Ed, I admit to being provocative, but also, I really do think that it's vital to think things through and use measurements to make things as rational as possible. Hypocrisy is a way people look after their own interests while mouthing platitudes, cliches and express their intense caring about those they purport to be so concerned about.
I have found for decades now that when people won't be rational, deal with facts and assign values and measurable mechanism, it's because they are being dishonest, self-serving and wish to avoid facts and outcomes which will not suit their personal purposes. Or they are simply incapable of doing so.
One of my favourite hypocrisies is the common expression "You can't put a price on human life". If they aren't being hypocritical, then they are simply stupid. Everyone puts a price on human life every day and it is a surprisingly low one. They might not say "Hey, right now I figure that life is worth $2,315". But one can assign values by making choices in what one does. For example, most people speed at one time or another. They are increasing the risk of harm to other people by driving faster - it's just physics. But they are saving themselves some time. Time is money.
The value of the people they risk harming is less than the value of their time. They have put a value on those they put at risk. Road transport authorities have good data on the correlation of speed with deaths. People value their time savings more than the deaths they cause. They have big SUVs so it's the OTHER people who incur most of the cost.
My point on the abuse of children was the abuse of language, which people use to manipulate arguments. The young man gaoled for kidnapping off a street, and sexual molesting, a 5 year old girl, [stopped only because a policeman had a hunch on where the missing girl might be found and bingo, there was the young man with the little girl], is a horrifying criminal. But for the interruption, I am fairly sure the girl would have been dead from impact at the bottom of the water falls, or strangled and hidden in the trees. stuff.co.nz
I consider that situation nothing whatsoever like Foley and the pages swapping smutty text messages. To make a comparison and pretend there is a similarity by use of the word "children" in relation to 17 year old men is dishonest.
One situation is an absolute nightmare. You can imagine which one I mean. If you have daughters, you will know the feeling of horror that such a thing engenders in one's imagination, just by imagining it, let alone the actual experience.
On the value of soldiers. I don't see soldiers as any different from other people in their value. They have a job, they have a value. Pretty straightforward. And actually priced! They are offered a pay rate sufficient to get them to take on the deal. If they accept, it shows their worth at that time. Near enough anyway.
I've worked on building scaffolding, 9 stories high, at a time when people actually died on construction sites fairly regularly. I ran around like a monkey with no security systems at all, other than my ability to be a monkey, tight-roping across bars to install another bar. Nobody [except me] did a cnyndwllr analysis:
Is the cause just and worth dying for?
Is the mission doable?
Is there any possible way to achieve the end without doing the job?
The company offered me money and told me what the job was. I considered the job, thought about the risks, decided whether I could do it, considered other jobs. Took the job. Succeeded. Didn't die. Didn't kill anyone [by dropping boards, pipes, spanners, me, etc].
If I had slipped, I would have had part of a second to grab a bar as I fell, to swing into lower parts and get a better grip. Which was my plan in the event of a mistake. It was a fun job. I liked it.
It was like being a mountain climber, but not having to travel and being paid to do it. My cousin's son went mountain climbing and fell to his death off a mountain. We take our chances. We have a value and a price.
<What would make you believe that the deaths of young men and women in service of their country could be justified in terms of the gross number of lives lost, or dollars per soldier dead, or some other metric that would trivialize even one death >
Simple economics. Economic activity, along with wars, costs lives. That's not news. A crash fire service at an airport costs lives, as well as money, to run. People don't just die in operating the service [getting squashed when the truck falls off some blocks on their head, or they fall down some stairs while hurrying to a training lecture], but there's the opportunity cost in lives. The umpty$million spent on achieving nothing in 40 years [in the case of Auckland's crash service at Mangere Airport] could have been spent on crash-avoiding radar, or vaccinations in Africa, or genetic research in Auckland University or building a Globalstar gateway and service in New Zealand, etc.
The reason the crash service is provided is because people "Can't put a price on human life. Any expense is worth it, to save just one life". Their faulty reasoning costs MANY lives. But they don't care. They value those lives at such a low price that they can't even be bothered thinking about it correctly. That's the price they put on those lives. They wave them away with some cliche and an ad hominem attack on the person pointing out their hypocrisy.
They assign almost no value to human life other than their own. Which is full of ego and of enormous value. They value an interruption to the full flight of their ego more than the lives that their faulty reasoning costs.
<Maybe you believe that human lives should be viewed as commodities that can be traded profitably? >
I have no idea how you could conclude that after reading more than a few of my rants. Here is a difference between commodities and humans. Commodities don't have self-determination ability. They are objects. Humans have a sense of self-worth and like to decide for themselves what their value is. They do not like being serfs, chattels, slaves, possessions or commodities. Though paradoxically, they vote to be just that, time after time.
Which is not to say that other people shouldn't think of people as resources to be hired, fired, traded and used at prices which the market will bear. Of course they should. Everyone does it. When one buys a Big Mac, one is assigning value to the suppliers.
What people do is a quite magical thing in a free world. They interact with each other and create synergistic value of mutual benefit and even more importantly, mutual recognition of value which does nothing less than create the very reality of their respective identities.
It's almost a law of physics at the most fundamental level - an entity comes into existence when observed by an observer. Shrodingers cat is neither alive nor dead until observed. A photon exists in all possible states until the observer creates its identity and state by observing it.
It's the consciousness to consciousness mutual identity formation which is really being traded and I think is the real purpose of transactions, economic, and other activity. When we buy stuff, we are forming our suppliers' and our own identities and thereby our very reality.
<We don't allow murder defendants to go free if they can prove that the life they took was a "bargain" for them or for society. We don't "comfort" those who've lost loved ones by pointing out to them how many more people die each day from criminal activity, old age, disease or car wrecks. We don't allow businesses to sacrifice the lives of test subjects or workers "for business" or even for the "public good." >
Yes we do. Soldiers, for example, are allowed free if they can be shown to have taken near-enough reasonable care to avoid collateral damage [meaning killed children and others, as surely dead as the kidnapper's terrorized victim if not caught]. The test of reasonable isn't even very tough. Bad luck for those killed in the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. "Oh, sorry about that mate." We do indeed allow businesses and individuals to sacrifice the lives of workers for business purposes - though not a guaranteed death basis, just a probabilistic one. Various jobs have statistical risks associated and insurance is taken out accordingly. New Zealand's Accident Compensation Corporation for example ranks all occupations on a hazard basis. Some are much more dangerous than others. Those jobs are still done.
When it's the "public good", you will even get the death-dealing slavery of conscription for military service, which is popular in this very stream. It's not me who puts a low value on people. It's the hypocrites who claim they don't put a value on human life who put a low value on human life.
<There is no dollar price for the life of a soldier. And there certainly isn't one soldier's death that can reasonably be deemed "trivial." >
I disagree. Both the soldiers and their employers put a price on their lives. And, one soldier's death is trivial in the grand scheme of things. Just as my death is not likely to cause shock and horror to reverberate around the world and could reasonably be considered trivial. I don't think I'm about to come up with a world-changing thing before my telomeres run out, so even in my own opinion, my death from falling off my keyboard is pretty sure to be trivial.* Not to my immediate family of course. We are talking overall.
I bet, for example, that you can't name more than a few of those who have been killed in Iraq. They are so trivial that you don't bother knowing who they are. But I bet you know the name J F K [even without me spelling it out], know your friends names who have died, and maybe even know Stan Shaw's name and Alan Beaven's. [Just kidding there - you certainly won't as they are insignificant to you].
Mqurice
* I am working on the world's new currency, the Qi, so that's significant, not trivial. But if I don't get it done, I'm sure somebody else will pick it up and do it. |
