Every Person Has Value!
 

Every person Has value, Every point of view has validity, there is no one you can't learn something from.

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is good.
Every sperm is needed
In your neighbourhood.

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite iraaaaate!

The human species is an intelligent species, some may be a little smarter than others, but for the most part, we just see different things. We are just smart in different ways.

That song popped into my head when I read the first post too.

Steve and I will now sing "Kumbuyah".

According to this site, which references a Wired article, every one of us is potentially worth millions...in our component parts.

Sometimes, the only real value in a person's existence is that their life serves as a warning to others.

Like mine. :eek:

"every person has value"? that's my schtick. you beat me to it!

I don't agree with this part. Not all points of view are equally valid.

However, I think everyone has the right to state their point of view. In fact, I encourage it. It allows one to identify the nutcases. :lol:

Mrs Elspode and I often discuss the validity of schizophrenics' experiences. I mean, just because it isn't real for you and me...does that mean it isn't real at all, on some level, in some other plane of existence?

I'm usually very charitable towards insane people, but here on The Cellar, I tend to be more judgemental about such quirks. :3_eyes:

Actually, I wanted to break into a chorus of "Jesus loves the little children, aaalll the children of the world!"

But I didn't.

Or maybe I did.

Anyhow...

Yeah, every person is unique and special in their own way. However, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one. :p

Does it then follow that every asshole is special?

ummmm... No

Givens:
1) Every person is unique
2) Every person has an asshole

If every person has an asshole, then having one is not a trait that lends uniqueness to its owner.

TWEET!

Faulty logic. 3 beer penalty. Carry on. :lol:

I rather call it inane. I find no tolerance in it myself. So
No, Not every one has value.

Any assumed value is forfeited once a community or anyone is made to feel abashed for just 'being' there or against the onslaught of force fed poo poo.

Yes, but we'd have more fun doing it.:D

And they all stink.

Well duh. Even if you ignore the inherent pleasure that a guy gets out of it... A woman has to take a month's worth of hormone shots that make you varying degrees of nuts, then have an invasive procedure to physically harvest all the extra eggs, of which a certain percentage still may not be viable.

A man simply has to touch himself for a minute or two, gets a million or so viable li'l swimmers, and then he can do it again 20 minutes later.

And may I ask. just how old are you?:lol:

Point taken--but by the time a man is too old to maintain the one-minute-every-twenty-minutes ratio, a woman that same age likely isn't making eggs at all anymore. :)

I so totally hate every mother-fucking one of these dudes.

Unfortunately Bri, you've now just guaranteed that someone will pipe back in with why you're being judgmental, and the meaningless arguments will continue, despite our best efforts to allow thread drift to take its natural course...

WTF does this even mean? These are meaningless phrases strung together because they sound pretty, and require no heavy lifting.

Every person has value? Ok, I can give you that one. The intrinsic value of life is maybe the only truly universal moral axiom. Granted.

Every point of view has validity? What the hell does "validity" mean? does it mean "correctness"? "truth"? does it mean "relays the perspective of the person speaking"? You see how different each of these things is. So, give me something other than validity. Give me a word that means something. Not some mushy feel-good world consciousness

There is no one you can't learn something from. Something substantive? Something transferable? Something actionable? Something functional or principular? Something worth learning? Nah. Not from most people. Most people are idiots.

But they're VALUABLE idiots! :lol:

I guess what I'm saying is one subjectivity is not inherently superior to another, they are all just subjectivities, neither right nor wrong. The trick is to step outside of your own perspective and see yourself from another's point of view, or see that person in the light in which he sees himself, both hard states of mind to sustain long enough to get much result from. If you listen to what someone has to say about you, and consider the source, you may well learn something about yourself, but it is not guaranteed. Often people insulate themselves from learning unpleasant truths by discarding the source as unworthy or inferior. I am saying it is not neccessarily so.

What if you step outside your own perspective, and see the world through someone else's eyes, and you realize that they're a complete f**king idiot?

Just because I think you're wrong doesn't mean I don't understand your perspective. It means I understand your perspective, and I think it's poorly considered, frought with error, and will inevitably lead to personal disaster.

Then you haven't stepped outside your own persepctive. Try again.

A statement that has as its sole virue that it serves as its own counterexample.

Well, I've lost interest in my own thread. That is a first.

Ummm, I actually tend to agree with Flint on this one. People do what they do and think what they think because of any number of life experiences which are in sum total unique to them alone. They are most likely doing the best they can with what they've got (granted there are exceptions, but these are usually a small percentage).

Making the statement that you would be able to step into someone else's shoes and still view them as a complete idiot indicates a certain lack of imagination if not also empathy on your part.

empathy is an overvalued character trait. It's also not mutually exclusive to thinking someone is an idiot.

I'll have to disagree again, SM. One may think someone is a complete idiot and feel pity for them, but I beleive that it is very difficult to think someone a complete idiot and to feel EMPATHY for them - not unless you consider yourself a complete idiot, too.

And, I would say empathy is more undervalued than it is over valued. The problem is that feeling empathy for a person has gotten mixed up with being a door mat or a sniveling co-dependent.

For example, one can have understanding for the environmental and genetic forces which may have turned a person in the direction of beuing an addict or an alcoholic. One might even feel deep empathy for this person's plight. This does NOT mean that you will then enable their addiction. A person with empathy will judge the sin and not the sinner, while at the same time, not allowing themselves to be sinned against.

"I used to see the world in black and white. I now see that there are shades of grey, but I have not yet learned how to distinguish one shade of grey from another."

"In the meantime I shall regard all shades of grey as white."


Coincidentally, this perspective inhibits a person from arguing for their opinion.

Your perspective defines how you act, but you cannot act on all perspectives simultaneously. You must take one point of view for your own if you are going to do anything.

"Every point of view has validity"

Maybe those who argue against this point are forgetting about negative values? :D

Doesn't empathy mean "I feel your pain"?

To feel empathy for someone's pain, if you aren't suffering the same pain at the same time, wouldn't it be necessary that you've experienced that type of pain before and you remember how it felt?

If you can feel empathy for anyone's pain, does that mean that you must have experienced all means of feeling pain?

If you've experienced all means of feeling pain, are you are doormat?

I pretty much have the inside track on this one.

It's crazy.

No question.

That being said ... it is true that most delusional systems have some small grounding in reality. Things fall apart when it comes to that part of the brain responsible for interpretation of input.

Serving as a bad example has value, right?

I see more useless pieces of crap on a daily basis than most people see in three and a half years.

I know the difference between priceless and worthless.

Okay, I think what we need is some sort of hypothetical, or perhaps a case in point. Please tell me the inherent value of:

1) The drug-crazed sociopath who beats, rapes and kills your sister.
2) The crooked CFO who loots his company's pension fund, leaving elderly people penniless while he buys a mansion, a boat, and new boobs for his girlfriend who replaced his wife of 25 years.
3) The punk who smashes out your @250.00 car window to steal your $15.00 CD laying on the front seat.

From my point of view, the only inherent value these sorts have is, in fact, whatever you can fetch for their component parts...kind of like a car when the engine is shelled.

So, "I think I'll burn down your house and kill your sleeping children" is valid, because the arsonist has a negative value system?

Oh...I get it. We're equating *values* with *integers*, so negative values are valid...mathematically speaking.

Where you see a drug-crazed sociopath who beat, raped and killed your sister, Laurie the Youth Minister sees a soul waiting to be Saved.

1) The drug-crazed sociopath who beats, rapes and kills your sister.

Your sister has gotten you shitty birthday gifts for the last 46 years, including the years in which your parents purchased the items and pretended they were from her, while you have painstakingly searched for exactly the right thing, or responded to her increasingly expensive demands for specific items. She's permanently off your gift list.

2) The crooked CFO who loots his company's pension fund, leaving elderly people penniless while he buys a mansion, a boat, and new boobs for his girlfriend who replaced his wife of 25 years.

She was totally fucking hot before the boob job, and now she has surpassed even your wildest imaginings of the perfect woman.

3) The punk who smashes out your @250.00 car window to steal your $15.00 CD laying on the front seat.

You borrowed your brother-in-law's car that day. You don't like him anyway. The inconvenience that you cause him by his having to replace the window is worth the $250 that he demands you pay for the replacement.

By the way, I just accidentally discovered the feature that holds the last color chosen in the editor. That's pretty cool.

Very nice try, wolf, but you fail. It's a common mistake -- you took the objective approach, and this conversation is about the subjective approach.

Y'see, the actions of these people are irrelevent, because there is no knowable objective reality. Instead, every living person creates their own subjective reality. In order to communicate with another person, your subjective realities must have something in common (hence the value of empathy). You cannot communicate with another person without being transformed.

One way to get into this mindset is to contemplate the question: "How long is the Emperor's nose?". Since it is impossible to measure the length of his nose, what you think is the length of his nose is pure guesswork. However, if you could compare your guesswork with the guesswork of everyone else in the country, you could get a precise value for the length of his nose.

Likewise, since objective reality is fundamentally unknowable, the best way to learn about it is by comparing your subjectivity with someone else's. The smaller the difference between your subjectivity and the other person's, the easier it is to communicate. The greater the difference, the more you can learn from them. Fox News uses this method to search for the truth.

It is important to remember that "one subjectivity is not inherently superior to another", because, after all, it's subjective. Therein lies the beauty of the subjective approach: because every subjectivity is valid, we are freed from the chains of judgement.

Now let's try to answer these questions the subjective way.

1) The drug-crazed sociopath who beats, rapes and kills your sister.

The sociopath knows much more about pain and neglect than you do. The sociopath occupies a more visceral subjectivity, one full of contrasting colors, vividity and darkness.

2) The crooked CFO who loots his company's pension fund, leaving elderly people penniless while he buys a mansion, a boat, and new boobs for his girlfriend who replaced his wife of 25 years.

The CFO occupies a much more placid subjectivity than the sociopath, and is probably less painful to talk to (unless you retch when you learn why he ditched his wife and looted his company). The CFO obviously worked hard to get to his position. It would probably be very pleasant, in fact, to talk with the CFO on his yacht while smoking his Cuban cigars.


3) The punk who smashes out your @250.00 car window to steal your $15.00 CD laying on the front seat.


Fortunately, you have an obvious commonality with the punk: similar taste in music. Music gives order to subjectivities, so it is sure that you will be able to communicate with the punk on a large number of issues. Since the punk was willing to smash your $250.00 car window, he is clearly a free spirit. His subjectivity is probably untainted by social mores or book learning and therefore more pure. Be glad that you were able to meet the punk: $265.00 is a small price to pay for the value of this meeting of the minds.

Nah, I couldn't disagree more, the sociopathic killer, the greedy CEO and the punk are all psychopaths. Some psychopaths are just more clever at the game than others, as in the case of the CEO.

While I highly value the quality of empathy, you can't do empathy on a psychopath. Empathy means to feel WITH someone. When we are talking about a non-psychopathic person, I don't think you need to have experienced his same exact pain to have empathy for him. All you need is enough imagination to put yourself in that person's place and imagine what he must be feeling.

Psychopaths completely lack all empathy. Higher human emotions are completely foreign to them. I tried doing empathy on the "ax murderer." I tried imagining myself in his place and looking out through his eyes at the world. It made me sick before I got very far into the experiment. I can't imagine being indifferent to the life or death of another person; I can't imagine just helping myself to what I want - whether its someone else's car stereo or a the workers's pension fund at my company..

I am far from being Mother Teresa, and I've certainly done my share of selfish things, but never on that level, and some of them I feel bad about to this very day. The psychopath has no remorse. None - just a sense of entitlement.

The ax murderer played classical guitar; I have loved the music of the classical guitar all my life. I got to hear classical guitar concerts that he played just for me. He also stole $23,000 from me. It wasn't worth it.

For that $23,000, not only could I have bought myself a really nice sound system and a collection of classical guitar CD's made by some of the greatest players in the world; I also could have attended any number of live concerts by these musicians, and at the end, I wouldn't be feeling this deep sense of betrayal and mistrust of my ability to make good judgements of other human beings.

The point of view of a psychopath is not only worthless, its frightening. They are the one group of people I have NO empathy for. I think they should all be put on an island somewhere and they can prey on each other and leave the rest of society alone.

Truly, you are a poet, and poets see the world differently.

Ah, and here we get to the heart of it. This is really a conversation about morality, isn't it? And nobody wants to be in the position of having to make judgmental statements about somebody else's moral alignment, right?

Let me make two somewhat unrelated comments here.

First, to say that, in your words, a "knowable objective reality" exists is not the same thing as saying that there is a perfectly objective observer of it. As far as I know, nobody who steps up to the plate in baseball hits a home-run on every pitch. That doesn't stop us from saying that some batters are better or worse at measuring against that unrealized standard. Yes, every person has perspectival limitations, but no, that does not mean everyone is limited to exactly the same degree by their being a subject in their own observation.

Secondly, if we are truly going to say that subjectivity prevails over objectivity in every case, it does not allow us to talk about moral progress. At all.

Think about this for a second - imagine a person who is cruel to people, abuses power, hurts the innocents, kills and eats young children. Now imagine that, over the course of several years, he slowly stops being cruel, abusive, and an infant cannibal. We would want to say that he has made progress, right? He is better now than he was. But to say that someone has progressed implies an external measure that they have advanced along. If we're subjectivists, we're not allowed to introduce anything external. We are not allowed to say that the former infant cannibal has made moral progress. We are not allowed, in fact, to say that anything about him has changed, other than his perspective.

The same is true of cultural relativism (the emperor and the nose story) - we all believe that a Germany that killed millions in the 1940s has morally progressed to become the Germany today that, ya know, doesn't load people on boxcars and gas them. They have progressed in some way that transcends perspectival shift.

We might be able to talk about relativism as an academic curiosity, but we can't actually live like that. We all, truly, believe that progress has been made.

"Ummm, I actually tend to agree with Flint on this one."
@marichiko: Well, don't sound so excited about agreeing with me (?!)

"Maybe those who argue against this point are forgetting about negative values?"
@monster: Positive and negative are completely subjective. See also below:

@Elspode: Validity is not a measure of inherent value, subjective or otherwise.

"It is important to remember that "one subjectivity is not inherently superior to another", because, after all, it's subjective. Therein lies the beauty of the subjective approach: because every subjectivity is valid, we are freed from the chains of judgement."
@Torrere: Beautifal. The internet exists, for me, so that I can read statements like this. Somehwere, out there, people are thinking.

"If we're subjectivists, we're not allowed to introduce anything external."
@smoothmoniker: Ouch. That stings, yet it doesn't. What you say is true. The subjective approach doesn't allow you to introduce objective values, but then again, that's the whole point. The subjective road isn't travelled down in a quest for value judgments. Is it (subjectivism) practical? Not as a dogma. But as a resource it is extremely useful. We are bound by certain neuro-chemical behaviors which are the product of evolutionary adaptation, yet we have also evolved the ability to reason our way around some of these attributes.

OK, by wild co-incidence I happen to agree with Flint. Most people can eventually find SOMETHING they agree on. It was a random event - one I'm sure that will never happen again, (yawn).

How's that?

Wanna hear my joke, yet? :lol:

Moral judgements are a fallacy in and of themselves. They inhibit your ability to learn.

In this subjective world, you learn by melding someone else's subjectivity with your own. This is how a child learns, by absorbing their parents' subjectivity. This is how a student learns science, by studying the opinions of his professors. Every person's subjective point of view is worth learning from, even the smallest child's.

Marichiko has no respect for ax murderer psychopaths: even the attempt to feel empathy for them "makes her sick". But, as mjisnomis said, "there is no one you can't learn something from". Marichiko, by being judgemental, has lost the opportunity to learn from ax murderer psychopaths.

That's the same mistake that white people made earlier in this century: without respect for our negro brothers, we lost the opportunity to appreciate African culture. We lost the voices of a million African-American minds. Racism crippled our culture; we refused to learn from the perspective of African-Americans.

We're trying to compensate for that now with the cultural diversity movement. By surrounding ourselves with people of all cultures, we augment our opportunity to learn.

But if you're going to learn the most that you possibly can, you have to be open-minded about all individuals and all cultures. Making Holocaust remarks about Nazi Germany is just as bigoted as Jim Crow.

Ah yes, cultural diversity.

~In school ~
Class, this is Jamal. He wears his hair in dreadlocks, yada, yada, yada...
Me - I think that would be hard to keep clean.
They - Why you racist, biggoted, bastud!!
or
Me - I think I'll grow dredlocks.
They - How dare you mock Jamal, you racist, biggoted bastud!!

~At work ~
Keeping with our corporate cultural diversity program we've brought Apu into the department.
Me - Hi Apu, I've read that in your homeland, cows are sacred and wander the streets unmolested. Do they get hit by busses very often?
They - You racist, biggoted, bastud!! How dare you question Apu's culture?
or
Me - Hi Apu. Did you go to college here or back home?
They - How dare you question Apu's credentials? You racist, biggoted, bastud!!
or
Me - Hi Apu. Is that a Madras shirt?
They - What kind of crack is that? Don't ridicule Apu's custom of dress, you racist, biggoted bastud!!

You'll note neither Jamal nor Apu were reacting, but the people pushing the agenda.

From what I've seen, the corporate cultural diversity program is a politically correct sham.
"Oh looky, looky World, we have people from 3 billion countries working here. OK? Fine, goodbye."
"Attention all employees.....You will think, act, eat, breath and crap, according to the employee's handbook, pages 1 through 88jillion. That is all."
:rolleyes:

Think of the human population as a large organism. Is every cell in the body equally valuable? Are some worth more than others? Is a toenail cell as important as a brain cell? What about cancerous cells?

Do brain cells hang with heart cells? :eyebrow:

"I used to think the brain was the most interesting part of the body. Then I realized... look what's telling me that!"

- Emo Philips

Your analogy is absurd and actually disrespectful to Afro-Americans. To feel empathy for someone is to put yourself in that person's place and try to understand how they think and why. It makes me nauseous to put myself in the place of a "person" (I use the term advisedly) who is without conscience or remorse and preys off other human beings. The study of the condition of psychopathy and what factors cause a person to devolve into being a psychopath has much to tell us about the workings of the human personality, and most of all, how to recognize and stay clear of these dangerous people.

The individual psychopath has nothing that I want to know about. I spent 6 years with a man who I afterwards found out had been diagnosed as an "asymptomatic" sociopath - meaning that he had the cunning to "pass" in normal human society without most people detecting him for what he was. It was a devastating experience that I wish I could have passed up on. YOU can go hang with the psychopaths. Good luck, and you can't make me feel guilty that I want nothing more to do with such people.

Thank you. You are entirely right.

I think that these "everything is subjective" arguments blow away like dust in the wind if you actually want to do anything. Actions speak a lot louder than words, and I think that bullshit is much more readily detected in actions than it is in words. I am rather embarrassed by the last two posts that I've made in this thread.

In this forum, I believe that BS is equally detected through words. And that is no slight to anyone in this thread. I am fascinated. Keep it up.

Did I say they weren't? You forgot to include the :D in the quote.

:right:

...to spell it out, my point was that even if you may consider a POV as having a negative value, it's still a value and therefore the POV has validity....... :rolleyes:

Granted I may have a bank account that is $300 overdrawn and therefore has a "value" of negative $300. That bank account is still worthless when it comes to paying the rent or buying food, however. :eyebrow: