Comment On the Importance of Human Life
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

The preservation of human life is the ultimate value, a pillar of
ethics and the foundation of all morality. This held true in most
cultures and societies throughout history.

On first impression, the last sentence sounds patently wrong. We all
know about human collectives that regarded human lives as
dispensable, that murdered and tortured, that cleansed and
annihilated whole populations in recurrent genocides. Surely, these
defy the aforementioned statement?

Liberal philosophies claim that human life was treated as a prime
value throughout the ages. Authoritarian regimes do not contest the
over-riding importance of this value. Life is sacred, valuable, to
be cherished and preserved. But, in totalitarian societies, it can
be deferred, subsumed, subjected to higher goals, quantized, and,
therefore, applied with differential rigor in the following
circumstances:

1.. Quantitative - when a lesser evil prevents a greater one.
Sacrificing the lives of the few to save the lives of the many is a
principle enshrined and embedded in activities such as war and
medicinal care. All cultures, no matter how steeped (or rooted) in
liberal lore accept it. They all send soldiers to die to save the
more numerous civilian population. Medical doctors sacrifice lives
daily, to save others.
It is boils down to a quantitative assessment ("the numerical ratio
between those saved and those sacrificed"), and to questions of
quality ("are there privileged lives whose saving or preservation is
worth the sacrifice of others' lives?") and of evaluation (no one
can safely predict the results of such moral dilemmas - will lives
be saved as the result of the sacrifice?).
2.. Temporal - when sacrificing life (voluntarily or not) in the
present secures a better life for others in the future. These future
lives need not be more numerous than the lives sacrificed. A life in
the future immediately acquires the connotation of youth in need of
protection. It is the old sacrificed for the sake of the new, a
trade off between those who already had their share of life - and
those who hadn't. It is the bloody equivalent of a savings plan: one
defers present consumption to the future.
The mirror image of this temporal argument belongs to the third
group (see next), the qualitative one. It prefers to sacrifice a
life in the present so that another life, also in the present, will
continue to exist in the future. Abortion is an instance of this
approach: the life of the child is sacrificed to secure the future
well-being of the mother. In Judaism, it is forbidden to kill a
female bird. Better to kill its off-spring. The mother has the
potential to compensate for this loss of life by bringing giving
birth to other chicks.
3.. Qualitative - This 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.. Utilitarian - 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.

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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)



Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com