How much is the individual worth?
This is a philosophical existential question and it is questionable whether we can even fairly objectively answer it.
The value is in the eye of the beholder and if we humans judge that, then our perspective is certainly colored in an anthropocentric way.
If we look at it from the perspective of the individual, most would probably say that they consider themselves valuable.
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There are currently 7.7 billion people on earth
So we all have the same value?
Does it make a difference philosophically whether I am a top manager in New York City or a rice farmer in China, live in a luxury villa in Beverly Hills or live in the slums of Mumbai?
Now it depends very much on the perspective and on the evaluation framework.
If we argue philosophically, then there should be no reasonable argument that one human life is more valuable than the other.
Looking at it from a social perspective, one could say that the value of the individual depends on how much he or she contributes to the common good.
The ancient philosophers were already considering this. Aristotle points out that the goal of the polis (of the state) is the happiness of the citizens. This happiness, Aristotle says, can only be achieved by engaging the individual in the community.
In the history of jurisprudence, too, the common good is central. The German philosopher Leibniz emphasizes that all rights serve the common good.
Particularly interesting is the perspective of utilitarianism. Here, the common good is defined as the greatest possible happiness for the largest possible number of private individuals.
The common good would therefore be measurable?
A classic utilitarian thought experiment is the trolley problem by the British philosopher Philippa Foot.
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
It raises the question of whether it is morally right to sacrifice the lives of fewer people to save the lives of a larger number of people. The trolley problem becomes tricky if, for example, you have to sacrifice the life of a loved one to save an anonymous group. How would you decide?
So the life of an individual doesn't have a fixed value, but it varies according to perspective and situation?
If you look at it economically, there are also considerations about the worth of the individual.
It seems very analytical at first, but here humans are viewed as in a cost benefit analysis. How much does an average human life cost and how much profit does a human on the other side make in an average life? To what extend is it worthwhile for a state to spend money to sustain a person's life?
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There are some interesting statistics on how government agencies in the US, for example, estimate the value of a human life. Depending on the authority, this varies between 8 to 10 million US dollars.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-value-of-life/
The general trend is obvious that the value of life in the last 30 years has been calculated with increasing higher amounts.
Will this trend continue in the future?
We are facing great changes. The increasing spread of automation, robotization and the introduction of artificial intelligence will lead to a major disruption in society as a whole, fundamentally redefining the role and value of human beings.
In his book "Homo Deus," author Yuval Noah Harari points out that with automation in the military and economics, man will lose his economic and military benefits to society. He concludes that the state system assigns value to only an elite of optimized individuals but not to the mass of the population.
Is the revolution of artificial intelligence therefore a great danger to the value of man?
In the future, if we do not want to allow that, it will be the challenge to find new criteria to measure our value, far away from purely economic value.
What could these criteria be? What makes us valuable in particular and how can this value be measured?
Write your opinions here in the comments.
I am looking forward to a lively discussion.
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