Bornsatin
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Country: Toronto, Canada.
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 Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 4:13 am Post subject: The Logic of Consequence: An Extentialist(?) Approach |
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Life: The will to exist individually, grow and reproduce.
{Note: The word will has been used in it’s literal meaning. This is crucial to the theory}
Does a human life carry any essential value?
No, life carries Relative value only.
For instance:
Jack, who spends his entire life in solitude with no human (or animal) contact whatsoever (practically speaking) never mattered. No one ever shed tears when he died. And ever though materialistically his absence would’ve been noticed, that was where it ended.
If a tree fell in the woods and no one heard it, did it make a sound? That concept is being applied here.
On the contrary, if Jack leads a normal life and meets people, interacts and relates to them, his death would now matter. His death would create new emotions and losses. And would influence everyone he has known (with exceptions). It would take something away from the society, hence it’s a loss.
From the above we may conclude that life has no ‘essential’ value. An individual within itself carries no influence without another entity for it to affect, which happens to be one of the conditions that have to be satisfied for something to carry any value (as established earlier). Hence my life as a person carries no value but our lives as people do. So life holds a ‘relative’ value. We are as important as others find us.
Here’s where it gets complicated even for me. In order to define anything we need anything, something of opposition or contrast must be present for perspective.
What does carry value?
Here is where my extreme skepiticism and absurd metaphysics jump in, so please refrain from too much flaming.
The Bing Bang Theory sates that the universe started from a 1-dimensional point the size of an atom, so there had to be ‘will’ present for it to disperse and infinitely expand. Which would mean that if we ever decided to travel towards the edge or the center of the universe, we’ll always be infinitely distant from it.
Now we think of life, it’s value individually is nothing because it started from nothing and to balance the equation it would have to end in nothing.
But assuming that the universe, the center of all relationship (before the big bang) has some value, this might contradict what we’ve said earlier since.
-Individual lives carry no value
-The universe does carry a value
-Individual lives and abiotic components (their relationship is being ignored for the sake of argument) are the constituents of this universe
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So yes, individual life carries no value. But when two lives relate, as in a relationship.. that has value. And all relations, material and non-material (physical and spiritual) eventually constitute the universal value.
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The only practical implications I notice here are.. if a man kills another, isn't the value goint to replace ultimately either in our world or in a different alien species? The why exactly do we punish them... it's usually under the assumption that they'll repeat a crime which causes the value to be 'lost'. So there's a selfish motive, of feeling 'safer' while ultimately have two lives ruined rather than one. Another common reasoning is revenge, simple enough. The person has taken a life and his deserves to be taken as a price he must pay (obsolete?).
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Please do not mis understand, I don't have an opinion on this, which is why I would like yours. So while this may sound sarcastic, I would like you to sincerely enlighten me.
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This might be remotely relevant to the topic because I was planning on using it as the bases of a long-short story. |
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