Philosophy - Two Parts Short Assignment

PART B Please response to these two original posts below. When responding to these posts, please either expand the thought, add additional insights, or respectfully disagree and explain why. Remember that we are after reasons and arguments, and not simply the statement of opinions.

Original Post 1 Are human lives intrinsically valuable? If so, in virtue of what? (Is it our uniqueness, perhaps, or our autonomy, or something else?)

To begin, I would like to remind us that being intrinsically valuable means having values for just being us and nothing else. I believe that human lives are intrinsically valuable in virtue of our uniqueness. As a bio nerd, I would like to state the fact that there are a lot of crossover events during meiosis, which create trillions of different DNA combinations. Hence, from a biological standpoint, without considering other aspects, being you is already valuable because you are that one sperm that won the race and got fertilized. On a larger scale, there are hardly two people whose look and behaviors are the same in the same family, unless they are identical twins. However, identical twins still act differently and have differences (such as fingerprints). Since we are raised in different families, we are taught different things and have different cultures.  In general, we all have different genetic information, appearances, personalities, senses of humor, ambitions, talents, interests and life experiences. These characteristics make up our “unique individual value” and make us so unique and irreplaceable.

I would also love to discuss how our diversities enrich and contribute to society, but that would be a talk about our extrinsic values. 

Original Post 2 Are human lives intrinsically valuable? If so, in virtue of what? (Is it our uniqueness, perhaps, or our autonomy, or something else?)

I believe that human lives are intrinsically valuable due to a number of reasons. Firstly, human lives aren’t replaceable. You can’t replace a human being with another just like you can replace a broken laptop with brand new one. Part of the reason why we tend to think this way is that we were nurtured with the notion that there is, indeed, a special value to human life. This could be in virtue of our uniqueness-- the fact that we are sentient and capable of complex thoughts and emotions separates us from any other species on this planet. From a scientific standpoint, this is also one of the reasons as to why humans became the dominant species in today’s age. 

Moreover, human lives aren’t disposable. I think this is largely due to us humans having the ability to empathize with others. We understand that it’s morally inappropriate to take the life of another individual even if they’re complete strangers because they’re another human being like us who has their own thoughts, values, memories, and stories. In a way, we have a strong emotional connection to our own species. As mentioned in the lecture, if you lose a child, you wouldn’t think that having another would replace that child. Referring back to the idea of uniqueness, each and every individual is different.

I just wanted to quickly acknowledge how extrinsic values together with our intrinsic values makes our lives valuable: Try thinking about people you know like your family and friends.

Each one of them has had a unique influence to your life, perhaps some positive and others negative. In other words, they all add value to your life in some kind of way. Because we impact each other’s lives in unique ways, we build emotional connections with them, which leads to the idea that taking another life is morally wrong. Therefore, interactions and memories of another individual are irreplaceable as well.