Is human life sacred?

If you hold the view that life evolved from a chemical soup, does life have any value? Is it sacred?

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Such as?

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
If you hold the view that life evolved from a chemical soup, does life have any value? Is it sacred?

By "sacred" do you mean the following or something else?

"highly valued and important".

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sacred

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
If you hold the view that life evolved from a chemical soup, does life have any value? Is it sacred?

Sacred is a religious term [or one with deep religious connotations] which is not really appropriate.

So let's just stick with "does life have any value?"

To which the short answer is "of course it does, duh" 🙄

It has value to us, we are complex social creatures with empathy that care about others.
We have thus created a myriad of moral and ethical systems of varying degrees of sophistication
over the millennia. We have huge debates and arguments about what is or is not moral and people
hold great protests and demonstrations and campaigns against things they consider immoral.

People care, people hold moral values, they like or dislike things.

This perpetual fear that without an imaginary god holding people in line nobody would care about morality
or value life is both bizarre and totally baseless. I mean sure it's possible to build up arguments from first
principles and a basic understanding of humans and our environment that explain why people should care
and can be used as a foundation for morality, and moral philosophers have found many ways to do this and
love debating their intricacies.... But for everyday people they are completely unnecessary because they are
trying to solve a problem that does not exist. People care, they do not need to be convinced that morality and
ethics are important. The question is instead HOW you make good moral and ethical judgements and not whether
you should make them in the first place.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Sacred is a religious term [or one with deep religious connotations] which is not really appropriate.

So let's just stick with "does life have any value?"

To which the short answer is "of course it does, duh" 🙄

It has value to us, we are complex social creatures with empathy that care about others.
We have thus created a myriad of moral and et ...[text shortened]... ake good moral and ethical judgements and not whether
you should make them in the first place.

Let me rephrase the question, do human have intrinsic value greater than that of other life forms?

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Let me rephrase the question, do human have intrinsic value greater than that of other life forms?

Humans have the capacity to attribute and articulate their greater value and to perform countless feats that prove and demonstrate, at least to themselves, that greater intrinsic value. When animals gain the capacity to argue the opposite, and do so on human terms, then we may have to rethink it all. But it doesn't look like happening.

Originally posted by FMF
Humans have the capacity to attribute and articulate their greater value and to perform countless feats that prove and demonstrate, at least to themselves, that greater intrinsic value. When animals gain the capacity to argue the opposite, and do so on human terms, then we may have to rethink it all. But it doesn't look like happening.

If you had to choose between saving your trusty dogs life and say the life of Adolf Hitler. Which would you save and why?

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
If you had to choose between saving your trusty dogs life and say the life of Adolf Hitler. Which would you save and why?

Perhaps you could describe how this scenario you mention could possibly happen in a way that is worthy of a serious debate about the everyday lives of billions of people rather than a silly gimmick that sells the discourse short.

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Let me rephrase the question, do human have intrinsic value greater than that of other life forms?

Humans have de facto greater value because they have the capacity to attach and express such value to themselves and also demonstrate it. This is a philosophical debate in the human realm. There is no philosophical debate - or competition - with the animal kingdom about how humans perceive themselves.

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Let me rephrase the question, do human have intrinsic value greater than that of other life forms?

An intrinsic value is one that is a property of the object itself.
Food has intrinsic value to us as we need food to keep existing and we want to exist and so food
has a value to us.

Money does not have much intrinsic value however, as you can't eat it and there is almost nothing
useful you can do with it. However we imbue money with value because of the mental concept it
stands in for and substantiates.


People are both. We have intrinsic value to other people, and we have imbued value to other people.
And yes, that value is typically greater than that of other life forms. [individually, the collective intrinsic
value of the biosphere is greater than any one human.]

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
Let me rephrase the question, do human have intrinsic value greater than that of other life forms?

If humans are the ones determining which creatures have greater "intrinsic" value, it isn't very intrinsic, now is it?

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
If humans are the ones determining which creatures have greater "intrinsic" value, it isn't very intrinsic, now is it?

Things can have an intrinsic value to us, without them having an intrinsic value in the abstract.

If a thing has properties that are valuable to us, then it has an inherent value to us.

It may not have that value to anything else, and so that value is not an intrinsic property like
[say] mass. But we don't really care if things have intrinsic value to the universe, only if they
have intrinsic value to us.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
If humans are the ones determining which creatures have greater "intrinsic" value, it isn't very intrinsic, now is it?

Our capacity to decide and determine such things about ourselves is intrinsic to humans. 😛

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
If you hold the view that life evolved from a chemical soup, does life have any value? Is it sacred?

If you hold the view that life was created by an everlasting being, does this life have any value?

If you hold that it does, does the life of the everlasting being have any value?

And if you hold that they both have value, can we not therefore say that whether life was created by another being, or not, has no bearing on whether it has value?