2nd September 2018 - Human Value

Today's Topic - 2nd September 2018

Submitted by @Rinari

When is the value of a human being lessened? What incentivizes people to feel free to judge and say when someone is 'worthless' or 'worth less'? We are all born the same, we live our lives, adapt as well as we can, to the best of our abilities. So when someone calls you a failed human being or worthless - why do they feel entitled to say it?
This is not a question if someone is truly worthless. This is a question about why someone feels free to make such claims (not in a spur of rage or when upset, but in a situation when people are rational).
Wu-Tang EthosLast Sunday at 7:59 PM
Oh boy an ethics question! I love these. There's a few problems with this one but I'll go over it piece by piece, break it down and provide the best answer I can.

    'When is the value of a human being lessened?' This entirely depends on who you're talking to, who they're talking about, what just transpired and the ethics and morals of all the people in involved. The question is wholly incomplete from the get go and needs a ton of qualifiers to really be an easy question to answer that isn't going to require a three hour verbal debate or several dozen page dissertation on the value and morality of man.
'What incentivizes people to judge and saywhen someone is worthless or 'worth less'?' This bit is a bit easier but again it's really a tossup depending on who's involved. For instance, for someone like me, anyone who would put their own benefit a magnitude above and beyond the benefit of the many is someone who is, to me, worth less. But again, it really comes down to a person by person case.
'We are all born the same, we live our lives, adapt as well as we can, to the best of our abilities.' So the first part of this is actually just outright untrue. We aren't all born the same. If you mean we're all born to eventually die a mortal death then sure, yeah, we are. But this is a bit nebulous and inconsequential. A lot of us are born into positions of severe poverty, to levels of which a good portion of the world will never see and more importantly, understand, while very few of us are born into positions of absurd wealth and privileged, which many more people will see and still very few people will genuinely understand. Man is inherently un-united, incapable of being a singular entity. Our early lives are vastly different everywhere, were a child in japan will be taught a seperate set of ethics and morals than a rich child in America, or a poor one in Africa, or one in Cuba. To go even more deep, a poor child in Louisiana will be taught and told a separate code of ethics than a rich one in Louisiana.
    As for the part about adapting to the best of our abilities, this one is putting the thumb on the scale. We have a demonstratable non-zero percentage of the population that will not act in their best interest for various reasons. People who are depressed will often act irrationally, unable to take the steps they need to get help without prodding in the right direction by an outside force, those with schizophrenia will not have the same understanding of 'best interest' as someone without schizophrenia, and the list goes on. While these seem like outliers, remember that there are more human examples. People will deliberately act against their best interests out of tribalism, or sheer misinformation, or because someone else told them they should. Not everyone is someone who will act entirely of their own volition, and therefore, this part of the question is almost impossible to answer properly, because it's just not true.
'So when someone calls you a failed human being or worthless - why do they feel entitled to say it? This is not a question if someone is truly worthless. This is a question about why someone feels free to make such claims (not in a spur of rage or when upset, but in a situation when people are rational).”' the reason people may feel entitled to say it is, again, entirely dependent on other factors unrelated to the actual question. An Anarchist may find literally anyone who endorses the state in any capacity to be worth nothing more than a shallow grave, a slave owner would see his slaves as inherently worth less than him because of some kind of racist pseudoscience, it truly is up in the air, and without a more specific qualification, the question becomes almost impossible to answer without dancing around it.
The short and sweet answer is prejudice, but this is such a dumb answer that I feel like I'm dumber for having even said it. On a surface level, it's always prejudice. Someone who is prejudiced against the rich would feel that they are worth less, someone who is prejudiced against the poor will feel that they are worth less, and since prejudice doesn't have a timer attached to it, it's possible to be prejudiced against very specific individuals for very short periods of time, like bouts of extreme anger or frustration. But prejudice has such a deeper meaning and context to the world around it that this answer is wholly insufficient. Someone may have a deep hatred for the rich, that goes beyond prejudice. It may extend into genocidal rage. Prejudice is no longer a proper qualifier. It's too weak. Their distate is several magnitudes above what the mere word 'prejudice' can convey. Or maybe they merely think that men who speak about womens issues are idiots and wrong and need to be silenced because they are worth less in that department. Prejudice is again, the wrong word. The distate is minor, specific, quantified. This person may not believe men are inherently worth less, just that their opinions on matters outside of their expertise is not worth the same as someone elses. But because of the incompleteness of the question itself, and the broad strokes it's asking for, it's the best answer I can possibly provide. Prejudice.
Mad PigeonLast Sunday at 8:05 PM
I used to judge people myself, so I could tell you what my take on this was.
I have been narcissistic and naturally thought that my opinion is everything, everyone thinks like me and if they don't know something they are stupid.
It's obvious to me now why that's fundamentally wrong, but when I was young it wasn't clear to me.
Nowadays I'm still pretty straightforward and I feel like the humanity as a whole is something like a united organism. It's a tree of ideas that grow and evolve by being transferred from person to person. People die and ideas stay and evolve. So if someone judges me I feel like I might be on a wrong branch of this tree of ideas, and maybe I shouldn't spend my life developing those.
But if I feel remotely judgmental, I try to show a person what branch of this "idea tree" they're on and leave decision to change it(or not) to themselves.
SilenLast Sunday at 8:08 PM
If the discussion is supposed to be only about when people call someone else worthless while being completely aware of the results such claims will bring, then I think it's simply an example of extremism or outright stupidity. People put the idea that being superior in some way awards them with the rights to completely disregard anyone who don't meet their criteria into their heads and they act upon it with zealotry, which is rather pathetic. A very commonly known example would be WW2 Germany with their extreme ideals and their actions towards jews. Another commonly known example would be League of Legends community. For some reason, every single player on ranked games will call you trash and tell you to kill yourself upon dying even once, because they do not consciously think about the consequences or they think it's fine because it's just an insult on the internet. I would like to brush it off as a ''spur of the moment'', but this kind of behaviour keeps on happening, the people who are toxic in one game are pretty much always toxic in all games and their favourite insult is - ''You worthless trash''. It doesn't even have to be something major to be upset about, as long as someone feels superior (even if it's not true) and as long as their insults will carry no harsh punishment towards themselves, people might think of it as perfectly normal to call someone worthless, whether they actually mean it or if they simply look for a heavy sounding insult.
The biggest issue with the latter example is the fact that if done consistently, it almost always becomes a way of acting towards others, rather than simply being an insult thrown in a moment of rage. Constantly disregarding others as being completely worthless before the game even starts, shouting ''ban this ban that, trash team 1v9'' becomes a rather common sight once it starts becoming a conscious act of stupidity rather than simple rage over the game not going well.
Mark C. P. | KZNELast Sunday at 8:21 PM
I think the reason why people see other people as worthless is due to the fact that we have a set of expectations we get from family, friends and random strangers that we need to upkeep, and if we don't we end up being seen as failed specimen of the cycle.

And for as much as our parents wanna say that "Whatever you do, we will support you" might also have a sense of underlying expectation. They still expect that the career you choose is not only fruitful to you, but to them as well. So in case they need an errand done, to borrow something or maybe that you can support them some other way when they get old, they want you to be able to do that. It's one of the main reasons why people have children, and thus, your parents had you.  And when you don't fulfill these requirements, when you can lead on their name and legacy for future generations, they get mad and wish to use a scapegoat. Which, in case, ends up being that failed child.  And they call them worthless to disassociate themselves with them.  To try and make memories and other associated thought about the failed child be suppressed to the point where it can be forgotten, and try to start anew with a new set of dice. A new template to try and build something better of.

I know this thought of you being made simply to fulfill the desires of your parents is very pessimistic, which it is. But with our current competitive society, of wanting to be better than the one next to us, I feel like this idea of associating worthlessness to people who just need a second chance to be a lot more common in the future. Especially as the planet gets more crowded and the desire for long term support grows.