[Jebusfathead]

@12 I think you have a very interesting view on this question, thank you for sharing that.

It seems clear enough that many people find the value of human life to be intuitive. We don’t just feel like we want to live because we are deluded or manipulated by our instincts. We feel like our lives are highly meaningful parts of the universe. Take a look at these three intuitive examples.

First, a universe without consciousness would be empty and meaningless. A world full of real people with minds of their own would seem to be important unlike a world full of robots that are programmed to behave exactly like real people.

Second, consider that we value the lives of friends and strangers. When someone dies we love we experience grief; but when a stranger dies (especially a young one), we can also experience grief and mourn their death. We seem to realize that something important was lost when the person dies.

Third, it is quite possible to end one’s own life—but such a decision does not come easy. Our life can seem horrific and we usually still value it enough to keep on living. We certainly don’t think it would be right to kill miserable people just because their life is awful. We suspect that their life can be worth something even if it isn’t enjoyable. That’s not to say that suicide couldn’t possibly be a rational decision. Perhaps overwhelming pain could be worth avoiding through death in some situations.

Is there any reason to think that human life has value beyond intuition? I want to suggest that we can actually experience that human life is valuable. We know what it’s like to have a mind because that’s exactly how we know we have one in the first place. We know that having a mind involves having experiences—some are positive and some are negative. These experiences are quite complicated. A happy person can experience pain but still highly value their life overall. A miserable person can experience pleasure, but still feel unfulfilled at the end of the day.

Although it is intuitive that human life has intrinsic value, there can be a good reason for that. It can be intuitive because we really do experience our life as having value. It can be difficult to put our experience of our own experience in words, which would explain why it is so difficult to argue that human life has value, even if it is obvious to us.

On phone so cba to actually quote the bit I want, the 'third' bit you talk about can be linked to our instincts similar to what Crovus said about instincts being preprogrammed, because your jaw has the power to completely bite through you tongue in one clean cut, but it's a biological instinct that tells your body 'don't do it you retard' so that could be applied to suicide as well to help our survival