Life should be priceless, but it is not.
The idea of life might be priceless, individual lives are not.
We have been brainwashed by the idea that “life is priceless” for too long, that it’s too horrific to think that there are things in the world more important than an individual life. But let me ask you this, if an individual’s life is the single most important thing in the whole world, why would people sacrifice their lives for many things, and are often times applauded for doing so.
The concept might be hard to swallow, so let me start with an example:
Would you do anything to save one human life?
Would you?
Would you sacrifice the entire art collection at the Louvre (or the Met, the Forbidden City.. your choice) to save one single life?
The correct answer is NO, and don’t feel guilty if that’s what you said — one human life is a small price to pay to save countless treasures.
What about ten human lives then? A hundred? Five thousand?
There might come a point where you would stop to reevaluate and decide that a certain number of lives worth more than the Louvre, but the fact that you are appraising lives against other “dead” objects shows that you don’t actually believe in the pricelessness of lives.
If the value of the Louvre seems hard for you to grasp, think of the death penalty. In the U.S., certain crimes, or in other words, certain violations of the law, are punishable by death. This shows we agree that the upholding of law, or certain sections of the law, is more important than life.
The first truth, however awful, is that human lives are not the most important things in the world.
The second awful truth is that some lives are more important than others.
Again, you might reject this idea immediately, but think about this example:
It would be perfectly acceptable for a body guard to take a bullet (and to die) for the president, but the president is not expected, and is most likely discouraged, to do the same for his body guard. Their lives are not weighted equally.
Lives don’t weigh equally, and it is a good thing that they don’t. Most of the work people do, they do in order to make their lives more valuable. Consequently, most of us would lose such incentive if everyone’s life is of the same value, regardless of their contributions to society. The development of society depends on the unequal values of life.
Once the “hype” over the pricelessness of lives is gone, we will be able to assess the value of individual life more accurately and objectively.
We have all heard some argument that goes like this: “It (whatever it is) saves lives, and lives are priceless, therefore we should do it, no matter what” — this excuse has been used as a carte blanche by politicians, activists and moral highlanders for too long and for too many times. And it’s about time that they be stopped.
Everything has a price. And it’s not a bad thing that they do. Price (not necessarily monetary price) is simply a scale that indicates our priorities and preferences. Life is undoubtedly towards the larger side of the scale, but nonetheless, it is within the scale, not beyond it. Nothing is.