah, but we dont eat jews.

Yet.


This all depends on the means by which you calculate your valuation. why should anything be valuable? answer that first or you are still confused.

Is a rocks existence less valuable then a human's existence, just because a human happens to exhibit different properties then a rock? what do either ultimately accomplish? a rock sits there. a human moves things around to make more humans faster. both are fairly nonsensical and pointless.

should humans be considered objectively valuable simply because we are on the receiving end of a fantastic array of drugs which motivate us to display gregarious behavior towards other humans? 'worth' is a way of deciding what we are to do next. because there is no evidence of free will, we have to assume that whichever is worth more (to US, asshole, there's nothing and no one for either a human, a cow, or a rock to be worth anything to, outside of humans, cows, and rocks, each of which finds themselves worth more then the others.) is whichever we tend to preserve more. preserve for our own use. a person that would kill a cow more easily then a man values men more. vice versa. the question is somewhat fluff-brained.

[REL0AD]

Originally Posted by Cheetah

Scientific evidence tells us that humans are just animals who accidentally developed intelligence. So in the context of the universe, the holocaust isn't any different to the daily slaughter of cows and chicken.

The holocaust didn't happen anyways. I myself would like to think it did, but it didn't.

[odin_dax]

Originally Posted by REL0AD

The holocaust didn't happen anyways. I myself would like to think it did, but it didn't.

You can't be serious...

[Saturday]

Reload, you are an idiot if you think the holocaust never happened.

To get back to the original question, I believe that we can't clump together humans and clump together animals and try to measure the value of individuals within the groups.

In order to be able to compare the value of two living things or two species, we must first define what the value of life is. What is value?

In some ways, you attribute more value to the life of a Cheney or someone by caring enough to want to end theirs.

Many more extreme animal rights people believe that animals deserve the same rights as humans and that they are just as valuable. I personally do not believe this, I am slightly more Darwinistic than that, but I do believe that the existence of any species directly impacts our species, so either way we should care about other species, if not for their sake, for our own.

[CommonPlaceTool]

We as humans are more valuable for out individuality, intelligence, etc. If I had the choice of saving some of a dying species or another fellow human, I would save the human every time, unless I had a score to settle with said human. Species go extinct all the time, we just need to do our best to not accelerate it.

[sCoNtFuUcK]

Humans are just tomorrows dinosaurs! We have no more rights to life then a nat!!! But we all think were special!!!

[sCoNtFuUcK]

People make things happen
some people watch things happen
others wonder what the fuck happened....

[CommonPlaceTool]

Have you ever seen a nat create a beautiful work of art? Didn't think so.

Hrmmm a 'right to life' you say? Well perhaps we are lacking in that, but rights don't exist in the first place. I wrote my first post wrong, considering value itself doesn't exist in any more than our minds. The question is, is a human life equal to that of a single head of cattle or a single cockroach, etc? Well, we are certainly better in almost every way as compared to these beings, I'd consider our lives more valuable.

As for your little saying there sCoNtFuUcK, you're right, but a head of cattle and a cockroach would do none of those.

[Abrazaderas]

So we're more advanced technologically then all the animals. check. but the difference is barely beginning to separate from magnitude to quality. as living creatures we maintain a state of irritability towards the end of homeostasis - that's us considering our lives more valuable. a cow or cockroach considers it's own life more valuable then ours though.

as for art, well, bowerbirds decorate their homes (they even hunt shiny beetles and kill them just to use as shiny things!), they sing and copy other birds songs in order to impress females. (rockstar?) they'll spend hours arranging random objects, rearranging, before they get it just right. they dance in groups. they creatively construct homes, making buildings with different rooms, towers, courtyards, tunnerls, nests, and of course decorations of whatever they happen to like the color and look of. they'll kill each other over prized possessions such as a soda can, as well.

Take all that and complexify it with a forebrain and specialization, you'd get what we call art, war, architecture, dance, society, aesthetics - we're not really that different, just more skilled.

a beautiful work of art is ONLY beautiful to us. it is ugly to nature; she attempts to destroy art. and does the ability to create an artifical system of judging useless things to recieve the pleasure of irrational, right brain stimulation really give us any real transcendant reason to exist? what, after all, is even the greatest artists! mozart, michelangelo - dance, monkey, dance!

when a human dies, only humans care. and we only care because we're on drugs, naturally, that create pleasure when we bond and act in a group in order to satisfy the more basic drug addiction of survival. that's how it looks. i don't think there's anything special about taking an organic object made of 70% water and scattering it about in a new configuration that no longer allows it the mechanical function we call 'life'. it's just another event in the history of the universe, honestly. it creates ripples in the other, similar organic objects, because they're really a single, larger entity. that doesn't mean anything, either.

[CommonPlaceTool]

Ok, let me put it like this:

Earth
Us
Every other living critter

We are SLIGHTLY more complex and SLIGHTLY more creative. While I can agree that life is really not that important to the universe, it can be argued that we're the best of the worst. As far as nature goes, she doesn't TRY anything, she just lets her process unroll, she finds nothing ugly and nothing beautiful.

Everything you say about us you can say about another critter, but our potential is far more expansive and we are more skilled. Like I said, best of the worst. If we are the ones dictating worth, then yes: 1 human > 1 other critter.

[True Sounds]

Whhyyy?!