Yes it is true that certain innate behaviours tend to favour ways of living that preserve life. Whilst this would tend to provide an urge to value your own life, you might have to go further to explain why there can be a more general valuing of some "other" human lives.HJCarden wrote: ↑November 24th, 2020, 12:26 am Not an original topic, I know theres lots of work out there about this already, but interested in hearing some new thoughts about this.
I believe that very broadly, we can say that human life has value purely on its own, or if we value human life because we have a natural instinct for self preservation.
??? WHAT?
This has always interested me, because it seems that the overwhelming amount of substantive and logical evidence pushes us towards believing that our value is an illusion created by survival instincts, but I feel an irresistible pull to believe that human life has its own innate value.
A value requires a valuer, and an evaluation. Unless you want to throw "God" into the picture, all you are doing is imposing an anthropogenic system on an unwitting universe.
There is no International Bank of human value. Human value is by no means universal. It is very partial, very biased, and very particular. As a currency, beware, you cannot achive value for it the world over. There are several places on earth where yout life is worth less than nothing. In fact you could be worth more dead than alive.
I'd love to know what sort of mentality, or ideology makes people think this way!!
We seem plagued with them on the Forum: those who keep pushing for objective morality, as if that were a thing.
What psychological problem generates these sorts of fallacies, I wonder?
You "intuition" is nothing more than wishing on smoke, thinking its a cigar.
My loose collection of arguments for believing this intuition is as follows
Possibility of God/Creator: If there is a God (fairly, because I do believe in God, this argument is biased) I think it follows in most conceptions and is logical to me that human life has innate value.
Human moral reasoning: This argument I believe is only persuasive if one DOES NOT believe in God/creator. As I see it
-Humans are the highest reasoning beings that exist (outside of the not-believed in God)
-Therefore, we are masters of creation, the highest type of being (this assumes a very high value of reason)
-Highest type of reason gives us the highest moral reasoning
Therefore,
-Humans are the highest morally reasoning beings
Being the highest morally reasoning beings sounds like its pretty innately valuable.
Several holes in this argument, assumption of high value of morality and reason
also why should anyone other than humans give a damn about all of this morality stuff, doesnt seem to bother rocks if theres war crimes
Interested to hear anyone's thoughts and questions