Psionic Circles | The Value of the Human Life

Our global society has worked hard towards eradicating tyranny, Communism, Fascism, Dictatorship, and many other autocrats from the world.  We have earned our freedom through the sweat, tears and the lives of many civilians and military personnel.  God Rest their…

Our global society has worked hard towards eradicating tyranny, Communism, Fascism, Dictatorship, and many other autocrats from the world.  We have earned our freedom through the sweat, tears and the lives of many civilians and military personnel.  God Rest their Soul.  They fought and died so that we can be valued.

Introduction

Is your life worth more than $200,725.00 dollars in 1971 or $1,430,884.72 in today’s money?  In 1970, Ford Motors was pressured to produce motor cars that were cheaper and safer than the Japanese and Germans.  The Japanese vehicles at the time were lead by Honda, Toyota, and Datsun.  And there was a rush for the US to get a car on the market to compete.  The engineers worked hard and came up with the Pinto.  There was only one problem.  They failed to perform all of the safety checks for the vehicle!

The President of Ford Motors was presented with the huge ethical problem of either redesigning the vehicle at a cost of mullions of dollars, or sending the car to the assembly line and selling the car as is and, with the understanding that they would pay through insurance claims for any and all accidental damage to individuals who had died, at a value of $200,725.00 per person.  Their statistics suggested they would have approximately 180 deaths per year.  This would mean that the total cost for the error would be 180 in deaths =  $36,130,500 per year while they would potentially sell hundreds of thousands of vehicles.  They actually sold 328,275 vehicles. And that year they had less than 30 accidents, no deaths, but a few other injuries that the car company quickly compensated.  Their gain was 682,155,450 vehicles and merely thousands of dollars in compensation.  They quickly made modifications to the vehicle so that subsequent years they were much safer.

So this experience begs the question “Can a dollars-and-cents figure be assigned to a Man or Woman’s life”?  What do you think?

 

Our Values Lean Towards Greater and Better Life

At Psionic Circles, we believe that the protection and preservation of human life is the ultimate value.  It is not just an ethics or moral value, but it underpins the the foundation of humanity and our global society.   And we can see in much of the modern world this belief is true and has been true for much of human history.

And while we say and believe this is true, we don’t necessarily live this express it at all times.  We all know about during the 2020 COVID Pandemic: 5.22M people died globally, and we saved approximately 258 million people.  Does the saving of all of those people mean that human lives are important?

 

Are Human Lives Important?

I read a statistic recently that stated that natural disasters kill on average 60,000 people per year and are responsible for 0.1% of global deaths.  This percentage is very small, which would indicate that that we care about our fellows enough to create environments that are safe and we respond quickly to any disaster regardless of where it is located for the purpose of keeping people safe.

However, on the other side of the coin, intentional homicides, which are defined as the unlawful deaths that are deliberately inflicted on a person by one or many perpetrators.  It can be due to a number of causes which include; interstate wars, civil wars and genocides.  It has been stated that more than 400,000 people die from homicide each year globally.  The percentage of homicide varies from 1% to 10%, depending upon the countries.  The targeted victims are generally between the ages of 15 and 49 years old. Is this a cleansing and the annihilation of specific or targeted populations?  And does this defy the ideal that humans are important?

Let us look at a number of philosophies and get an idea of the value of life and determine if they are relevant in us determining our key question.  What is the value of a human’s life according to our most prominent social philosophies?

 

Major Philosophical Viewpoints

Our society is made up of very complicated ideas that over 300,000 years of homo sapien history has accumulated.  It stems from the Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics through to 18th Century Utilitarian.  There are many different ethical philosophies.  The top six are Tthe categorical imperative, utilitarianism, hedonism, the golden mean, the golden rule, and the veil of ignorance.  The balance of this article will discuss the Libertarian Totalitarian and Utilitarianism and relate them to the question of what is the value of a human’s life.  Let’s start with Libertarian.

A.  Libertarian Philosophy

Libertarian is a philosophical viewpoint that espouses many key concepts of that have developed. over the centuries. Its rudiments are found in ancient China, Greece, and Israel.  As they formed and developed, they organized into modern libertarian philosophy from the work of the seventeenth-century and eighteenth‐​century geniuses; John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

Some of their primary concepts and viewpoints include:

1. Individualism: the individual as the basic unit of social analysis. Only individuals make choices and are responsible for their actions.
2. Individual Rights. Because individuals are moral agents, they have a right to be secure in their life, liberty, and property. These rights are not granted by government or by society; they are inherent in the nature of human beings.
3. Spontaneous Order. A great degree of order in society is necessary for individuals to survive and flourish.
4. The Rule of Law: proposes a society of liberty under law, in which individuals are free to pursue their own lives so long as they respect the equal rights of others. It is not a claim that “people can do anything they want to, and nobody else can say anything.”

Life, thus, is seen to be sacred, it has intrinsic and extrinsic value. The individual always has the right and duty of care to cherish and preserved their lives. There can not be a proxy given to someone else, or outsourced. Life is to be well-lived.

Therefore,  the value of life is kept sacred.

B.  Totalitarian Philosophy

The Totalitarian viewpoint sharply contrasts the Libertarian view.  Totalitarian philosophy creates anti rights of the individual.  They are suppressed and there is no individual freedom.  The individual’s life is subordinated to the authority of the state or a selected group of people.  It is a form of government where there is strong central rulership that attempts to control and direct every aspect of a person’s life: eating, sleeping, associations, lifestyle, work, and every other aspect of a person’s being.  The “authorities” perform this through criminal behavior such as coercion, repression, blackmail, extortion, theft and homicide.  Their means of rulership denies the individual any freedoms and all value.  They degrade the life of the human to that of a slave or an animal that only has importance relevant to the tasks that the person can accomplish.  Modern examples of this philosophy are Nazi Germany (1933–45) and the Soviet Union during the Stalin era (1924–53).  This political philosophy is not the Psionic Circles viewpoint of human value or society.

Some of their primary concepts and viewpoints include:

1.   Extreme Practicality: this is used when there is a choice between two evils the lesser evil prevents one that has greater loss. The sacrifice is intelligent and practical. This value is embedded in most cultures. It is the very core of war where the lives of a few military people die to save the civilian population. Another example is the work of Medical doctors, Pharmacist, and Firemen and women, and anyone who regularly  sacrifice their lives daily, to save others.

Every so often, society reviews its rules and values to determine realistically whether their current system is working or should be modified and changed to something that meets the needs of the people.

2.  Temporal Thinking is that one is sacrificing life (voluntarily or not) or the “life in chains” at the present will secure a better life for others in the future. This is generally uses short-sightedness as key to their doctrine and belief. The future life picture may not mean that everyone gets to survive. There is an implication that the right lives will survive and that the current dogma is required in order to protect that vision of the future.

As examples, the system may need all of the youth to sacrifice their freedoms, energy, and lives for the imperial controllers, for the sake of the new, or the sacrifice might be made by the elderly to give up their lives or levels of comfort for the greater good  since they are so old.  Never the less a trade off that defines exactly who is to be sacrificed is made between those who already had their share of life and those who they feel really don’t need a share. The temporal view holds that over time this too shall pass.

3.  Qualitative Analysis: is an especially vicious variant because it purports to endow subjective notions and views with “scientific” objectivity. People are judged to belong to different qualitative groups (classified by race, skin color, birth, gender, age, wealth, or other arbitrary parameters). The result of this immoral taxonomy is that the lives of the “lesser” brands of humans are considered less “weighty” and worthy than the lives of the upper grades of humanity. The former are therefore sacrificed to benefit the latter. The Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, the black slaves in America, the aborigines in Australia are three examples of such pernicious thinking.

4.  Usefulness:  is viewed when the sacrifice of one life brings another person material or other benefits. This is the thinking (and action) which characterizes psychopaths and sociopathic criminals, for instance. For them, life is a tradable commodity and it can be exchanged against inanimate goods and services. Money and drugs are bartered for life.

 

C.  Unitarianism

Utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that driven actions are based upon that which maximizes happiness and well-being for all affected individuals.

There are different varieties of utilitarianism which possess different characterizations.  But the basic idea behind is maximize functional utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being.  For example, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility as “that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness…[or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.”

Thus Utilitarianism is is seen as a version of consequentialism, where the consequences of any action are the only standard of right and wrong. Unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism and altruism, utilitarianism considers the interests of all humans equally. Proponents of utilitarianism have disagreed on a number of points, such as whether actions should be chosen based on their likely results (act utilitarianism), or whether agents should conform to rules that maximize utility (rule utilitarianism). There is also disagreement as to how total (total utilitarianism), average (average utilitarianism) or minimum utility[3] should be maximized.

Thus, a Utilitarianism example is a pharmaceutical company releasing Panadol which has been govern mentally approved with known side effects.  The side effects are nausea, vomiting, stomach upset, trouble falling asleep, or a shaky/nervous feeling may occur. However, because the drug is able to help more people than are bothered by the minor side effects it was released and sold to the general public. Utilitarianism often shows “the ends justifies the means”.   In this case, more people will not have the side effect than will have negative affects.  It might also be thought that of those who take the medicine and have some of the side effects, the benefits of the drug will offset the side effects.

Some of their primary concepts and viewpoints include:

1. Consequentialism: view that the moral rightness of actions (or rules, policies, etc.) depends on, and only on, the value of their consequences. And the rightness is good and the action is right if it results end in the happiness or a benefit of some type.
2. Welfarism is the view that only the welfare (also called well-being) of individuals determines how good a particular state of the world. Thus it is the concept that the greatest number of people in the society or group must gain from the decision or the action. It must be a win-win.
3. Impartiality: is the view that the identity of individuals is irrelevant to the value of an outcome. There are no special kings and queens. We all are kings and queens.
4. Additive aggregationism is the view that the value of the world is the sum of the values of its parts, where these parts are local phenomena such as experiences, lives, or societies.

This viewpoint also validates the value of the person and thus is a Psionic Circles viewpoint of,   human value and worth.

Summary

Each person is a sovereign individual that is unique unto themselves.  Therefore each person is a valuable piece of the puzzle of life.  Their piece can not be replaced by anyone else.  Not a sibling that has similar DNA,  not to the best friends who seem to have everything good that you don’t have.  And not the teacher who seems to know everything,  but their own life seems to be always challenged.

 

Thank you for reading!

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