Originally posted by Bentley
1) I'm not really trying to hammer a point of value linked to money, but the idea crossed my mind and I thought it was worth exploring. I do find interesting your argument about the unborn industry because it shows a bit of how the Dynamic of human non-agency works. In the cases we just discussed young and unborn humans are essentially receiving the attention and care of society, they are an investment of sorts (and thus not valued by their actions).They are like a positive desire that goes towards the others unlike most other individualistic experience we tend to build up. In short: they are loved hence they become important.
2) I see your point to a degree, but my perception is that lack of agency is often a symbol of inferiority in social interactions. The fact that you say "women and children first" also suggests that men are the decisión makers and thus more critical to a functioning society (as far as I know it's not women nor children who ever say "women and children first" that kind of phrase makes them objects, essentially). If we take a slave and a free man society considers the one with less options a lesser agent. But you do have a point in the fact we are protective of children so they obviously must have some kind of value. Things are not as linear as I implied originally.
3) The element of tragedy is likely linked with what I mentioned above: children are perceived as a symbol of universal affection.
4) I have a hard time pinpointing what makes life valuable or not because I try to extract its value from the actions taken in said life. By talking about innocent life you imply that the lack of certain actions would be important to present life as more valuable. I don't want to take that notion for granted because I don't want to undervalue life. If a few actions are enough for you to lose whatever importance you held as a living being that means the value is small. And there is a bunch of complex implications that stem from here, but I honestly thing they stray pretty far from the topic at hand.
The reason for me to be callous is because I don't see death as somethng intrinsically bad. We have been fed the notion that dying is deterrent of how life is valued, the idea would be: if we easily kill a mosquito it means we don't value its life. If we kill in self-defense it's less of a crime because the person who attacked us was wicked. But I think respecting life might go beyond supersticiously evading death and it's way more linked to our capacity to love.
1) I think the very foundation of your logic is deeply flawed. You seem to forget that society is made up of many individuals and that the value of life is even more inherent on the person, than those around him/her (essentially, even when no one values a life, there is still one person who values it: the person whose life it is). My child might be far more valuable to me because I care about her but another person's child does not have less value to society just because the parent loves her less.
Society values the life of the individual because each individual (who, en masse, composes society) is assumed to value their own life (as such a need for self-preservation is encoded into our biology). There might not be "equal" valuation on how much one's life is valued by indviduals around them but society should always value all life within this baseline at the minimum.
2) Your "lack of agency" logic is very hard to wrap my head around. There is a reason why children need their choices limited as they are not fully able to comprehend/understand their decisions (many are unable to live without intervention from parents) thus parents (or guardians) are needed in order to teach them the proper methods of survival otherwise they will die or get themselves kill. This is just as much biological truth as us needing to breathe.
The parallels you are trying to draw between slavery and children is also very strange. There is a reason why we abolished slavery. It is an evil practice where society saw the value of human life equal to that of a commodity (like an animal, for example). The difference between the lack of agency between slavery and raising kids is that children are incapable of making their own choices because they are unable to understand what they are doing or are fully unable to function on their own thus someone needs to guide them in order to preserve their life/safety/mental health (essentially, we teach our children and we discipline them to protect them and make teach them how to survive). While slaves are aware of their choices and their choices are simply taken away by force. Kinda like how the choice to life is taken away from an aborted child.
3) And thus their value of life is seen (at times) as even greater than that of full grown adults w/c is what I have been saying.
4) Perhaps your methodology is flawed? Because the very premise of it is flawed? From what I am seeing above, that may well be the case.
I disagree. Death is always intrinsically bad, to the individual. The need for self-preservation is hard-wired to our biology (and I would argue this is one of the things that make a life, a life). There are WORSE things than death (and when one experiences these things, they may force one to weigh one's life against such things and decide that one's life is not as important as avoiding such experiences) and mental illness may cause some to lose their own valuation of their life but no one in their right mind (and not currently experiencing some form of suffering) wants to die.
No, when we kill someone in self-defense we are simply allowed to exercise our rights to protect our own life against others within the law. And others who try to take the life of others waive their own rights to their life thru the actions that they themselves initiated. We do not take it because they are "wicked" as a person simply being "wicked" is not a valid societal reason to take another's life unless that wickedness forces another to defend their own life.