"What Is Life Worth?"

Abstract

<p>What is life worth? Questioning the value of our existence has the utmost significance, but no response seems likely to fully satisfy our need for an answer.</p> <p>First a few preliminaries. Our question could be raised out of despair by people who are struggling just to survive, in war-torn, enslaved, or environmentally collapsing countries. Or, it could come from a position of privilege, being asked by those who have the luxury and leisure to ponder it. In addition, our question may not have arisen at all in early human history, or have ever been asked by those whose sociocultural experience is quite different from our own.</p> <p>Some reflections concerning life on Earth also make our question problematic. For most (perhaps all?) life-forms, the overriding purpose of existence is to reproduce the species, to be evolutionary self-replicating machines, serving as links within sustainable ecosystems. Yet one might well ask, ‘But what’s the value of all that?’</p> <p>There isn’t any clear, uncontestable answer. Perhaps life, with all its dramas and developments, just came to be, and so just is, with no higher-order significance. Moreover, when we examine the state of the globe, it may appear that the planet would be healthier minus certain species, our own among them, perhaps even at the top of the list. It might be better for the ecosphere, that is, for <i>Homo sapiens</i> – an apparently failing species bent on plundering the planet and its own self-destruction, consumed by animosity and fear directed at its own kind – not to exist at all. While humans have transformed the Earth, there are few reasons to believe that we’ve made it better overall, or that other organisms have benefitted from our presence other than parasites and (some would claim) domesticated animals and other creatures that wouldn’t exist but for human choices and need-satisfactions. Indeed, the conditions for the continuance on Earth of most life-forms (including our own) have become increasingly precarious precisely because of humanity. This is all unfortunately true, and it cannot be neutralized by citing the noble creative achievements of exemplary people or the love, friendship, and kindness with which many have treated their fellow humans and other creatures, laudatory though these all are. We might well consider, then, whether we humans even have the right to ask about the value of existence without clearing up our mess first. Still, the question ‘What is the value of existence?’ keeps coming back at us with an urgency that cannot be denied or diverted.</p>