The Human Fire 2.12 - The Value of People
Seeing the inexhaustible worth in each of us.
One of the stranger trends that's made the rounds in our digital life has been that of "cancel culture." Truthfully, I'm not a fan. I don't think people are something you cancel like they're an unwanted magazine subscription. Even if their views are wrong or terrible. Argue against them, show a better way, point out the flaws in their reasoning. But pile on them, belittle them, shame them?
I've certainly changed my mind on a few things in my life, so I'd bristle if someone tried to pin me down to a past view and rake me over the coals for being wrong. There was a time, for example, when I poorly understood the experience of gay and lesbian persons. I'm still not fully sure where I got this idea, but at one point I thought that gay men were dangerous because they possessed a kind of sexual compulsion. I know it's silly now, and I was wrong. I also know there's a cultural history behind that mistaken idea that has had incredibly damaging effects for many wonderful, kind, and good men.
If someone had cancelled me for holding that view, I might never have grown. Instead, I had a rewarding friendship with a gay man I worked with who cared about me enough to help me understand where I was wrong. And he helped me see how my view was inconsistent with a deep value of mine - that every person is of immeasurable worth.
Today's newsletter begins a series where I'll be exploring the notion of value - what it is, what possesses it, how we measure it. And today we start with what may be our most important thing of value: people.
Oxygen
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are humans that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God
and crowned them with glory and honor.
~ A Hebrew song
I used to be able to cradle a football from my wrist to my elbow. But the football grew. Soon it was bigger than my arm, and soon it will be as big as I am.
It wasn't a football, of course, but a human being, small and precious and vulnerable. One worth more than an ordinary football, worth more than all the billions of dollars football teams are worth today. Heaven forbid I ever think he's worth a cent less. (And that goes for you, and your footballs too.)
Fuel
According to the Ford Motor Company of the 1970s, a human life was worth exactly $200,725. That's it. Back then, Ford thought it better to save $10 per new Pinto car, than to save an estimated 500 people from dying in rear-end crashes. You see, they opted not to issue a recall for some cars that had the gas tank attached too close to the car's back end. Ford thought it better to risk the chance they'd get sued, than to do the right thing and make the car safe for all people.
Human beings just weren't worth that much to them. As it was put in the press at the time, it was "cheaper to let 'em burn!"
Things haven't exactly improved much since the 70s. Now some economists put the "value of a statistical life" in Western democratic countries somewhere between $1-10 million. (They don't say much about what that would be in, say, Sudan or North Korea.) A metric like this is purportedly useful for allocating scarce resources across a population and conducting cost-benefit analyses.
After all, for the powers that run the world, what are mortals if not something to be evaluated?
Economists will tell you that they can't tell what is actually valuable, only what people value by way of spending their cash. To find out what's really valuable, you have to turn to ethics - that slippery conversation about right and wrong that everyone is afraid of having these days. Start a conversation about ethics, right and wrong, and it's everyone for their own ethical selves, relativism running wild.
Ethics, however, isn't as slippery as it seems, and has ways of thinking about value from which economists could benefit. It even makes use of a related sub-branch of philosophy called axiology - which is, simply put, the study of value.
In any discussion of value, it's crucial to distinguish between two types of valuable goods: those of intrinsic value, and those of instrumental value.
In the instrumental category, you'll find things like money. Of it itself, money has no inherent value. It is only worth something as a means of acquiring something else valuable. It's transitory, and that's a helpful way of thinking about instrumental goods in general.
Intrinsic goods are different in kind: they are irreducibly valuable in themselves. One of the most famous moral philosophers, Immanuel Kant, put this idea at the center of his ethics when he said that every human being is an end in themselves. Which is to say, every human being possesses intrinsic value just by virtue of existing.
That's a value more real than all the gold in Fort Knox.
Heat
Before he retired from the papacy, Pope Benedict XVI said, "To me, it really seems visible today that ethics is not something exterior to the economy, which, as technical matter, could function on its own; rather, ethics is an interior principle of the economy itself, which cannot function if it does not take account of the human values of solidarity and reciprocal responsibility." What would our society look like if we truly valued people in all aspects of our lives - economic, social, spiritual, moral? How might that shift change you?
What is the most valuable thing in your life right now? Is it another person? A pursuit? A dream? What makes it valuable to you? Is it something of intrinsic value?
Next week this series on value will take a stop on the road to knowledge. And after a summer hiatus I'll be resuming the "Connections" section of this newsletter with some new ways to dig deeper into, share, and support my work.
Until next week, I'll see you down the path.
Chad