The second Steve Jobs died, a dam burst somewhere. Gallons of elegies and eulogies spilled forth, flooding the surrounding low-lying areas with a lot of sentimental goop. People praised Jobs as if he were a real-life John Galt.
Naturally, this invited a backlash. Jobs is no hero! He was a rank industrialist, furthering consumer culture and making the world that much more materialistic. He does not deserve to be memorialized any more than any other person on this earth because he is no more valuable.
This leads to some very important questions. What determines the value of a human life, and what effect should this have on us?
Before we can answer these questions, we need to know exactly what we are asking. What is the nature of human value? This notion is used as the grounds for praise. We frequently give the highest praise to people who have done great good, such as Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa. However, this is not required. It is not immediately clear that Leonardo da Vinci and other great artists accomplished feats of high moral worth.
The lesson we learn from these considerations is that human value can be raised by doing good, but there are other ways to make oneself more valuable. It may prove helpful, then, to make progress along the moral dimension and then try to generalize all value-determining features.
There are two approaches to ethics that enjoy high degrees of popularity. The first is deontology, or duty ethics. This theory holds that an action's moral status is determined by adherence to some set of rules, given by, for instance, God. The second is consequentialism, usually presented as utilitarianism. As the name implies, consequentialists hold that an action's moral status is determined by its consequences — for utilitarians, the relevant consequences are the changes in utility.
We can try to adapt these theories to determine human value. Deontology will not help much — we can hardly turn to the dictates of God.
On the other hand, consequentialism fits human value very snugly. When asked why all of these people are so great, a natural response is that they all impact the lives of others positively. So, we will take this as the answer. A person has human value in proportion to the positive effect they have had on others.
This moves the question back — which effects are positive? There are two routes here. The first is to appeal to the somewhat abstract notion of an objective good. This is the way that eating vegetables impacts positively. It is plausible to say that freedom is an objective good of the relevant kind. But we would hesitate to praise a person who plunges an unjust society into years of starvation and misery even though the resulting anarchy provided a lot of freedom. This suggestion won't do.
The other idea about positive impacts places them firmly in our heads. Things impact us positively if they fulfill certain of our desires and fail to violate certain others. This accounts for all cases. Great artists fulfill our desire for great art. Great leaders bring about much needed — and wanted — social change. The aforementioned revolutionary fulfills her countrymen's desire for freedom, but violates their desire for safety. To recap, then, a person is valuable in proportion to how much they have impacted others.
Though utilitarians have a hard time keeping track of how much utility an act produces or takes away, impact is much easier to calculate. In the modern world, we pay money for what we desire. Staple or luxury, we buy things because they help us live happily. I will pay more for something that satisfies a more pressing desire or satisfies in a better way — more to fix my car than a bowl of cereal, more for the high quality chocolate.
The more you impact others, the more they will pay you. This suggests that your net worth reflects your value as a human being. One might object, saying that very rich person Paris Hilton receives her money from other very rich people, so Hilton's monetary worth does not reflect her impact. If each dollar represents one "impact," then the fact that it is transferred should not matter.
Where does this leave us? We can still praise all the people we wanted to before — Nelson Mandela was not paid for his impact. It does give us an additional commitment, though. Praise the rich!
David Hefer '12 hopes that his column has made a positive impact on you.
