this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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Declaring people to have a certain value relative to each other strikes me as uncomfortably close to treating people as things.
I don't understand why only things can have different values. People have different impact on the environment, the world, etc. and what you value determines their worth on that scale. If everything is equally important to you, good or evil, then i guess everything and everyone can have the same value? I don't really understand this paradigm.
What I’m saying is that it suggests uncomfortable things about the ethical framework in which whoever is making the valuations is operating. Not because of any specific valuation schemas, but because reducing people to numbers (values) is inherently dehumanizing.
I'm not saying that there aren't terrible people who do terrible things. But any ethical framework or decision that dehumanizes people I would consider inherently unethical.
I want to point out a stronger contention in your favor: Republicans in the US are murdering their own citizens right now. I don't think they are demonstrating much worth at the moment.
More fuel to add to the fire - compare a factory worker with a capitalist. The capitalist provides negative value to society, by actively stripping the value of others’ labour from them while contributing nothing themselves, whereas the factory worker creates value for those around them. I’d argue that the factory worker has more value than the capitalist.