Not Every Life Has Value

“Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives.” What more non-controversial basis could you have for a foundation than that?

The idea that every human being has value is taken as a self-evident moral starting point in moral reasoning. But it’s a bad idea—not because it’s wrong, but because it’s not even coherent.

“Value” is a relational concept: to be a value is to be a value to someone. Rocks in a distant galaxy do not and cannot have value—but the rocks lining my garden do have value: they have value to me because they serve my purposes. And my purposes are all the means to my ultimate purpose: my own life. It’s the fact that I value my own life that makes other things valuable to me insofar as they promote my life.

What about other human beings? Their lives may be valuable to them (though unfortunately not always), but what about to me?

Certainly the people I know and care about have value to me. My happiness is deeply intertwined with the happiness of my children, my girlfriend, my closest friends. But even distant strangers can have value to me. Not only are they potential friends, but I thrive living in an interconnected world where billions of people are discovering knowledge and creating wealth.

Human beings, insofar as they are rational, productive, and peaceful, are allies in the quest for life and happiness. It’s for this reason than an Effective Egoist is a radical humanist. His flourishing is aided by human flourishing as such.

But not all human beings are valuable to me. A monk living in a cave is not an ally—his life has zero impact on me. I wish him no ill will, but on what possible grounds could I value him? More relevantly, there are plenty of people who threaten me: not just power-lusting dictators and psychopathic criminals, but anyone who is essentially irrational. They are enemies of everything I value. To value them would be immoral and suicidal.

And this is why it’s so vital not to concede that “every life has value.” All too often that principle is invoked to justify injustice. Don’t punish criminals or destroy foreign aggressors: every life has value. Don’t pursue your own hopes and dreams: serve and sacrifice for others because every life has value.

There is only one obligation we owe to every other human being, including the monk in the cave and the shiftless conspiracy theorist who emotionally manipulates his parents into giving him a place to live: we have an obligation to respect their rights.

Individual rights are not based on premise that “every life has value.” Individual rights establish the social conditions that enable each individual to value his own life and happiness—if he chooses. To respect the individual rights of a shiftless conspiracy theorist, I don’t have to value him—I merely need to leave him alone. And if someone does violate individual rights, he places himself outside the protection of rights and will be treated as he’s demanded to be treated: as a dangerous animal.

Human beings have free will. And so in this sense, even the monk or the bum have potential value to me—they have the capacity to change their course and become allies in the quest for life and happiness. But you cannot value someone for a capacity he has deliberately chosen not to exercise. The fact that the monk and the bum could live moral lives but have chosen not to is precisely what makes them vicious.

People are to be judged according to what they have actually made of themselves—not by what they could have made of themselves. Hitler could have been a painter. Stalin could have been a poet. But that’s not the course they chose. They made themselves monsters, and just as it would be obscene to condemn a moral man because he has a capacity to commit atrocities, so it would be obscene to value an immoral man because he has a capacity to achieve nobility.

In the end, the notion that “every life has value” is a legacy of Christianity. For Christians, you are valuable, not for anything you’ve done or achieved, but because you are made in God’s image. Indeed, God’s grace is the only thing that makes you valuable because all of us are sinners and cannot be redeemed through our own good works.

No human being with an ounce of morality or self-esteem could find this viewpoint acceptable: it means that everything good in you comes from God, everything bad comes from you, and there is nothing you can do that would make you more morally worthy than Hitler or Stalin. You can only hope for God’s grace, which Hitler and Stalin were just as entitled to as you, so long as in the last speck of their earthly existence they asked God for forgiveness.

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.