Do you think that there are any concepts that are more important than life?

The life of you, your family, your community, the health of the planet as a whole - as a place that can sustain life.


(If yes - what concept or concepts do you have in mind?)

Life is not a "concept." I don't understand your intended meaning.

For some people religion (and esp. God) are more important than life. They live for heaven, etc. It's a concept.

Other people might think that money is more important than life. Money is a thing - but it's also a concept.


Life is life. Concepts are concepts. I didn't say or intend to say that life is a concept.

eom

You don't. But still - there have been people who put concepts above life. Of course - it's often above the lives of others - but some people think that some concepts are more important than their own life (immortality, esp., but other things also).

killing for? :shrug:

I would die or kill to save my children, and probably others. So in that case, life is a higher concept than my own life. Maybe.

dying for another's life as the same as life - not as a concept that is other than life.


Although - wars are often sold as the concept of saving the lives of one's family/community - but it is often a lie. (ie. the Iraq war/occupation)

So there has to be something in what you are dying for to make the other life worth more. THAT would be the concept worth dying for. Love, loyalty, or maybe, as I tried to say in the first post, that the concept of LIFE is greater than the reality of life, therefore the concept and the reality aren't equal.

I would consider - for this exercise - that concepts of life and realities of life to be the same.

I would consider such concepts as self-defense as being compatible with the concept of and/or reality of life.


Concepts that I don't personally count as "life" are abstract concepts like "eternal life".


Some people might think that love is more important than life. That would count as a "yes" for purposes of the poll. Although as someone pointed out (m/l) - you wouldn't have love if you didn't have life. But someone might think that they would have "eternal life" without life. So that is really what I was thinking about.

"that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Things like freedom, justice, love, virtue, etc. I should hope that people believe that there are higher principles than just 'keep yourself alive'.

But I don't know that any of those things - freedom, justice, love, virtue - are MORE important or even as important as life. Since first you have to have life to have those things.


There could certainly be the argument that people wouldn't want to live without x,y,z or under certain conditions.

Looking at how people have lived in the past - there was a lot more that was done just to keep alive (as there still is for a lot of people). So people didn't/don't always need to think up reasons/causes so much. And a lot of times reasons are family members. And people create reasons.


It is an existential question.

"Give me liberty, or give me death."

Is it better, for example, to live under Nazi rule, or to die fighting it?

"As the (Civil) war came, as thousands of Americans found themselves making the same commitment to face death that John Brown had made, the force of his example took on new relevance. That's why soldiers marched into battle singing "John Brown's Body." Two years later, church congregations sang Julia Ward Howe's new words to the song: "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free" ..."

"'Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments. I say, let it be done.' (John Brown, speech to the court)
Brown's willingness to got the gallows for what he thought was right had a moral force of its own. 'It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived,' Henry David Thoreau observed in a eulogy in Boston. 'These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live.'"
James W. Loewen "Lies my teacher told me" p. 175

on Democracy Now! earlier - and he was making the point (that we've mostly heard around here - maybe from him) that wars are fought by the poorer groups of people for the richer groups.

So there is usually a concept that is sold - usually some kind of nationalism - that we are fighting for freedom or whatever - and what people are really fighting is for something like Haliburton.

That is esp. clear in this war - but it is often clear in retrospect. Sometimes the poor are somewhat better or worse off under one set of rulers than another - but a lot of times - it's not as much as what the leaders would have people believe.

the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and WWII.

what would that be?

Hypothetical thought experiment: you have the responsibility of pressing (or not) a button to obliterate all life on planet Earth. If you press that button, life as we know it will end in a minute, and the earth will become completely uninhabitable for the next 10000000 years. What possible "doing what's right" could make you press that button?

lead you to all sorts of scenarios that bear no relationship to life as we live it. But assuming that I had the (ridiculous, I know) power to obliterate all life on Earth, I can think of no reason to do so, not even an evil one. What profit to me if I was killed, too?

On the other hand, nothing is all positive and no negative, nothing is all gain and no pain. So any specific proposal to do any specific thing must be considered in the context of all the consequences of that action. For a 0.000001% percent improvement of air quality is say, San Francisco, is this worth the loss of 100-2000 jobs (whatever the estimate would be)?

Maybe, maybe not. But making the choice, either way, is a moral choice, and we should strive to "do the right thing".

However, in context of my previous post, what I was actually thinking was that there are things worth dying for, and things that I, personally, would be willing to die for, if not enthusiastic about the prospect.

I don't know if I've answered your question of not, so let me know if you have any more.

I don't see any way to answer the overall question of ranking "the importance of life" without starting from the hypothetical end cases, tho.

FWIW, there was at least one Outer Limits episode which dealt somewhat with both the moral and tactical issues of a doomsday machine, in the context of an alien invasion. Nicely done, in my opinion, but I tend to like that sort of thing.

From what I've seen so far, practical attempts to improve air quality through regulation and technology tend to create more jobs than they cost -- although they may be different jobs and/or for different people.

I agree with you that there may be things worth dying for, but the ones I can think of are tied to the importance of life on a larger scale. There are no principles or values I can conceive of that transcend the existence of living valuers; there is no correct action in the absence of beneficial consequence, and no beneficial consequence in the absence of a consequent beneficiary.

OK, let me expalin my philosophy. I am not responsible for the world. I cannot make the whole world better. What I can do is try to make my little piece of it better, for me and for my loved ones, and for those that I come in contact with. I can possibly reach out to a few individuals that I will never meet, that may be at a considerable distance. Maybe I can join politically with others of a like mind to try to change society for the better, a little.

But maybe I (and they) will fail at this. For instance, despite all the hard work that has gone on during the last 6 years, we finally win one. They haven't even taken power yet, and already I amsensing disappointment and anger at them on this forum.

What I can do, and will do, is try to treat other people right, try to be pleasant, try to realize that other people have wishes and goals, legitimate wishes and goals, that may conflict with mine, and try not to get my panties in a wad when I don't get my way. Which doesn't mean that I won't keep trying to get my way.

Earlier in the subthread, I think you agreed with me that you couldn't imagine a scenario where the consequences of "pushing the button" to obliterate all life on earth would be preferable to not doing so. Let's move the hypothesis a little closer to reality.

Let's say there's some midly utilitarian (e.g. labor-saving) activity that you, me, and 250 million of our fellow citizens could do that would destroy all life on the planet if we all did it together, and that destruction would take place within a year. In fact, if some of us stop doing it, but some percentage continue, it will still destroy all life on the planet but slower -- in a matter of decades or centuries rather than years. What level of intervention, if any, would you say is appropriate to prevent said activity? Are there any more important things we should consider, maybe not in terms of immediacy, but rather overall importance?

that I told you that hypothetical thinking can lead you down roads that bear no real relation to reality?? We can't all be Einstein, and not all real-life experiments are valid, thought experiments even moreso.

But I'm willing to play. Come up with your earth-threatening scenario and its mechanism, and put some numbers on it, and I will give you the best answer that I can.

You have to remember that, in these kinds of situations, we are not dealing with certainties, but probabilities. And just getting up out of bed in the morning is a severe risk, as is staying in bed.

really, they're one of the only tools we have for the current scenario, when it comes right down to it. You only get to die for something once, right?

"If someone physically attacked me, I would fight to the death to defend myself."
"If a criminal threatened my family, I would give my life to protect them."
"If another nation invaded my country, I would fight as long as necessary to repel the foreign armies."
"If a human activity threatened the biosphere, I would stop doing it."

Those are all hypotheticals, right there, and absolute ones that aren't uncommon to hear. But you wanted to apply numbers and quanatities -- this is doable.

So let's say hypothetically we know as certainly as possible that a given common activity of the hundreds of millions of people living in the USA will cause greivous harm to the biosphere, eliminating between 90 and 100% of known species within a year if we continue to do it en masse, and 90-100% of the remainder every year following. Suppose also a direct scaling of the number of humans who do this activity to the number of years it takes: i.e., if 1 person does it, it will cause an extinction of 90-100% of species in 300 million years; if everyone on the planet did it (~25X300million) it would take 2 weeks. Also, the % of species exterminated will scale linearly to the duration of use relative to this time period: if 300 million people do it for 6 months, we lose 45-50% of the known species (assume flat distribution for chance of species destruction, incl. human).

What sort of otherwise "right action" would, in your mind, justify an activity that triggers the destruction of the biosphere over said time frame? What, in your opinion, would be an acceptible quantitative threshold of "right action" that would impose a finite limit to the viability of all or nearly all life on the planet?

Firstly, if only one person was doing it, I would take no action whatsoever. The world is hardly likely to last 300 million years, anyway, and certainly the one person doing it will not.

Nor is it likely that "everyone" on the planet will be doing it. And if they did, I don't think that 2 weeks is enough time to do anything constructive about it, including passing a law and getting the word out.

Still, there are a lot of species we don't need. Why, for example are we keeping smallpox around? What percentage of your living standard are you willing to give up to keep some exotic cockroach from dying out? None? All of it? Would you be willing to accept a lifestyle similar to an Indian peasant of the 19th century to keep the Bengal tiger from going extinct? There's lots of people in India who wouldn't. How many people are you willing to let starve to prevent some kind of unknown minnow from doing what all species do? These are the kind of numbers I mean. What are the economic trade-offs.

But you miss my point about "hypotheticals". I reject your basic premise that we can know with absolute certainty that any activity will cause the extinction of anything unless we deliberately wreck their whole range. Do you have something specific in mind?

WRT the hypothetical I posed for you, the "one person doing it" doesn't have to be the same person every day. While I disagree with you about the world being "hardly likely to last 300 million years", as it has lasted 4 billion or so already and multicelled life has been around for about half of that, I'd concur that the current species set will undoubtably have gone the way of the dinosaurs by then. But that example, just like the one of everyone doing it, were the endpoints of the range. Were you deliberately skirting the issue of the midrange, or were those end cases too distracting from the actual point of the hypothesis?

Then, saying
> I don't think that 2 weeks is enough time to do anything constructive about it
shows that you missed the point entirely.

Again, the question was, and is, what "right action" would justify that kind of expense? What action could possibly be so right that everyone should do it at the expense of most or all life on the planet? Do you understand now?

Nothing illustrates our current environmental conundrum better than your comment that
> Still, there are a lot of species we don't need.

Let's take that exotic cockroach, for example. Maybe *you* don't mind if it goes extinct, but anything that feeds on it does. The food chain is like a monstrous jenga tower in this respect; pull away too many pieces, and eventually huge parts of the structure will collapse.

Even smallpox may serve a purpose, in the grand scheme of things. Such things provide adaptive pressures, and from a humanocentric viewpoint, may form the basis of a vaccine for even more virulent diseases in the future. Just because we don't see the use at the moment, doesn't mean it could never have one. The great advantage of biodiversity is that it provides a broader spectrum of possibilities from which life can recover from major catastrophe. An evolving biosphere with millions of species has a much better chance of adapting and surviving long-term, in some form, than a completely stable one with a few dozen species.

Yeah, maybe it's impossible to justify starving a village to preserve a single variant of minnow, and those are the numbers you want to talk about in terms of "econonomic trade-offs" (although I'd probably call it something different) but those aren't the numbers I'm talking about. How many people would you be willing to let starve in a year to prevent the mass-extinction of all the fish in the ocean in ten years? How do your "economic trade-offs" line up then?

> But you miss my point about "hypotheticals".
And you missed mine.

> I reject your basic premise that we can know with absolute certainty that any activity will
> cause the extinction of anything unless we deliberately wreck their whole range.

You keep missing the forest through the trees. This was originally a question of relative importance, specifically comparing "doing what's right" with the value of life itself, not the practical difficulties involved in evaluating the results of a particular hypothetical scenario.

As to uncertainty, we regularly accept as scientifically valid results that are uncertain within some identifiable threshold of knowability. I reject your rejection, especially since it's non-sequiter within the scope of a hypothetical.

What kind of specific example would help you address the general question and arrive at a satisfying conclusion?

The virus has no other hosts than humans. It is extinct in the wild. Leaving it around to get loose again when some Al-Quaeda, or even Bushco conspiracy gets hold of some is insane just to guard against some "hypothetical" more virulent virus for which no evidence currently exists.

Here's a specific example. The food chain that depends on the cockroach is very unlikely to be an important one for humans. However, my question is how many human lives, and how much human misery, would it be worth to preserve said cockroach? If the cockroach went extinct, how many human lives would it cost? That we know for certain? When you know these things, you can decide which way to go. Otherwise you are just bullshitting.

Let's say that economic benefit is that 10,000 impoverished peasants from underdeveloped countries could get good middle-class jobs with health benefits if the cockroach went extinct. Let's say that there is no human downside to the cockroach's extinction, but two other obscure insect species become endangered. Do you let it go extinct, or do you create a fund to "Save the Repulsive Shit-Eating CockRoach"? I let it go extinct. I'm pretty much Humanocentric. So sue me.

You're right, of course, statistics do matter, and there is always some uncertainty in statistics. But the confidence level has to be pretty high ~ 95%.

So my questions to you, and to play we need an answer, are these: How many human lives is a species worth? How much of your own money are you willing to spend to save that species? Numbers, please.

whether any other issue ranks in importance with the threat against the global environment, which in my book means life, I checked no.

Regarding concepts, I believe the primary concept is survival of the species. The loftier higher moral concepts are definitely important and can follow, but if humanity dies out, in the words of a scared Space Marine in the movie Aliens 2 "game over".

what I think.


I think that historically - for a long time - people have been fed the concept that other things are more important than life - and I think that people need to re-evaluate where life falls on the priority scale.

cheez

that a multinational corporation had anything to do with anything that was more important than life (re: the Cheetos concept).


Some cheese is alive.

There is no concept more important than that of preserving the ability of the biosphere to sustain life. Every other thing we typically hold to be important, virtuous, true, or beautiful proceeds from the premise that someone, perhaps not us but someone, will be able to appreciate it again tomorrow. Once that ends, once we say it's all over for everyone and everything come Tuesday, depreciation occurs at a very rapid pace indeed.

Sacraficing life for potentially a few decades of profit is selfish. Telling others that they should die for an ideal is selfish. In a way, dying for an ideal is selfish, unless one's death is more than symbolic and actually saves others lives.

There are concepts more important to me than my own life, but I cannot make the decision that anything is more important than *someone else's* life, and I certainly can't make the call that anything outweighs the biosphere's life.

My own life--sure.

Tucker

My children, for example.

"Liberty" and "freedom" is another concept, although how this has been marketed in recent years might leave many Americans skeptical...

to be synonymous with life - and not a separate concept.


I agree that we have much to be skeptical in regards to such marketing concepts as "liberty" and "freedom" as they have been used.

and reality cannot be conceived under the category of cause and effect." -- Richard Wilhelm; Chinesische Lebensweisheit; 1922; page 15.

"...the truth is that outside of existence there is nobody. Man exists. For him it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether he wants to live and under what conditions."

Simone de Beauvior

_____________________


I think that it's nice to live for something other than one's self. Besides family and such - I like to think of the planet as something that needs consideration as opposed to being something that is just taken for granted — and as if our actions mean nothing.

While our individual actions may not amount to much - knowing that collectively our actions have consequences - we can choose to act in ways that are more positive or more negative on a large scale. Cause and effect. Unfortunately, the truth is - the planet is better off without any of us. People that is - at least those of us who are living and consuming beyond the Stone age - beyond what is necessary to live. Which would certainly be anyone reading (writing) this.

It may be that the only thing that makes sense is that to love life one must despise luxury (how most of us live) - at the very least (or to live in denial).

Freedom and Liberty are what cost you.