The value of a life

How does one compare the importance of, for example, a bug's life versus a human's life? Most people would consider the human's life to be more important, but this is just a result of natural selection, our species having discovered that by helping each other survive, we increase the chance that our genes, either our's or a relative's who carries many of the same genes, will be passed to the next generation.

Other people would say that all lives are equally valuable. Still others might extend that level of importance only to mammals, reptiles, etc., but may not be so sure about bugs and bacteria. Some might argue that all lives are equal on a cosmic scale, but that, just as lions may be justified in killing a gazelle for its food, we are also justified in killing what we need to kill in order to survive.

I would like to put forth an argument that all lives are not equal on the cosmic scale, and a criteria for comparing the relative values of an individual life of a particular species.

To begin with, what do we mean when we say a life is important? Important to whom? On a truly cosmic scale, I would say that life simply isn't important at all. I guess I'm talking about a slightly modified "cosmic scale" where "whom" is anything that cares. For example, a wood rat cares about the lives of its offspring, but probably doesn't care to much about us. The value of a life is therefore determined by how much other lives care whether or not it keeps on living.

One thing that is important to all species, whether consciously or not, is the continuation of its gene pool. Therefore, we can calculate this element of a life's importance by taking the importance of the gene pool and dividing it by the number of lives in the gene pool. If we assume all gene pools are equally important, we can compare the value of a human's life with that of a bug by looking at the comparing the number of people in the world with the number of that type of bug.

Of course, that leaves open the question of how to compare the relative importance of different gene pools. Unfortunately, I hadn't really thought all that out before I started this blog, and I have to start getting ready for work, so I'll have to leave that as an excercise for the reader. :)

Another element to consider is the importance of a life to other lives. For example, a tree helps support many insects and birds, so the trees life is important not only to its own gene pool, but to the other gene pools as well.